How many times in your life has someone asked you to pick a number between 1 and 10?

There are a lot of situations, like picking teams, in which two people have to decide who gets to go first. More often than not, they have an independent party select a number between 1 and 10 and then they, themselves, attempt to guess that number.

Now, a group of people exist, let’s call them idiots, who get the first pick and choose a number really close to 1 or close to 10.

Stupidity.

Then the second person only has to choose the number one higher or lower and the non-idiot has the odds on their side.

Sure, the idiots might hit a random low or high number once in awhile, but is it enough to throw the laws of probability out the window? I guess so.

For you idiots reading this, here’s an example. Idiot chooses 2, Smart chooses 3. Idiot has a 20% chance of being correct. Smart has an 80% chance.

Don’t be an idiot.

The next time you are required to choose between 1 and 10 for something, pick 5 or 6. It forces the other person to go with the high or the low and keeps the odds of winning closer to your favor than otherwise.

---

More Reviews

---

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.