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Comment by teractiveodular | Hacker News Reader

There's a legendary Reddit comment that lays out the many, many other ways winning the lottery (or, more importantly, letting people know you won the lottery) is bad for you. Can you debunk its claims as well?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/comment/c...

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That comment makes untrue claims and cites no sources. The claim about multi-million dollar jackpot winners is a viral meme that keeps making the rounds despite the people with the actual stats repeatedly trying to debunk it. It is not true that a huge percentage of winners go bankrupt.

https://www.nefe.org/news/2018/01/research-statistic-on-fina...

https://www.reddit.com/r/PetPeeves/comments/18xqcbw/70_of_lo...

I imagine that it's perpetuated by the myth that people who make a shitton of money "legitimately" (ie getting insanely lucky by inheritance, investing in a moonshot, or both) are somehow magically blessed with the wisdom to handle money in a way that commoners are not. Plus a dash of cope for all the people who will never touch that amount of money. Assurance that even those who gain a lot will be no better off (or worse off) than them.

I also think the myth of “winners lose everything eventually” is a specific instance of general hate against gambling…

AKA “the house always wins” philosophy

The Reddit comment is interesting, and I think the advice that starts in the reply is sound. But this person's list of lottery winner failures is a small list of people versus a very large group of winners. Surely it's not hard to cherry pick a bunch of worst case scenarios.

i am still willing to experiment, for science

Unfortunately, you got put in the control group.

The reddit comment says things like "Homicide (something like 20x more likely)" without citing the source of this statistics.

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