[quote name=\'clemon79\' post=\'179048\' date=\'Feb 26 2008, 01:31 PM\'][quote name=\'TLEberle\' post=\'179046\' date=\'Feb 26 2008, 01:24 PM\']People like you can't exist in the wild. They just can't.
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Except he's *right*. (And you KNOW how much it kills me to admit that.) If you remove the undefinable "probability of riding the storm out," it's a straight 50/50 shot.
The problem is that you can't remove that, and you can't quantify that.[/quote]What, he's right that the odds of calling a coin flip correctly are 0.5? Yeah, he is, but so what? That's trivial. Chuck is trying to jump from that to "the odds of winning..." and they're not so. We went through that in the other thread, but apparently there are still people who just don't get it. His adding of "the question is how much they have to pay you to give up that chance" negates the previous statement.
Deal or No Deal is what it is. It isn't "a lottery that sells chances," it's a game show that gives out money, it costs nothing to play (other than expenses). You can't just change the rules to suit a particular argument. It makes as much sense as trying to quantify the confidence level of a Phone-a-Friend: it's either Certain or Not, and the in between doesn't make a lick of difference. There's no way to objectively quantify whether a player will Deal or Not Deal, because there are far too many variables.
Either Chuck has a tenuous grasp of how probability and odds really work (and in that case I worry that he's practicing law and trying to convince people of falsehoods) or he DOES know, and it just trying to dream up convoluted situations to suit his particular needs. (Which is possibly more distressing, I don't know.) And it's frustrating to have to explain these concepts again and again because people don't know the difference between odds and probability, or pot odds against a one-time event.