October 29, 2006I recently got into what could be considered a heated debate on some guy's website. After a couple episodes of Deal Or No Deal, I decided to see if others agreed with me about proper statistical decision making as it applies to the game. He seemed to go into great depth about what he thought, but I considered his analysis flawed, so I posted what I thought was a simple correction. Well, apparently he didn't like that. First he argued with me, then he posted the following:
You know what, you’re right.
I must be an idiot.
Why the **** did I put up with four years of the #3 Mechanical Engineering Institution in the country?
Why did I learn statistics and other meaningless crap when I could have just listened to your clairvoyant insights?
I don’t see why you’re wasting your time at my site if you’ve got
your finger so firmly pressed upon the pulse of success and useful
knowledge. You should be out getting rich and writing those “rich jerk”
info product spoofs.
But you don’t need me to tell you that…Right?
Anyway, I thought this rather funny and responded with a post restating my reasoning and telling him that he should be more careful about bragging about education. He then made this guess about my own background.
In the best case scenario, you attended either a state university or
second tier specialty school (and no, there’s no way it was on par with
a UNC or a UVA)You received a degree in a major that covers very general topics —
something like Business Administration, Management, or Communications
(although I hope not, because you do a poor job of constructing an
argument)You may have received a decent GPA,
but if the above bullet points are true, this really isn’t that
impressive given the difficulty of both your school and your major.
After this, I found myself suddenly unable to post on his site. I formulated a more... formal (wordy) version of my reasoning, but it wouldn't go through even when I changed my email address. Eventually, I had Paul post it for me. Apparently the guy just blocked my IP address. If you can't beat 'em, block 'em??
Anyway, I think the show is interesting, so I'll share what he thought and what I think.
He states clearly that he believes that the goal of the game is to "beat the mean". The mean, of course, it calculated by taking the average of all the values not yet revealed. He says that if any offer is extended that beats the current mean, then you'd "be an idiot not to take it."
My thinking is this: what really matters is what will happen as a result of your choice to settle or not. Your offer is based on the mean, right? Then if the mean is likely to go up, then your offer is likely to go up. Your calculation then, should not be whether the offer is above or below the mean, but whether the next offer will be higher or lower. The premise of my thinking, of course, is not to beat the mean but to maximize how much you take home. Why settle for any offer if you expect the next offer to be higher? You don't have to think about what might be in your case until the end of the game.
So let's look at an application to see how these two theories work. Let's say there are 5 values left: $10, $200, $20,000, $100,000, and $500,000. The mean is about $124,000. By the other guy's logic, an offer of $130,000 should be accepted, because it is above the mean. By my logic, you should reject this deal, because you have an 80% chance of your offer going up next time (because the mean will increase).
You can decide for yourself. Accept the deal or reject it? Oh, and I apologize if you've never seen the show and none of this makes any sense. What do you guys think? Anyway... HE TRIED TO BLOCK ME FROM HIS SITE! It's really ridiculous. How insecure do you have to be to block someone because you can't refute their arguments?
