This essay is about shifts in risk taking towards the worship of jackpots and its broader societal implications. Imagine you are presented with this coin flip game.

How many times do you flip it?

At first glance the game feels like a money printer. The coin flip has positive expected value of twenty percent of your net worth per flip so you should flip the coin infinitely and eventually accumulate all of the wealth in the world.

However, If we simulate twenty-five thousand people flipping this coin a thousand times, virtually all of them end up with approximately 0 dollars.

The reason almost all outcomes go to zero is because of the multiplicative property of this repeated coin flip. Even though the expected value aka the arithmetic mean of the game is positive at a twenty percent gain per flip, the geometric mean is negative, meaning that the coin [...]

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First published:
July 11th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3xjgM7hcNznACRzBi/the-jackpot-age

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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