That example is quite bracing, but I think it points out that there are many ways to build this 'luck surface', and the expected values of each are probably very different, and likely situational.
The next dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets is to compare it with other long odds (lightning strikes, marrying your favorite actor). If you want to play along, the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe.
Buying lottery tickets is a simple framework. The upside of winning a lottery is significantly higher than the downside of losing one (per week or per month). So do it.
The opposite is driving recklessly to save a minute of your commute. It has significantly higher downside risks than the upside of time savings. So don't do it.
A lot of lottery-bashing people make 10000x worse sub-optimal decisions in their life and yet pick trashing a lottery ticket to feel superior about their decision making ability.
Yup -- it was written in a universe where the poster they replied to exists, so that probability is = 1 here.
There's no reason to hate on people for doing something that they enjoy, regardless of what the expected value is. For god's sake, I juggle! As a hobby! Can you imagine the expected return on THAT?
Is it, though? This claim ultimately hinges on the probability of life occurring in the universe, and that's pretty hard to assess given our lack of encounters with extraterrestrial life.
Once life is established and subject to evolutionary processes, I hypothesize that intelligent life is - barring some mass extinction event preventing it - just about inevitable; evolution will select for greater and greater intelligence until the local lifeforms achieve sapience (and possibly beyond even that, i.e. levels of intelligence we mere apes are incapable of comprehending).
It’s my opinion that just buying one ticket, for say $2, essentially is a trivial and inconsequential amount of money that exposes you to incredible upside. Imagine if the ticket only cost a penny. At that point it’s practically free, but free exposure to life changing wealth. I don’t know if that counts as zero to 1 according to Peter Thiel, but it’s basically zero to something, for essentially nothing
It’s almost like there is another variable that determines if this is a dumb idea, and it almost always is. Maybe those math professors are on to something after all.
Go back to the framework
Upside(Gain) / Downside(Risk) is a pretty simple framework.
All I'm saying is, Downside(Risk) is not f(Expected Value)
Downside(Risk) is not f(p(winning))
I agree. Something as straightforward as being known as someone who does good work, putting yourself out there somewhat (writing, speaking, etc.), basically developing a network of people who you know at least professionally is certainly a way a lot of people develop at least something of a "luck surface." It may well not produce the big win but it can certainly lead to "lucky" opportunities.
Of course, there are other options that are more like gambles that may have negative EV but if you don't play big you probably won't win big.
For any given "luck surface" strategy, you can find far more people who haven't achieved massive success using it than those who have. Some strategies are probably better than others, but those are not foreseeable in advance.
Think of networking, and imagine every person you meet and build a rapport with as non-parametric distribution that you're randomly sampling from over time (future interactions). You have no clue if each sample is going to yield positive results, but you can increase your chance of a positive outcome overall by increasing the number of distributions (people) you're sampling from (maintaining relationships).
So much of it ends up by random chance, what else could it be but luck?