re: #80 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

um.. yeah.

I guess I was just musing on how I wished winning a major lottery could be played in the hopes of winning being readily represented by a percentage expressed in easily intuited numbers.

For both Powerball and MegaMillions, even the second prize is less than one in ten million odds.

But the really frustrating thing is that these lotteries only pay out like $10 or $12 if one hits one of the one-in-700 odd prizes. I’ve done these many times, and always find it starkly negative in emotional feedback for buying anymore lottery tickets. I think this is one reason sales of MM and PB have fallen so far behind the scratch-off sales.

But in elections, the “odds” really don’t reflect probabilities in the sense of combinatorics. Instead, say Trump has a “10%” chance of winning, all this means is that someone has an algorithm that wants to express that they think Trump really won’t win but the odds-maker doesn’t want to totally commit to that.

Everything is frequencies/combinatorics. It’s just factoring in the unknown, as polls come with significant margins of error and thus leave the door open for Trump-win scenarios, with the percentage revealing how many combinations of such MoEs lead to a Trump victory. So, a lotto in the end.