How old are you?

[AdrenalinDragon]

What would you do if you won the lottery, BigOto2?

[BigOto2]

It depends on the kind of lottery you are talking about. If I won the lottery of chance by effortlessly picking the right numbers, I would probably put the money towards whatever I need it most for at the time, and donate some of it back to society who would really need it more than me. Of course, as I am only 15 I'm speaking in the future.

If you're talking about the lottery of life, where I actually DID something to earn the money, I would do the same but feel much more proud of myself for having given back to society in order to earn the money.

[rockdet]

I don't exactly think it's the place to go philosophical about lottery. I'm assuming being all good at math, we all know that the odds of winning are ridiculous. As for me, it is my field of study, so 'course I know that. It's all hypothetical, there's no commitment nor prompting/incitement to buy lottery tickets, there's "if"s and only "if"s...

Also, I'll turn 23 in 2 days

[jblewis]

If I ever achieve 437 on Blobnet, I might consider trying out the lottery again.

[BigOto2]

Yeah, too bad I don't believe in karma so I wouldn't.

[BitBuster]

If I ever achieve 437 on Blobnet, I might consider trying out the lottery again.

If you ever achieve 437 on Blobnet, I'd say you'd probably have used up the entirety of your good luck allotment.

(Hey, while we're talking about fallicious reasoning, might as well bring up the old "luck is a resource" philosophy.)

[BigOto2]

Luck isn't exactly a resource. A better way to imagine tiny odds is to think that for every possible number combination you can pick for a certain lottery, a parallel universe is created for each combination, and only one of which involves you winning. Then, say in the universe you won, you went home to attempt Blobnet's 437 route, another set of millions of parallel universes will be created. While the odds of landing in both lucky parallel universes is atomically small, it can happen. This is how I like to disprove karma, too, but then of course you can debate it with the idea that the universe in which you win/lose gets heavier when you do good things, but that's getting way too complicated for me to imagine right now.

[Markus]

I myself don't believe in "luck" or "free will" or any of that. Nothing is really random. You would be able to predict the lottery if you knew exactly how each ball would move and where each ball would start and end up, which you would be able to predict If you knew exactly what the person who positions the balls would be thinking, which you could predict if you knew exactly how everyone and everything would interact with him/her etc. There is no real luck involved.

I totally agree with the buddhist idea that everything is connected.

[geodave]

There is no real luck involved.

I totally agree with the buddhist idea that everything is connected.

Well. Luck only applies when things are not completely deterministic. Theoretically, either everything is deterministic or nothing is, depending on how you look at it and how many universes you think there are. Since chaos theory states that we can't possibly measure things closely enough, we might as well treat certain things as random even though they are completely deterministic.

The best you can do is minimize the possiblity of bad outcome and maximize the possibilty of the good. Hedge funds anyone?

I suppose that everything is connected, but not in a way we can actually measure.

[BitBuster]

Getting back on topic (!), I recently turned 23. I don't feel quite as depressed as I thought I would.