[ahhhhhhhhhh]

>but I think people know what a longshot is.

Gambling addiction and various mega-jackpot ticket-purchasing fervors are an indication that many people can't really comprehend the odds. A human can easily visualize 1 (the number of jackpot winners), but less so the scale of the 292,201,337 chances you have to lose (Powerball odds)

If you had a contest where you asked someone to pay $5 to correctly choose a single grain of rice out of 10,000lbs of rice... I doubt you'd get many takers because you're confronted with the physical reality of the odds.

It would be harder than picking a random year between now and when the first dinosaurs existed.

>Is this so much more stupid than throwing your money away on useless consumer junk?

"Junk" in the form of physical goods still holds some level of value. If you bought $1,000 of random physical goods in a year you'd more likely than not have something >$0

[bradleyjg]

I think this is broadly correct. Your system 1 (in Kahneman terms) can tell the difference between 50/50 and 1/10 but something like 1 in 1000 in is put in the same bucket as 1 in 100,000,000 -- unlikely but not impossible. If you want to actually work with odds like that you need to use system 2 to compute something more tractable like EV (~$0.75 on a $2 ticket for tonight's drawing).

In the interest of full disclosure, I probably spent $30 on lotto tickets last year.

[ahhhhhhhhhh]

I think we've all made gambles despite the odds. That's a bit of an unescapable human element.