Hacker Cinema
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
1999 · TV series · 60 min episodes · 10 seasons
Created by Steven Knight
American version of the tense gameshow where contestants tackle a series of multiple-choice questions to win large cash prizes.
1 negative3 neutralfrom 4 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
4 comments on Hacker News
> Freelance Programmer and Writer
"I never thought the machines would come for MY job!"
> Human skills, inquisitiveness and thirst for knowledge and craft will eventually die off if all creative tasks are taken over by the machines. Consider the already degraded thirst for GK or General Knowledge ever since google search became a thing. There was a time once when kids used to watch the KBC Show (Indian adaptation of Who wants to be a Millionaire) with tremendous awe and enthusiasm, but no longer today. Today, a simple google search will tell them the correct answer for the quiz question, why bother with discussing the actual answer, the lore and the facts behind it, etc!
What a classic "kids today" take. Paraphrasing: kids used to be so starved for access to knowledge they had to watch a commercial TV show for little nuggets of trivia sprinkled between commercials, but today they have the entire world's knowledge at their fingertips in an instant so they don't bother with the trivia show. What a disaster!
I think I get the point he's trying to make -- maybe one similar to the "no one debates trivia questions in person anymore, they just look up the answer on their phone" -- but I don't really think that's a very compelling condemnation of AI or technology in general. Increased access to knowledge is good, actually. Not that we haven't lost anything culturally, but the benefits are too great to justify sacrificing for nostalgia.
That's pretty much why I never followed Jon Stewart outside of The Daily Show. It's not that I think he's a bad guy, but his general demeanor both on and off script tells me he's not someone I'd want to be around IRL. I first started to realize this when he was on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire (holy crap, I'm realizing that was probably over 20 years ago) and his attitude was offputting. It seemed as if he found Regis to be annoying and believed that everyone else believes Regis is annoying too, except most people don't. And in other instances, he seems very self-righteous.
The one good thing I'll say about Stewart is I think he's genuine, even if I don't like that side of him. For that reason, I respect him more than Stephen Colbert whom I think is always "on" and is more of a people pleaser, even though I think he's (somewhat) funnier than Stewart and is more likeable.
EDIT: Wow, he was more insufferable on Millionaire than I remembered. I just found the episode on YouTube and he starts being a dickbag in the first few minutes. Apparently people still think he was funny here, but to me this is one of the least funny Jon Stewart moments I've ever seen. My personal taste, I guess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD0vcmhmaCY
>No one is claiming (so far as I know) that Who Wants to be a Millionaire? scoured all episodes looking for suspicious patterns
Because it's normally not worth it. This selected a show with a big win where it was worth analyzing it.
Big winners will always either know a lot, or be lucky (and bold) with their guesses. So this is already a pattern that was selected for.
Now given this backwards reasoning every time the guest said something else but changed his mind will look like cheating. But you already selected only the cases where they did get lucky, so that shouldn't factor in to your thinking, but it obviously does because humans are bad at separating this rationally.
No matter the percentages, absent any proof of collusion I don't think this conviction holds up, since nervous cough when seeing the right answer is enough of an explanation to make this plausible without any connection between the two.
I think that is still an uncharitable interpretation of events. No one is claiming (so far as I know) that Who Wants to be a Millionaire? scoured all episodes looking for suspicious patterns. This is one episode where cheating was already suspected (though I would like to know on what grounds they suspected it).