More lotteries

[ciphergoth]

Thanks for all your answers and discussion in the last entry! I don't think either those questions, or these, have a straighforward "right" answer, I'm just interested how different people think about these things

Comments

[andrewducker]

Can I suggest that for your next poll you make it "A week's wages" and "20 year's wages" or something similar.

Because my response is coming from "£500 wouldn't change my life, but £1,000,000 would."

(And whether I know the roll result doesn't bother me at all.)

[ciphergoth]

Yeah, that's a problem. It's hard to word it just right, I think - how would you nail it down, given that eg some people aren't waged, some are paying for two etc?

[andrewducker]

I think that anything that turns it from an absolute value into a ratio would help.

Even if you made it "What you live on for a week versus what you live on for 20 years" - everyone has some amount of money that they subsist on.

[simont]

Even normalising to a week's wages doesn't solve the problem of it having different utility to different people. If I'm the sort of person who usually has plenty of surplus money at the end of the month and puts it into savings, an extra week's wages won't do much for me except slightly decrease the length of time until I can afford whatever I next plan to buy with those savings; but if I'm the sort of person for whom it's touch and go whether I have money left at the end of the month or month left at the end of the money, or the sort of person who consistently ends up with the latter, a week's pay could easily make all the difference.

I'd guess that we're taking a couple of steps down the road which ciphergoth had got to the end of by the time he posted this comment :-)

[andrewducker]

True. If you have savings then you're in a different boat to someone that doesn't!

[ciphergoth]

Still, perhaps I shouldn't let the best be the enemy of the good here!

[purplerabbits]

Another reason to reword it is that one million pounds is a magic number which people these days substantially overestimate the value of [citation needed] - unless you want to take advantage of that...