It's been said, enough times to fill an olympic-size swimming pool with smugness, that the lottery is a tax on stupid people. I can't be sure that a $40 sculpture of Wonder Woman that's a third breasts by weight is a better investment than 40 scratchers, but sure, let's go with that.

Certainly the lottery doesn't deserve to be part of any long-term financial plan any more than, say, counting on your children to support you, but what puzzles me is that people who count themselves as strict rationalists end up getting involved in voodoo as dubious as crystal healing, because certain forms of voodoo have a veneer of mathematical legitimacy.

Let's look at a few lottery tickets for the skeptical set.

Stock Picking ————-

Here's the thing about picking stocks: You can't. Hard evidence has demonstrated again and again that the human chances of outperforming the market by picking individual stocks is, if anything, lower than that of a random number generator or a chimpanzee, although conservatives argue that the chimp is merely concerned about the capital gains tax.

People who think they're stock-picking geniuses are either only remembering their good picks, or they're just getting lucky. Remember, if 10 million people pick stocks, a bunch of them are randomly going to have a one-in-a-million success.

Financial Motivation ——————–

If you want more and better work from your employees, what do you do? Offer them more money, of course. Everyone knows that the bigger the cash-carrot you dangle, the faster the donkey trots.

Psychological studies, however, have shown again and again that cash only translates into performance under limited circumstances, and that most workers would rather be treated like human beings. And yet, from paying kids for grades to protecting insurance industry profits, entire economic policies revolve around the idea that human beings are just locomotives that run on cash rather than coal.

Diets —–

It's simple, right? Eat fewer calories than you expend and you'll lose weight. This is in spite of the fact that dieting has only about a 5 percent long-term success rate, and typically the dieter gains back all the weight and more.

If live data demonstrated that rainbow chakra enhancement therapy worked only 5 percent of the time and usually made things worse, it would be resoundingly and sneeringly rejected by the skeptics. But because calories are math, traditional diets get a pass. Worse yet, many people spend tons of money on diet plans and diet foods under the false assumption that you can reliably lose weight just by cutting calories.

Lie Detectors ————-

It happens almost as often in real life as it does on TV: Someone accused of wrongdoing is subjected to a polygraph test. While the results from a lie detector are perhaps less extreme than throwing an accused witch into the nearest body of water, they're no more reliable.

This is a perfect example of how the veneer of technology can lend legitimacy to pseudoscience. Even people who scoff at the idea of psychic investigators are often much more accepting of "experts" with electronic devices and wires and needles being paid taxpayer money to provide vacuous interpretations of the squiggles. It's a literal tax on stupid people – the stupid ones being those who don't object to their tax money being spent on a high-tech Ouija board.

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Born helpless, naked and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg overcame these handicaps to become a curmudgeon, a grouser and a crosspatch.