As someone who's bought a few lottery tickets in his life, I can confirm that the fantasizing is in fact better when it's about something that could happen to you.
Have you tried buying a lottery ticket? It sure feels a lot different than the "free" variety you're proposing.
And props to you if you're a true rationalist who derive nearly equal amounts of satisfaction from both fantasy events, but most people don't behave like that.
The likelihood of the two events isn't at all similar. How often do you find discarded tickets for future drawings on the street?? You're much more likely to find one (or ten, or a hundred) if you buy them. Then once you're in possession of said tickets, now the odds of winning are the same.
> The likelihood of the two events isn't at all similar.
1e-9 and 1e-100 should both round to 0.
and since people spend all sorts of time imagining things with likelihood _0_ (or downright counterfactual!), 1e-100 should be plenty to get you rolling.
> How often do you find discarded tickets for future drawings on the street??
you're already fantasizing a wildly improbable chains of events (buy ticket, win max amount, and then, unlike a huge number of winners avoid having your entire life ruined by it), but imagining finding a piece of paper on the street is a step too far?
and if "found it on the street" is _really_ the problem, you could always choose to fantasize that someone gives you a ticket, or even just pretend that you purchased a ticket. (that's hardly improbable, after all.)
It sounds like you fundamentally just don't understand the psychology of people who buy lottery tickets.
That's fine, then don't buy them yourself, but it makes no sense to argue against other people's actual experienced feelings and thoughts. You can't use logic to "win" this.
and yet here you are, producing justifications about how your fantasy has to have particular levels of believability, instead of just saying "i like doing it".
