Tonight's TV: Derren Brown The Events
Saw a thing on Boing Boing about Derren Brown's new TV show. I missed it on Wednesday, but apparently he did a thing where he "predicted" all 6 of the numbers in the national lottery. There was a show on Channel 4 tonight purporting to explain how he did it. Boing Boing had an interesting video from someone with an idea of how it could be done and I thought I'd tune in to see if the guy who made the video was right or not, seemed plausible and quite clever.
Big mistake, the show was the biggest waste of an hour of my life ever. It was just lots of crap full of bad maths explained under the mumbo jumbo "Deep Maths" label with a touch more crap about people being able as a group to guess lottery numbers by clearing their mind and writing on bits of paper.
His claim of how he did it was to get 24 people in a room, have them write numbers from their subconscience on a bit of paper and then he created an average of each number and then used them as his results. The whole thing sounds like a load of bollocks and even ignoring my scepticism about the logical improbability of people being able to write lottery numbers via their subconscience; one of his numbers was 2, to get the average for that number to be 2, so many of the members of the group would have to have written a very low numbers.
To me this is just implausible. It didn't help that for the final version, he collected the papers and totalled the numbers and then put them in a sealed tube and no-one saw it until he revealed it live at the end of the lottery show, so there isn't even a semblance of proof that the numbers the group chose averaged out to the numbers he revealed.
To me, this totally ruined the show, half way through I thought it could go one of two ways and either way would be massively disappointing. Way number 1 (which was the case) is that he tries to pass it off with some sort of pseudo-scientific explanation. Way number 2 would have been to fool the audience for 50 minutes and then reveal a camera trick at the end (which would have made any further episodes pretty much unwatchable if he was going to stick to that formula).
I was under the impression that Derren Brown was the kind of guy who spoke out against so called psychics etc. but from this episode of his show, it seems like if he can make money from bombarding people with nonsense then he'll be happy. My only guess is that he might reveal everything at the end of the series, but I doubt I'll tune in to watch that.
Big mistake, the show was the biggest waste of an hour of my life ever. It was just lots of crap full of bad maths explained under the mumbo jumbo "Deep Maths" label with a touch more crap about people being able as a group to guess lottery numbers by clearing their mind and writing on bits of paper.
His claim of how he did it was to get 24 people in a room, have them write numbers from their subconscience on a bit of paper and then he created an average of each number and then used them as his results. The whole thing sounds like a load of bollocks and even ignoring my scepticism about the logical improbability of people being able to write lottery numbers via their subconscience; one of his numbers was 2, to get the average for that number to be 2, so many of the members of the group would have to have written a very low numbers.
To me this is just implausible. It didn't help that for the final version, he collected the papers and totalled the numbers and then put them in a sealed tube and no-one saw it until he revealed it live at the end of the lottery show, so there isn't even a semblance of proof that the numbers the group chose averaged out to the numbers he revealed.
To me, this totally ruined the show, half way through I thought it could go one of two ways and either way would be massively disappointing. Way number 1 (which was the case) is that he tries to pass it off with some sort of pseudo-scientific explanation. Way number 2 would have been to fool the audience for 50 minutes and then reveal a camera trick at the end (which would have made any further episodes pretty much unwatchable if he was going to stick to that formula).
I was under the impression that Derren Brown was the kind of guy who spoke out against so called psychics etc. but from this episode of his show, it seems like if he can make money from bombarding people with nonsense then he'll be happy. My only guess is that he might reveal everything at the end of the series, but I doubt I'll tune in to watch that.
Labels: bollocks, derren brown, tv, waste of time
posted by Unknown at 12:26 AM
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