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 :-)

[elfy]

I also don't really know why knowing the exact die roll outcome should change anything ... did I miss something?

[simont]

I think the point is "no guaranteed wins", i.e. the clause in the last version of the question about 100% trustworthiness has been repealed. So now you need to worry about whether they're actually going to deliver on their promises.

If they just say "you lose, sorry", you've got no assurance that they told you the truth, or even bothered to roll the die at all. If you see the die rolled in front of you and can check the result, you can be more confident that they're not cheating, though of course their die might still be loaded.

[andrewducker]

Are they getting 5-star feedback on Amazon? I'm not dealing with someone who only gets 2 stars :->

[ciphergoth]

No, as before you can assume that it's 100% guaranteed by every trustworthy institution in the world, so they are delivering their promise.

What I had in mind was that if you choose the £1M*9%, and the dice roll comes up 20, you know that you would have won the £500 if you'd chosen the other way. I wondered if one reason people chose the £500 was so that they weren't kicking themselves afterwards.

[whitepaw]

My emotional response to getting 60≥n>9 is entirely down to how much drama they put into the rolling of the dice and their reaction to my "loss" of £500. If I don't know their behaviour in advance, it cannot influence my decision. If they act in the manner I associate with popular entertainment's approach to matters of chance, I will be annoyed, but with them, for rubbing it in rather than with my own failure to gain any money.