Mega-Madness

So the MegaMillions lottery jackpot was up to $363 million this week, and it was of course a major news story.  Now it's rather intuitive that a major news story about something which hasn't actually happened yet is kind of difficult to report on, so the creative juices were really flowing on all the television networks.  A few days ago, I caught an in-depth report on one of the network news shows about the lottery.  The story featured an interview with an "expert" on how to win the lottery.  His advice included such gems as studying the numbers that have come up in past drawings, and choosing the numbers that are "due" to come up.

I spent my life teaching Math, so I count folks like this guy among the failures of the efforts of my colleagues and me.  How many times did I ask the question, "If a fair coin is flipped and comes up heads, what is the probability that the next flip comes up heads?"  (I hope you know the answer is 1/2.)  The only way that previous results could become relevant is if the lottery ping-pong balls are rigged, either intentionally or not.  However, great pains are taken to insure that the drawings are fair, including selecting the set of ping-pong balls randomly from several available sets, weighing them before and after the drawings, and using an independent auditing agency to oversee the drawing process.  So it still all comes down to probability, and you can no more predict which numbers are likely to come up than you can predict whether that proverbial coin is going to come up heads or tails.

So nobody won the drawing last night, and the jackpot is up to $476 million.  I suppose the news coverage between now and Friday will be even more intense, and people may be lining up to buy tickets.  That's a mentality I can't understand - would the folks going crazy now not be content to win a paltry $20 million or so?  I say, just calm down, everyone.  Buy a ticket if you want - the probability of winning is incredibly small, but when you think about it, virtually every event in your life is the result of an incredibly unlikely occurrence happening.  We don't notice, because nobody gives us a few million dollars for things like walking out the door at the exact same time as your next-door neighbor.

So please, news networks, let's not go crazy with this.  And for goodness sake, don't feed into the mentality that people can actually do something to improve their chances of winning.  Let's keep things in perspective - lotteries are entertainment, not an alternative to a 401k.

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