Hitting the Books: How winning the lottery is a lot like being re-struck by lightning
by James C. Zimring, published by Columbia Business School Publishing. Copyright 2022 James C. Zimring. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.The more unlikely an event seems, the more it draws our attention when it does occur and the more compelled we feel to explain why it happened. This just makes good sense. If the world is not behaving according to the rules we understand, perhaps we misunderstand the rules.
The lottery fallacy is not restricted to good things happening. Explanations also are sought to explain bad things. Some people are struck by lightning more than once, which seems just too unlikely to accept as random chance. There must be some explanation. Inevitably, it is speculated that the person may have some weird mutant trait that makes them attract electricity, or they carry certain metals on their person or have titanium prosthetics in their body.
Of course, the news does not give us a list of all the people who did not win. Can you imagine the same headline every week, “299,999,999 People Failed to Win the Lottery, Again!” . No, the news only tells us that there was a winner, and sometimes who the winner was. When we ask ourselves, “What are the odds of that person winning?” we are asking the wrong question and referring to the wrong fraction. The odds of that particular person winning are 1/292,000,000.
Similarly, the odds of twice being struck by lightning over the course of one’s life are one in nine million. Because 7.9 billion people live on Earth, it is probable that 833 people will be hit by lightning twice in their lives . As with the lottery example, our attention is drawn only to those who are struck by lightning. We fail to consider how many people never get struck.
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