What prize would make your life worse?

A lifetime supply of whiskey.

Anything that would put me in the public eye.

This is a good question to tell my story about my friend Kathy.
Kathy worked at Lucasfilm. One of her jobs was to send a sample all the merchandise connected to the Star Wars films to the actors who portrayed them.
Kathy kept getting phone calls and letters from James Earl Jones to stop sending him the Darth Vader merch. Seems JEJ was living in England, and he was having to pay taxes on the toys Kathy was sending him.
Kathy thought it was funny, and she kept sending him the stuff.
Ya, definitely a dick move.

The booby prize is supposed to be bad, but any prize involving boobs can’t be all that bad.

A one-way trip to Mars. Link
An all expense paid trip to have dinner with Trump in Mar-a-Lago.
A coupon for a free happy meal at McDonalds’s.

Like getting a hug from the deathbed companion?

I didn’t understand until I got older how terrible being famous would be.
I actually feel bad for celebrities and rich people.
Young athletes getting scammed by their financial caretakers, family suing each other over money etc.

I’ll take the house in the middle of nowhere.

Winning too much money at once would be like a curse, because I’d be a target and my family would be a target for scammers, kidnappers, etc. A little money every year would be fine – enough to take some nice trips and not worry about it – maybe 400k per year would make us very comfortable.

I also feel bad for celebrities – every time they leave the house they’re photographed and critiqued. If they don’t look 100% it’s all disected on the interwebs.

A lifetime supply of Ipecac juice.

@Jeruba & @Blackberry get the cigar. Nothing can match one’s flaunting of their own success when it comes to attracting attention from the multitude of snakes which plague the world.

When I was a kid, I was in the Cub Scouts. We would have a pack meeting once a monthe and at the end they would have a raffle. The whole pack would be about 100 kids and they’d put all the names in a hat and draw one to win a Swiss Army Knife or some such prize. I won that raffle three months in a row (what are the odds?). The fourth month they took my name out of the hat (with the permission of my father). That was all well and good but apparently nobody ever put my name back into the hat because I’ve never won anything since. I would gladly give back the knife if they would put my name back into the hat.

A lifetime supply of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

@Blackberry Google “celebrity suicides” and be prepared to spend hours reading about some really messed up stuff.
The death of Lupe Velez is really awful.

I don’t understand why any normal person would want to be famous.

If they’re a world-class attention seeker, they’re not normal.

@Blackberry, I feel especially sorry for the offspring of celebrities, the ordinary untalented or unbeautiful kids who have to deal with all the hounding and following and publicity, not only well before they’re gained some maturity but also without the bulwark of a reason for their fame that isn’t second-hand. Privilege doesn’t make up for it; it’s more likely to make things worse.

@Jaxk “I won that raffle three months in a row (what are the odds?)”

If each raffle had 100 kids in it, and you won 3 months in a row the odds should be 1M to 1.

Like the man who spent most of his life purchasing lotto tickets and won at age 90 and living in a nursing home.
Having won a large sum of money in the Millions only to have everyone come out of the woodwork to become my friend all of a sudden.

@gorillapaws, isn’t it the case that each drawing was the first of a series and that the odds are the same each time? That’s the principle that I understood from Mlodinov’s “The Drunkard’s Walk”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drunkard's_Walk

Or is that the odds of winning three times, versus the odds of winning on each of three occasions?

@Jeruba The odds of winning 3 1:100 drawings in a row is 1:1,000,000. To your point, there’s a bit of the “throw a dart and then draw the bullseye around it” in play here, which is how I’m interpreting your feedback.

@gorillapaws, thanks for explaining. I asked because math is not an area of strength for me. I read the whole Mlodinow book, but I couldn’t have passed a quiz on it. I don’t understand your remark about the bull’s-eye, but if you thought my question was facetious, it wasn’t.

@Jeruba “I don’t understand your remark about the bull’s-eye, but if you thought my question was facetious, it wasn’t.”

Not at all!

I’m not familiar with Miodinow. There’s an error people make where they draw the bullseye around the dart/arrow after it’s been thrown/shot. I think this is the error being described by Miodinow, but I’m not certain which is why I responded to you in the way I did. Apologies for not being more clear.

To further clarify the analogy: we do thousands of chance based things every day. Due to the nature of randomness, it’s expected for there to be clusters from time-to-time. It’s not unusual to have coincidences like @Jaxk experienced if we define the conditions after they happen (as my calculation did) across all possible sets of coincidences in your life. That’s what I meant by painting the bullseye after you’ve thrown the dart.

Thanks, @gorillapaws. I get the analogy now. I linked a page on Mlodinow’s book above. He also collaborated with Stephen Hawking and coauthored a book with him, “The Grand Design”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Design_(book)