This strikes me as similar to the way that making a to-do list, or praying, or writing about your future are effective tools for motivation. In articulating the path to the goal, what it is that you should do next becomes clearer, and you are more sure of the relationship between doing those things and ultimately succeeding.
This reminded me instantly of the UK National Lottery's slogan: 'you've got to be in it to win it'. Yes! The path is there. But personally I'm with Anthony Trollope that 'a lottery is a tax on stupidity'. And, to be honest, I'm slightly shocked that Paul even satirically allows himself to appear to promote the lottery.
Holy Happenstance, I was having a conversation with myself about this whole affair a day before finding this, it was as uncanny as it gets - especially given this was in no way one of those "oh we were talking about lawnmowers and now look at the ads I'm getting" kind of thing.
The Elster/Ainslie “shortage of scarcity” framing is the part that landed hardest for me — unconstrained fantasy collapses under its own omnipotence, which is exactly why Rub’s modest wishes in Nobody’s Fool count as wishing done right. Kenny Easwaran’s Taiwan sales-tax lottery example is a great real-world extension too: it turns the mundane constraint of keeping receipts into a path-based fantasy. It makes me wonder whether the same “path” effect explains why people check scores or tracking numbers obsessively — the path stays live, so the anticipation does too.
The path thing is interesting and plausible. Especially the bounded part. Also because that allows for a better preference reveal to others. That's why three wishes questions usually say "world peace, hunger and cancer are not in scope". And allows for diversification: that's why Desert Island Discs give you complete Shakespeare and the Bible or another holy scripture, because otherwise too many people would choose those.
But the lottery thing is better! I never could understand why economic principles get applied to LEISURE activity. For most gamblers (leaving aside pros and addicts) gambling seems to be ENTERTAINMENT. Lottery is not a tax on stupidity, it's a price put on specific kinds of thrill that a flutter can reliably generate. A winning is a bonus.
This reminds me of alt-history, or counterfactual history. (I've got "What If," "What If 2," and a third volume specific to American history.)
There, the "path," or per the second idea, the "constrained path" is pretty simple, and of two parts. Only one major counterfactual is allowed, and no time travel, whether of people or objects. (The classic example is you can't give Bobby Lee machine guns at Gettysburg.)
Without those constraints, counterfactual history would go all over the place.
With them, it can be a good way to show how Santayana's dictum about not learning from history is a way to play out learning by thinking of history's contingency.
Nice reframing of the lottery ticket: the Investopedia comparison only works if the goal is accumulating money. Is the occasional $2 ticket better thought of as entertainment spending, like a movie, rather than a failed investment?
I wonder if part of the appeal of a lottery ticket is that it substitutes a simple proxy wish for a complex, open-ended one. Fantasy is internal storytelling and, at least from personal experience, the easiest and (sometimes) most enjoyable part of writing a new story is the first hour of it, when I am coming up with the general idea and structure. The actual worldbuilding is hard.
I work in corporate, and usually I don't fantasize about working at a "better" job. The concept sounds great, but the details are a blur: what would my calendar look like? How would I get to work? What would I wear? It's not that I can't come up with answers to these, it's that I don't really care. The heart of the fantasy is "the better job", or "being rich". The details are necessary to make it "real", but they take a lot of work and almost get in the way of the dream.
This all changes when I'm interviewing. Suddenly the creative juices flow freely and the new job is all I can think about - but not the details of the position (technicalities!), just the dream of landing the job itself. The complex question of what that "better job" would entail is now replaced with a simple set of questions (Will I get a pay raise? A bigger vacation budget? Ah, the joys of adult life.) and a lot of the worldbuilding is suddenly done for me. The task of fantasizing becomes easy.
Maybe lottery tickets work the same way. "Being rich" is actually a multifaceted problem that takes a lot of effort to fully visualize, but "winning the lottery" (and maybe choosing the lump sum) isn't.
A few years ago I learned that Taiwan has a sales tax lottery, where all receipts for goods with sales tax are also tickets in a lottery. A philosopher wrote a paper trying to argue this was a reductio for views on which having a lottery ticket leads to skepticism about knowing you can’t do things - but I think this is a way to think of the government giving everyone the gift of this kind of imagination you mention.
This strikes me as similar to the way that making a to-do list, or praying, or writing about your future are effective tools for motivation. In articulating the path to the goal, what it is that you should do next becomes clearer, and you are more sure of the relationship between doing those things and ultimately succeeding.
This reminded me instantly of the UK National Lottery's slogan: 'you've got to be in it to win it'. Yes! The path is there. But personally I'm with Anthony Trollope that 'a lottery is a tax on stupidity'. And, to be honest, I'm slightly shocked that Paul even satirically allows himself to appear to promote the lottery.
