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Card Sharks
1978 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 3 seasons
Created by Bill Todman, Mark Goodson
Card Sharks is an American television game show created by Chester Feldman for Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions. Two contestants compete for control of a row of oversized playing cards by answering questions posed by the host and then guessing if the next card is higher or lower in value than the previous one. The concept has been made into a series four separate times since its debut in 1978, and also appeared as part of CBS's Gameshow Marathon. The primary announcer for the first three series was Gene Wood.
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> if you've ever seen the TV show Card Sharks...
I developed and taught an entire undergraduate math class on the mathematics of game shows.
https://people.math.sc.edu/thornef/schc212/gameshows-428.pdf
Much of the class I worked out probabilities like these, and compared what contestants "should" do to what they actually do.
Watching reruns of Card Sharks, The Price Is Right, and others, I've found that most people have a surprisingly good intuitive sense of probability. Not always, but more often than not.
> many people, apparently, believe that things which have a 20% chance of happening will never happen and those with an 80% chance will always happen
It could be the counter-intuitive nature of probability, but I wonder if it might sometimes just be that, psychologically, people have trouble accepting the idea that nobody really knows.
You look at a site like FiveThirtyEight, you know the site is run by an expert, and you know that multiple sources of data have been fed into number-crunching computers. You've seen other situations where this type of process nails it. You have a strong desire to know the answer, and that biases you toward believing that you do. The idea that something so important is unknown is unpleasant, so you reject it.
About the difficult of grasping the basic concept, if you've ever seen the TV show Card Sharks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_Sharks), a key part of the game is that contestants see a card which is face up, and they have to make bets based on whether the next card drawn is higher or lower. In that context, they have no trouble understanding that if the face-up card is a 5, the next card is probably higher (6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K, A) but it could also be lower (2, 3, 4).
Essentially, I think people can understand that unlikely things happen, but where they have difficulty is seeing/admitting that this is one of those situations.