That's a perfectly legitimate response. I have no idea why you dispute it.
It's been decades since I was in college, and I switched careers from philosophy/polisci to programming, so I don't have instant recall now of what I studied way back then. But yes, I did study game theory and problems of collective action way back in the day. At this point, I don't really care whether you believe me or not. Believe whatever the heck you want to believe, if it makes you feel better about yourself. I can't stop you. In any case, though, your comments are a gross violation of the HN guidelines. Take a moment and go read: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> No, that was not your initial claim. It's nice you're trying to walk back your claim now that you got called on it.
Uh, whatever, man. I think I know what I meant. Again, I said, "it's irrational to expect that your vote could change the outcome of the election. That's never happened, not even in Florida in 2000. You have a better chance of winning the lottery, as evidenced by the fact that people do win the lottery." That's pretty clearly a claim about the odds.
> I suspect your claim would win a Nobel prize if you could prove it. It certainly upends those hundreds of books and thousands of papers on this topic.
That's silly. Would I win the Nobel prize for proving that the odds are very long for a single lottery ticket to win the Powerball jackpot? It's not a particularly notable claim. I've never been aiming to be unique here.
> Yes, because you don't understand expected return, apparently, among other things. You hopefully understand to increase odds against a biased roulette wheel you'd not simply pick uniformly randomly. Same thing for lotteries.
I understand that it's not a good idea to play the lottery or roulette. Gambling is a bad investment, and most of the time only the house wins consistently.
> You seem to confuse zero repeatedly with non-zero.
No, I'm simply not concerned about circumstances that are close to zero without being literally zero. Or would you argue that it's actually rational to buy lottery tickets? I call it a waste of money in general, even though a few people do actually win.
The "premature optimization" part of picking lottery numbers is that you're almost certainly going to lose, lose the money you spent on a ticket, and any extra time and/or effort you spend on your "investment" is even more down the drain. If you're going to lose, might as well lose quick and easy, not laboring over mathematical calculations. And if you happen to luck out and win the jackpot, it's going to be a nice profit in any case, even if you haven't "maximized" your expected return and avoided possible sharing of the jackpot with other players.
> By that argument CERN should not design detectors to bias towards what they want, since the likelihood of a Higgs per collision is vastly smaller than winning a lottery.
That's a silly analogy. CERN is attempting to discover scientific facts, not make a profit. In fact, CERN is "losing", i.e., spending vast amounts of money on the project with no expected financial return; the returns are knowlege. The irrationality of buying a Powerball ticket is expecting to make a profit from that monetary investment. (A billionaire could win the Powerball if they really wanted to, but you'll notice that's not where billionaires invest, because it's a bad investment. Instead, they invest in politicians.) And the irrationality of "strategic" voting is an individual voter expecting to change the outcome of a Presidential election with their single vote.