My new fantasy is saving Paul Bloom from assassination and he is so grateful I get a free subscription to Small Potatoes for a year.
Holy Happenstance, I was having a conversation with myself about this whole affair a day before finding this, it was as uncanny as it gets - especially given this was in no way one of those "oh we were talking about lawnmowers and now look at the ads I'm getting" kind of thing.
A thing of beauty.
Thank you once again, dear Paul.
The Elster/Ainslie “shortage of scarcity” framing is the part that landed hardest for me — unconstrained fantasy collapses under its own omnipotence, which is exactly why Rub’s modest wishes in Nobody’s Fool count as wishing done right. Kenny Easwaran’s Taiwan sales-tax lottery example is a great real-world extension too: it turns the mundane constraint of keeping receipts into a path-based fantasy. It makes me wonder whether the same “path” effect explains why people check scores or tracking numbers obsessively — the path stays live, so the anticipation does too.
The path thing is interesting and plausible. Especially the bounded part. Also because that allows for a better preference reveal to others. That's why three wishes questions usually say "world peace, hunger and cancer are not in scope". And allows for diversification: that's why Desert Island Discs give you complete Shakespeare and the Bible or another holy scripture, because otherwise too many people would choose those.
But the lottery thing is better! I never could understand why economic principles get applied to LEISURE activity. For most gamblers (leaving aside pros and addicts) gambling seems to be ENTERTAINMENT. Lottery is not a tax on stupidity, it's a price put on specific kinds of thrill that a flutter can reliably generate. A winning is a bonus.
This reminds me of alt-history, or counterfactual history. (I've got "What If," "What If 2," and a third volume specific to American history.)
There, the "path," or per the second idea, the "constrained path" is pretty simple, and of two parts. Only one major counterfactual is allowed, and no time travel, whether of people or objects. (The classic example is you can't give Bobby Lee machine guns at Gettysburg.)
Without those constraints, counterfactual history would go all over the place.
With them, it can be a good way to show how Santayana's dictum about not learning from history is a way to play out learning by thinking of history's contingency.
Nice reframing of the lottery ticket: the Investopedia comparison only works if the goal is accumulating money. Is the occasional $2 ticket better thought of as entertainment spending, like a movie, rather than a failed investment?
I wonder if part of the appeal of a lottery ticket is that it substitutes a simple proxy wish for a complex, open-ended one. Fantasy is internal storytelling and, at least from personal experience, the easiest and (sometimes) most enjoyable part of writing a new story is the first hour of it, when I am coming up with the general idea and structure. The actual worldbuilding is hard.
I work in corporate, and usually I don't fantasize about working at a "better" job. The concept sounds great, but the details are a blur: what would my calendar look like? How would I get to work? What would I wear? It's not that I can't come up with answers to these, it's that I don't really care. The heart of the fantasy is "the better job", or "being rich". The details are necessary to make it "real", but they take a lot of work and almost get in the way of the dream.
This all changes when I'm interviewing. Suddenly the creative juices flow freely and the new job is all I can think about - but not the details of the position (technicalities!), just the dream of landing the job itself. The complex question of what that "better job" would entail is now replaced with a simple set of questions (Will I get a pay raise? A bigger vacation budget? Ah, the joys of adult life.) and a lot of the worldbuilding is suddenly done for me. The task of fantasizing becomes easy.
Maybe lottery tickets work the same way. "Being rich" is actually a multifaceted problem that takes a lot of effort to fully visualize, but "winning the lottery" (and maybe choosing the lump sum) isn't.
A few years ago I learned that Taiwan has a sales tax lottery, where all receipts for goods with sales tax are also tickets in a lottery. A philosopher wrote a paper trying to argue this was a reductio for views on which having a lottery ticket leads to skepticism about knowing you can’t do things - but I think this is a way to think of the government giving everyone the gift of this kind of imagination you mention.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/episteme/article/abs/lottery-paradox-the-nojustification-account-and-taiwan/B2C4693341739B83C32E2A947FA521EB
"a concrete path" is the part that got me. a vague goal never moves me. the next real step does, even when the odds are bad.
Perhaps, but the lottery ticket trades on a deeper psychological deceit: that acquiring the means of utility will make us happy. But it won't.
Possibly of interest accordingly:
https://www.paulsagar.com/_files/ugd/ec3ee6_1c272d452d444a40a7422f5d40cf8704.docx?dn=How%20to%20be%20Happy%20-%20Sagar%20-%20Smithean%20Mind.docx