Imagine if you not only realized you were living in a simulation but that the simulation involved randomness (god playing dice) and you could somehow force backtracking with a simple button so that different values were chosen. Now, play the lottery and hit that button whenever you don't win; you could then surface an unlikely universe where you get really lucky.
Have you heard of Max Tegmark's quantum suicide argument? If you believe it sufficiently, well, buy a lottery ticket and cyanide, and really commit yourself to it :)
Let us for a moment, assume that the quantum suicide argument is correct. It is probably more likely that you will somehow survive the cyanide with life-long debilitating effects than for you to actually win the lottery.
Hah, that's very cool. I came up with this as an idea for a short story a couple of days ago (except slightly more drastically, as it involved the complete annihilation of humanity on a failure condition, allowing the practitioner to drag everyone else with him into his preferred outcome-world). I'm simultaneously pleased and displeased that someone's already given it a lot of thought.
It's unlikely to work unless the button is so reliable that you have a better chance of winning the lottery than the button/mechanism failing in some (possibly undetectable) way. It's the same argument against trying to use quantum immortality to force a miracle by killing yourself, or constructing a machine to kill you, unless some desirable event occurs. It's much more likely that your machine will fail, or you'll change your mind.
We could imagine that the simulation naturally backtracks given a paradox or dead end. So if the lottery is rigged, I would never get rich, and the simulation would just backtrack to where I would never decide to try this.
