They’ll be no politics this week. I’ve reached that ever-familiar point of tolerance saturation. I no longer have control over my gag reflex, not to mention my rage level.
Listening to both candidates, it appears as though we’re all doomed no matter which of the two we choose. Each vilifies the other, but McCain does it with the temperament of a vindictive nasty old man, while Obama does it with absolute intellectual eloquence.
So, I’m taking a break from the fray for a couple of weeks. To this end, I’m going to tell you about my encounter this past week with an avid, genuine Powerball fanatic.
The two of us were waiting to pay for our books at Barnes and Noble. The checkout lines there tend to be long at this time of year. This one was longer than usual.
I had only three books to pay for, but she had two hand-baskets loaded with about $200 worth of hardcovers, “Christmas gifts,” she explained.
I asked her if she had considered buying a Barnes and Noble discount card, a worthwhile investment of $25 a year for people who buy more than $250 worth of books a year. The card grants a 10% discount on everything in the store except gift cards.
She seemed skeptical, even though she admitted that she buys a “lot” of books each year. I don’t think she understood the math involved. So, I just let the subject drop.
She confirmed my suspicion, though, a few seconds later as she poked around through her purse to find her wallet and credit cards.
As she pulled a credit card from her wallet, a Powerball ticket fell to the floor beside her. She didn’t see it fall, so I picked it up and handed it to her.
It was a $5 ticket. She explained that she has been “systematically,” playing the same numbers every week for the past 8-years. I asked her if she had ever won any money doing it.
“About $700,” she told me. “But,” she continued, “a friend of mine had been playing HIS lucky numbers for the past 15-years and he just won $5,000!”
She gave me the impression that she felt confident that it was just a matter of time before she, too, won some “big” money. Even though I doubted it, I wished her luck.
Then, it was our turn to pay for our books. A counter clerk called her to the register. Another one called me to the register next to hers.
I could not help overhearing that her book purchase came to $260. Rejecting the clerk’s offer of the discount card, she paid with a credit card; told me it was nice talking to me; and she left.
My total came to $68, but I only paid $61.20 with my 10% discount. I saved $6.80. Had she purchased the card, her gross total would have been $285, but her net due would have been only $256.50.
Including the card purchase, she would have saved $28.50, enough to buy almost six 5-dollar Powerball tickets. Even ignoring the card’s purchase price, she still would have saved $3.50 on the book total of $260.
I left the store, my savings intact. And, while I did not intend to waste it on lottery tickets, I DID have this week’s column topic.
To me, buying lottery tickets amounts to nothing more than a user tax on the mathematically challenged. Winning is possible, but “possible” is light-years from “probable.”
Politicians, scam artists, fear-merchants, and lottery agents depend heavily on the fact that many people do NOT truly understand probability theory. Here’s an example: a true story.
About 20-years ago, I was having a cup of coffee while waiting to catch a train to New York City. A man seated next to me at the coffee shop counter asked me where I was “headed.”
When I told him, he cocked his head and told me that he’d never visit New York City because he had read a report that there was a 1 in 20 chance of becoming a homicide victim.
It struck me as funny in that I, too, recalled reading the same story in New York Times a few weeks earlier.
However, I didn’t interpret the statistics as meaning that that people walking the streets of New York City had a 1 in 20 chance of some thug killing them during the commission of a homicide.
I assumed that the story meant that of all of the ways of dying in New York City at the time, there was a 1 in 20 chance that it would be by homicide.
In no way had the newspaper’s statisticians meant to include the entire population of New York City as part of their statistical inferences. They were writing about a small subset of that population: those who suffered the misfortune of dying.
About 8-million people resided in New York City at the time of the published report. Even people with less than 3-digit IQs should have realized that “1 in 20” would have amounted to about 400,000 annual deaths as the result of homicides.
The above is an example of a conditional probability, one that changes based on specific circumstances.
On the other hand, games of chance probabilities do not change… EVER! No matter how many times you try to draw an ace from a standard, 52-card deck, there is a 1 in 13 chance of success.
Flipping a fair coin (meaning balanced) in the air, there is a 1 in 2 chance (50% probability) that it will land heads up. The probability will not change, no matter how many times you do it, or how fervently you believe that it will.
It doesn’t mean that it will routinely alternate between heads and tails. It may come up heads, or tails, several times in succession. However, over many attempts, the outcome will regress to a 50-50 probability.
Lottery numbers can’t recall themselves. No matter how many times you use them, they can’t remember which ones came up at the last drawing. Consequently, the odds against winning with them are always the same.
According to the official Powerball web site, the odds against winning the Powerball jackpot are about 1 in 146,000,000. No matter how fervently people think they’re bound to win “sooner or later,” those 1 in 146-million odds predict that they probably will NOT!
There is no harm in playing a lottery as long as you are not taking food off the table to do so. But, playing under the assumption that you HAVE to win eventually is stupid.
The fact is, IF you play LONG enough, you WILL win eventually. However, on average AND assuming that you continue buying five chances a week to play a lottery with a 1 in 146-million chances of winning, it could take upwards of around 565,000 years to do so.
And, since I’m on the subject of inferential statistics, I’ll take this timely opportunity to warn all of you about the hazards of eating pickles. Statistically, it would seem, there’s a good chance that they’ll kill you.
Fact: Of all the people in this country who have died over the past 50-years, at least 93% of them had eaten pickles on a routine basis! Need I say more? You’ve been warned!
Joe Walther is a freelance writer and
publisher of The True Facts. You may comment on his column by clicking here.