Brain With Fantasy

LOTTERIES are a regressive tax on those who can't do math, runs the famous old saying. "Nonsense!" retort critics. "For a dollar, one can purchase the fantasy of being wealthy beyond dreams of avarice. It is cheap at the price."

Over at Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudkowsky says "But isn't that a waste of hope?"

But consider exactly what this implies. It would mean that you're occupying your valuable brain with a fantasy whose real probability is nearly zero - a tiny line of likelihood which you, yourself, can do nothing to realize. The lottery balls will decide your future. The fantasy is of wealth that arrives without effort - without conscientiousness, learning, charisma, or even patience.

Which makes the lottery another kind of sink: a sink of emotional energy. It encourages people to invest their dreams, their hopes for a better future, into an infinitesimal probability. If not for the lottery, maybe they would fantasize about going to technical school, or opening their own business, or getting a promotion at work - things they might be able to actually do, hopes that would make them want to become stronger. Their dreaming brains might, in the 20th visualization of the pleasant fantasy, notice a way to really do it. Isn't that what dreams and brains are for? But how can such reality-limited fare compete with the artificially sweetened prospect of instant wealth - not after herding a dot-com startup through to IPO, but on Tuesday?
Read More:http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2007/04/the_future_of_fantasy.cfm