Lady Wins Fourth Lottery: What Are the Odds? | Hacker News Reader

Lady Wins Fourth Lottery: What Are the Odds?

wmbriggs.com

33 pointsmattstat20 comments

In an episode of This American Life there was a story of a guy who bought lottery jackpots. (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/329/N... 20 minutes in)

This was during a time where you could not receive the full amount of the jackpot immediately -- regulation dictated that you had to get it in monthly instalments.

This guy would offer a lump sum here and now in exchange for the monthly instalments.

The winners were overspending because they started 'acting like millionaires' without having enough money from the monthly payments, so he would get them out of trouble and make a profit at the same time.

While signing a deal with one lottery winner, the lottery winner promptly bought 1000 scratch tickets without even bothering reading the contract he signed.

get them out of trouble

This is, unfortunately, against all evidence of what lottery winners actually do with lump-sum payments. Poor people have a lot of problems. Poor people with five million dollars in their hand have more problems. (Non-poor people generally do not play, and consequently do not win, the lottery.)

I'm sure you have no idea, but maybe someone else will read this: I grabbed the mp3 for that story, and would like to listen to it on my iPod as a podcast - meaning that when I pause, and listen to something else, resuming the podcast will resume from the point where I stopped.

Is there a way of doing this in iTunes? I tried creating an RSS feed, and iTunes added it to my podcast list, but it won't grab the damned file - and of course, doesn't tell me why.

Right click on the file in iTunes and go to get info. Then go to options remember playback position. This will work for any audio file that you have in iTunes.

Edit:

Also, just add the file to your library the normal way(No RSS) and do the above.

This company specializes in same (including people who win the 'lottery' of a large legal settlement):

http://www.peachtreefinancial.com/

They seem to advertise during trashy TV shows in hours when the gainfully-employed are usually at work or asleep.

So does JG Wentworth, with their memorable slogan, "It's my money and I need it now!"

Sounds like a clear case of Survivor bias: http://blog.asmartbear.com/business-advice-plagued-by-surviv....

The analysis on the article details goes into the odds and is actually quite good.

I have been trying to come up with a concept for this bias for a while for a certain case. The argument is that the earth has the "perfect" conditions for life. Any deviation would result in a planet devoid of life, thus only an intelligent designer could create such conditions. Survivor bias seems to be the exact term I've been looking for to describe this fallacy. Thanks for the link.

You are welcome. We could extend your observation about the earth to the universe: the universe is the way it is because had it been any other way, we wouldn't be there to observe it (and to comment on intelligent design or the lack of it!)

The term used in Physics for this is the Anthropic principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle.

Not suggesting anything.. (Honestly), but lottery tickets and such have been used by druglords to launder money many times. 1. Buy a winning lotto ticket from a real winner, pay them full price amount 2. Give ticket to corrupt official in exchange for services 3. Chief of police/minister/judge wins the lotto! (again!)

Such cases defeat statistical odds, and ruin the numbers.

More interesting to me are the odds that this woman is colluding with a lottery insider or a crooked retailer to divert and cash winning tickets.

More interesting to me to see what the odds are of nobody in the world ever winning four lotteries.

What's the chance of this lady winning four lotteries?

About 100%, apparently.

Yeah, this is a perfect example of Bayesian inference in action, where you update the probabilities upon receiving more information.

What's the probability that this lady will win four lotteries?

Before the first lottery, insanely low, say 10^20 to one. (I haven't actually computed this, but you get the point.)

After the first one, it becomes a little more probable; say 10^15 to one.

After the second, 10^10 to one.

After the third, 10^5 to one.

After the fourth, 100%.

The interesting part is after she first win Joan was able to find 3 other opportunities where the PV of playing was less than the cost of the ticket (assuming $1 tickets). 1 in 1,200,000 chance to win $10M? I'd take that.

I have seen scratch-off tickets cost as much as $20 a pop. I think it is safe to assume that the lottery commission is smart enough not to give away free money.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_restaurant_process

I would say that the (a priori) odds of this happening depend strongly upon how many tickets the lady bought.

Oh I submitted this last night - too early :]

If you plowed each lottery's winnings into more lottery tickets, you'd eventually lose everything, but probably win a few more lotteries on the way down. So it's not that unlikely to see this pattern, if a large number of lottery tickets are purchased.

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