Misunderstanting the Million Dollar Curve

On a meta-level, casino and lottery operators have an incentive to push content of that sort. More than once have I been reminded in a casino that the inventor of the Roulette game was a mathematician. "So maybe there is some structure in the results after all".

It's as if they were planting a thought from which the number-crazies and gampling-addicted emerge. There are always some poor souls who think they can crack the code.

But this is such an insane misunderstanding. To believe that lottery numbers are somehow predictable with mathematics, wow. And this is from a website about lotteries, which you would expect to be more familiar with these things. Or well, maybe not. I guess in retrospect, it makes sense that people interested in lotteries wouldn't understand randomness.

I think understanding probabilities is really important. It's something that should be emphasized in school a bit more. People have such weird and bizarre misunderstandings of it, like this case. The fact that lotteries are even a thing is concerning. Let alone a thing big enough to attract millions of dollars in ticket sales.

Personally I don't believe that they should be legal, simply because they prey on that misunderstanding, and often on the poorest. And they give false hope. But that's a moral/political question instead of an objective one. And voters support them a lot, and they are difficult to get rid of.

https://twitter.com/ThomasBaigneres/status/70460551486131814...