You know what I hate about the lottery?
The winners never say, “I randomly won!”
They always have some “magic trick” that gave them an edge. Maybe they used the birth dates of loved ones. Maybe they prayed. Maybe they played their lucky numbers. None of that has anything to do with the numbers that were pulled, but it lends credibility to those bullshit ideas.
That’s why reading about what happened to Kevin Millard is infuriating. He took the least rational route to playing the lottery… and was rewarded for his ignorance.
First, there was the psychic who told him to play the lottery.
Then, he had to go to the “right” store:
To shake things up a bit, he ditched his usual stores and looked for places known to have prior wins. He ended up at Golden Rule Liquor, at 7753 Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. California Lottery keeps a list of “Lucky Retailers”…
That’s just really stupid. There are no “lucky retailers,” just like there are no “lucky numbers.” The lottery balls don’t have a memory of which ones were chosen before. They don’t give a damn where you bought your ticket.
But Millard went to a “lucky” store on the advice of his “psychic” and now has plenty of money to show for it:
He walked away with a bit more than $1 million after matching five out of the six numbers on the Sept 19 draw.
I’m tempted to say the world isn’t fair… but the problem is that the lottery really is random. It won’t reward most players, but the ones who win are just a subset of the fools who play in the first place.
That means we’ll always get to hear another rationalization for how someone won a game of chance.
It makes my statistics-loving head hurt.
(Thanks to @csAdAstra for the link)
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