Stephen Law

Not withstanding Mike's suggestion that I drop this topic as its not up to usual standard, I'm going to stick with it for a bit. Jeremy says: ...the R&J show was basically scamming a significant proportion of the population into believing that they had a chance of winning... when they had NO chance at all at the time they decided to commit their money. It is in the withholding of this information that I think the unfairness lies. I'm not sure that's it, as, in my example where stage 1 of whittling down is that half the time entries are received they go straight in the bin, a significant proportion of the population have no chance of winning at the time they decide to commit their money (because their entry is immediately binned). Yet there is no unfairness in withholding this info from them. I didn't make my point about determinism clear, as some of you think it irrelevant. Well, may be it is irrelevant, but let me try again (as the point I was trying to illustr...

The puzzle in a nutshell, is this. On the one hand, most of us feel intuitively that the competition was unfair. Trouble is, now I have started to think more carefully about it, I cannot identify precisely why it was unfair. I am wondering if it was unfair.

Re my previous post, Jeremy says the unfairness in the Channel 4 phone-in is: "the company was withholding information such that the population thought they could win, when in fact they could not.In this way, they encouraged the population to become contestants and to spend money which they otherwise would not have done." This may be on the right lines. But consider this imaginary case: A winner is to be picked at random from one million callers. The whittling down is in two stages. Stage one is: half the time the phones are being answered, those entries go straight in the bin. The remaining entries are then entered into a lottery from which the winner is picked. Is this competition unfair? If the punters know how it generally works, certainly not. But actually, is it unfair even if the punters don't know how it works? What does it matter how the whittling down is done, as long as it's not done in a way deliberately designed to favour certain previously identifiable c...

"[T]he company behind a quiz on the Richard & Judy show was fined for urging callers to enter after winners had been picked." Regarding the upset over those who entered a Channel 4 phone-in competition (and were charged for doing so) when the winner had already been picked, I have to say, I don't really get it. You enter the competition with an epistemic probability of winning of, say, one in a million. You all know one million entered, and there will be only one winner. None of you have any idea who it will be. Of course, your objective chance of winning (the physical probability, if you like) depends on how we set the parameters. For example, given the laws of nature and antecedent physical conditions, it may be that the winner was determined months or even years beforehand. Given these laws and initial conditions, your chances of winning are zero and those of Bert (the eventual winner) are 100%. Does the fact that the physical probability of Bert winning is 100% m...