Lotteries and Hope

A pearl of wisdom from Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Understanding that lottery tickets have negative expected utility, does not mean that you give up the hope of being rich.  It means that you stop wasting that hope on lottery tickets.

I might not agree with all that Eliezer says (it would take me some fairly intensive study before I could say that), but I do find him to be one of the more interesting writers out on the web at the moment.