I used to love "Deal or No Deal". Gatecrashing the
Deal or No Deal Party was one of the highlights of my life. But like all love, this love has passed from exhilaration, through ennui to a kind of loathing, tinged with happy memories of what it once was to me. I can't help revisiting it, but it's not the same and in fact it has started to offend me a bit. Hard, you may imagine, for a game involving just opening some boxes to rouse such anger, but it's turned from a ridiculous and fun parlour game, in which people could win loads of money, to this strange quasi-religious cult which turns its back on probability and mathematical fact and celebrates destiny and fate and reinforces superstition.
The game could be used to teach the populace something interesting about probability and statistics (stuff which might prove useful to them in making real life decisions), but instead it's about the idea that some numbers are more magical or more unfortunate than others and spotting false patterns such as the fact that the newest player "always" has a high number or box 22 is the box of death. I think the overriding thing that annoys me about it is the way that it has become a competition with the banker and that Noel Edmonds encourages people to think they have won or lost because they settled for an amount more or less than what was in their box. This is stupid. Everyone is a winner as they come to the studio and invest nothing but their time and are guaranteed to make some money. It's not even proper gambling as they lose nothing other than something they might already have won. Yet if someone is faced with one high value box and seven low value boxes and chooses to deal, they have not made a bad decision if it turns out that the big money was in their box. They have made a sensible choice, based on probability and seven times out of eight would walk away with more than was in their box. They have won. To chastise people for understanding mathematics, or to congratulate them for going ahead with such a foolhardy risk is sending out the wrong message. You can choose to gamble - if I was on there I might just hope that one of the big amounts was in my box and play to the end, given that I'd have a five in twenty-two shot at making tens of thousands of pounds for no outlay from myself. But if you get down to £100,000 and 1p and settle for £20,000 that doesn't make you a loser if you turn out to have the larger amount in front of you. You'd have to be a maniac to take the risk. As a gambler it's an amazing bet as you get five times your money for a fifty fifty bet. But as a regular person if you are given the choice of £20,000 which you can definitely take away with you right now in return for doing essentially nothing, then taking that risk wouldn't make you a winner, even if you won.
But it's all the talk of people believing that their dead mother is watching over them and wouldn't let them have a box with a small amount in it (if our dead ancestors have these powers why aren't they using them daily to make our lives luxurious and safe?) or that they have a feeling about a certain number or box. It's just random chance. The contents of the box do not change just because they have not yet been observed. And it's a shame this programme propogates this shit. Rather than Noel Edmonds telling them they have made a terrible decision by dealing too early because the unlikely circumstance of the three lowest boxes all having been chosen in a row has happened, wouldn't it be better if we had a rational person explaining why they'd been sensible or foolhardy, or lucky or unlucky. There should be no talk of any sequence of boxes being unbelievable or impossible. Or it being weird if someone has the same box in front of them as they had yesterday (I am not as good at statistics and probability as I once was, but I believe out of 22 people it's pretty likely that someone will get the same box - if everyone did that would be weird, though of course not impossible). Even if you want to have Noel Edmonds pontificating like a twat over the random events and using hindsight as a weapon to bludgeon his contestants, then couldn't there at least be on screen statistics demonstrating the chances of success and failure and assessing the fairness of the banker's offer. And maybe Vicky Coren doing a hushed voice over explaining why someone has just been an almighty prick for taking a chance that is unlikely to pay off. Unless some ghosts are really in there rushing around moving the amounts around so they coincide with their birth dates.
The contestants are being given an amazing chance to win some free money and be on TV. They should be made to understand this and not feel that they are being victimised by fate if they have a sick child who they need money for, yet they still wipe out the top three amounts in one round.
DOND could be an amazing force for rationality and mathematics and still be a fun game, yet it's turning into this pillar holding up superstition and all sorts of bullshit. It worries me that in a world where we have so much actual factual knowledge that we seem to pander to ignorance. And though DOND might not bring down civilisation, it is representative of the worship of foolishness. And I don't like it any more.
And while I'm on a roll, what the fuck is going on in America that people have to queue up for three hours to vote? It's supposed to be a superpower, a shining beacon of democracy and yet unless you're able to give up half your day you can't actually have any say in who gets in. If this was happening in the Third World people would be asking all kinds of questions, yet this is America. I just have to pop down the road to vote in my local primary school and I've never had to queue at all. Surely they can do better than that.
And tomorrow we'll know if Muslim socialism or oven chips are going to win the day. I hope the Americans thought hard about it as they queued up in the rain.
Oven chips. For the love of reason, please God, oven chips.
Though of course, bloody Obama Bin Laden's dead grandma will be able to come back as a ghost and change all the votes for her Muslamic grandson now. You see if I'm wrong. You'll regret it when you have to go back to that deep fat fryer. Don't say I didn't warn you.
