Why you won’t win the lottery
Recently, I was having a discussion about the lottery with a friend of mine. Like so many times before, the analogy that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than winning came up. This analogy always annoyed me because it feels like there is a meta-level difference. Sure, I don’t imagine I will ever get struck by lightning. I don’t walk outside in thunderstorms with a kite. However, if I do play the lottery..?
And when you look at the winning numbers, they always look like your random numbers. Oh, there’s a 3, a 4 and a 7 and I had all of those! Pretty close. I mean, not close close, but surely if I keep playing, it might just happen?
Well, here is my new analogy that works better for my brain. You are not going to win the lottery and to realize it, think of this: Imagine that the drawn sequence is 1–2–3–4–5–6. Just how unlikely is that?! You wouldn’t believe it for a second. It would be on the news, everyone would talk about it! Well, your random sequence is 100% as (un)likely to come out as that one.
