Talk:Lottery paradox

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[edit] Proposed rewrite

Hi. I've offered a proposed rewrite of this article, following the structure of Gregory Wheeler "A Review of the Lottery Paradox", in Harper and Wheeler (eds.), Essays in Honour of Henry E. Kyburg, Jr., 2007.

[edit] Expansion & clean up

Hi all. I think this article really needs some expansion and clean up, such as:

  • Info on different formulations of the paradox (e.g., John Hawthorne (2004) and others formulate it as a puzzle about knowledge, not just justification).
  • A section on proposed solutions to the paradox.
  • The relation to contextualism.

These are just a few suggestions. - Jaymay 21:38, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Types of lotteries

This also assumes a lottery in which only tickets sold have a chance of winning -- e.g. unsold tickets cannot be drawn. This seems to be the standard where you buy a ticket and fill out the stub, the latter being drawn at the end of the contest. This paradox would not apply to lotteries where serial-numbered tickets are sold and a random number generator of some sort picks the number (like the old Olympic Lottery back in the '70s). "You could win a million, just by spending ten...you may never be this close again!" --SigPig 11:37, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

Keep in mind that the puzzle is meant to only be concerned with certain types of lotteries or lottery-type situations. (I added a note in the article trying to mention that.) John Hawthorne (2004), following others, even shows how the puzzle extends to non-lottery situations. So the puzzle is not about anything that falls under the word "lottery". It concerns specific types of probabilistic situations involving knowledge attributions and claims of justification. Such situations just happen to be largely lottery-like and the introduction of the puzzle in the liturature was primarily in the context of lottery situations (because they easily bring out the more general puzzle/paradox). - Jaymay 21:38, 17 August 2006 (UTC)