If I Had a Million Dollars

Break time. Let's go for coffee. Your turn to drive. I'm going to catch up on the news.

Hmmm.

Same old news. Hit and run. Hate crime. NIMBY protests over low income housing. Overdose deaths. Antivax demonstrations. 6 million jackpot in the lottery with no winner. Epiphany in the ICU. I should have saved yesterday's paper and read it again instead of buying one today.

photo credit: © Can Stock Photo / njene

Why so quiet? Oh, I forgot about you and the lottery. You're probably planning what you would do with 6 million. Pay attention to your driving. The lottery fantasy is pointless. Your chance of winning the jackpot is one in 13,983,816. The average person is twice as likely to die in a traffic accident any given day. Your lottery win isn't going to happen. Better to plan your epitaph. Mine too, if you are going to drive with your mind in Oz. Watch the road, please.

Are you going to buy another Lotto ticket this week? Haven't decided? Not an easy decision. You realize that there is a disconnect between the binary yes/no answer and its model in the mind? You see, the brain is binary only at the level of the individual synapse. At the neural network level it becomes analogue. Given that a typical human brain has billions of neurons and trillions of synapses, the answer will always be a compromise. We like simple either-or choices, but that isn't the way we think. 

Pseudo-binary thinking: if I had a million dollars, I'd be rich.

I remember back when I had a mortgage and a million dollars would have paid it off fifty times over. Feel-good only looks binary. It raises the question how good does it feel, and the answer is analogue and subject to change. Last week the jackpot was 30 million dollars which propelled feel-good into orbit while making no difference whatever to the odds. 

To arrive at a binary choice, you dynamically combine a large number of interacting analogue values, some of which are feel-bad. How bad does it feel that some random stranger will get a piece of my three dollars and won't even have time for coffee because he or she is busy fending off friends and relatives who want a share of the winnings? The winner has a lot more to lose than three dollars. I really feel bad for that person. I would feel better if I didn't contribute three dollars to poisoning their relationships with envy.

More analogue thinking pretending to be binary: if you don't play, you can't win.  

That sounds like simple Boolean logic. It's not. If I bought a ticket, I would have three dollars less than I had before I bought a ticket because luck is delusional and the chance of winning is too small to bother about, a lesson I learned when I was sixteen and bought three copies of a magazine so I could enter a solution to the crossword puzzle three times, which should have made me a winner and didn't. That vaccinated me against lotteries early on. So I win three dollars every time I don't play, and if I didn't spend it on coffee I'd be rich. Say fifty-two times a year for sixty-five years, assuming weekly $3 contribution and compound interest at 5%, it comes to $67,344 according to the savings calculator app on my phone. Not a million, but much better odds, and I would take it if it didn't mean 65 years without coffee. 

Speaking of coffee, we need a pick-me-up. Order donuts with the coffee today. I'm buying. You're welcome. Nice I didn't waste three dollars on the lottery or just invest it.

Oh look. The next jackpot is $1000 per day for life. What could I do with that? Feeling lucky. What if I play the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6;  such a neat set, it has to win. What? Oh yeah, you think it's not random enough; too regular to ever be a winning combination. Guess what, one chance in 13,983,816 just like any other combination of six numbers from 1 to 49.  The random number generator doesn't care about my quirky bias or yours. Not going to win, obviously. We were going to play Lotto and it turns out Lotto was playing us. Still, a thousand per day is pretty tempting.

I feel somewhat good that I didn't buy a ticket and I can still afford a coffee. Note that if I had won the lottery we wouldn't be doing this coffee break. I would be living in a gated villa in Bermuda with guard dogs. I prefer coffee with you to guard dogs. That sentiment is analogue and subject to change. Just kidding.

Now, about my epitaph. Any suggestions?