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I think that is still an uncharitable interpretation of events. No one is claiming (so far as I know) that Who Wants to be a Millionaire? scoured all episodes l

I think that is still an uncharitable interpretation of events. No one is claiming (so far as I know) that Who Wants to be a Millionaire? scoured all episodes looking for suspicious patterns. This is one episode where cheating was already suspected (though I would like to know on what grounds they suspected it).

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Two days filming; total klutz the first day; whizkid the second.
carlmr 6y ago
>No one is claiming (so far as I know) that Who Wants to be a Millionaire? scoured all episodes looking for suspicious patterns Because it's normally not worth it. This selected a show with a big win where it was worth analyzing it. Big winners will always either know a lot, or be lucky (and bold) with their guesses. So this is already a pattern that was selected for. Now given this backwards reasoning every time the guest said something else but changed his mind will look like cheating. But you already selected only the cases where they did get lucky, so that shouldn't factor in to your thinking, but it obviously does because humans are bad at separating this rationally. No matter the percentages, absent any proof of collusion I don't think this conviction holds up, since nervous cough when seeing the right answer is enough of an explanation to make this plausible without any connection between the two.
- goodcanadian 6y ago
  You are arguing a different point than the original comment I was replying to, however. The original argument was that even with only a 0.3% probability of being coincidental, you would still expect to find one episode out of the entire run where it occurs. This is true. However, that doesn't make it likely that this episode is the one. If they had trawled the whole series looking for weirdness, and picked out the one episode with weirdness, that would be a major issue. They didn't do that. They picked this specific episode for a different reason (that I am still not completely clear on). The analysis shows that the coughing pattern was extremely unlikely to be coincidental. You are correct that doesn't necessarily mean cheating, but it is an interesting result that shouldn't simply be dismissed with hand wavy statistical arguments. The correct follow-up is as mentioned in the article. If the nervous coughing explanation is correct (for example) then most episodes should show a similar pattern which would undermine the conviction.
  - carlmr 6y ago
    >If the nervous coughing explanation is correct (for example) then most episodes should show a similar pattern which would undermine the conviction. That doesn't necessarily follow. It could still be that this one person has a nervous cough response to correct answers. Doesn't mean everyone with a cough does the same.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Two days filming; total klutz the first day; whizkid the second.

carlmr 6y ago

>No one is claiming (so far as I know) that Who Wants to be a Millionaire? scoured all episodes looking for suspicious patterns Because it's normally not worth it. This selected a show with a big win where it was worth analyzing it. Big winners will always either know a lot, or be lucky (and bold) with their guesses. So this is already a pattern that was selected for. Now given this backwards reasoning every time the guest said something else but changed his mind will look like cheating. But you already selected only the cases where they did get lucky, so that shouldn't factor in to your thinking, but it obviously does because humans are bad at separating this rationally. No matter the percentages, absent any proof of collusion I don't think this conviction holds up, since nervous cough when seeing the right answer is enough of an explanation to make this plausible without any connection between the two.

goodcanadian 6y ago
You are arguing a different point than the original comment I was replying to, however. The original argument was that even with only a 0.3% probability of being coincidental, you would still expect to find one episode out of the entire run where it occurs. This is true. However, that doesn't make it likely that this episode is the one. If they had trawled the whole series looking for weirdness, and picked out the one episode with weirdness, that would be a major issue. They didn't do that. They picked this specific episode for a different reason (that I am still not completely clear on). The analysis shows that the coughing pattern was extremely unlikely to be coincidental. You are correct that doesn't necessarily mean cheating, but it is an interesting result that shouldn't simply be dismissed with hand wavy statistical arguments. The correct follow-up is as mentioned in the article. If the nervous coughing explanation is correct (for example) then most episodes should show a similar pattern which would undermine the conviction.
- carlmr 6y ago
  >If the nervous coughing explanation is correct (for example) then most episodes should show a similar pattern which would undermine the conviction. That doesn't necessarily follow. It could still be that this one person has a nervous cough response to correct answers. Doesn't mean everyone with a cough does the same.