By now you've probably seen the video from Friday on the Fox Business Channel mistakenly reporting that Apple had taken a minority stake in chipmaker AMD and then 'correcting' the report by stating that in fact it was the country of Abu Dubai that had made the investment. Pretty funny.
Funny as it is, you can't really blame the analysts for giving their commentary about the deal. I have to say that if I were sitting there on live TV and were asked to give my take on some just-broken news about Apple buying a stake in AMD, I can't honestly say that my first reaction would've been to say that the story is incorrect. But on the other hand, I don't think I would've immediately started talking about how brilliant the move was without first using some words like 'odd', 'confusing', 'perplexing', 'bizarre', etc.
The thing is, as far as I'm concerned, the analysts who come on the shows can't use words like that. They're not there to be confused or troubled. They're there to understand what's going on and give a quick thumbs up/thumbs down. Any fool can hum and haw. But if they're so willing to rattle off something on a subject that they can't honestly have anything insightful to add, how often is this replicated when they're actually commenting on real news. Stupid question. It happens a lot.
Actually, if I had a show on CNBC or FBC, it might be fun to occasionally break some fake news live on the air, just to keep our analysts on their toes. ME: "We're getting word that Microsoft has purchased a minority stake in cardboard box manufacturer Smurfit-Stone... your take guys?" Them: "Brilliant move; Microsoft will save a lot of money on the boxes for their software, at a time when raw materials are becoming increasingly expensive for the company." ME: "Just kidding guys." And then the gong would come out and the analyst would enter a six-month purgatory from the Weisenthal Hour. It'd be great theater.
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This story actually reminds me of an experiment I've always wanted to run. It would be a twist on the classic IQ test question of giving a set of numbers and asking the answerer to fill in the next one. Ex: 1,4,9,16,25, _. Obviously the next number is 36.
Except in my version, the numbers would have been generated from a random number generator. Ex: 53, 36, 83, 76, 48, _ (generated from Random.org). Now you couldn't just run this experiment with your typical man on the street, because they'd dart past you as soon as they saw it had something to do with numbers. But if you went to, say, the math department at MIT, folks might like to give the problem a shot. Of course, they don't know the numbers are generated at random, so they'll rack their brains looking for the pattern, which is exactly what brains are meant to do. I'd be curious about two things. For one, would any percentage of the population just give up and say it's impossible? I'm guessing this would be small, especially if we told them to "give their best guess".
The more interesting part though, would be to see, if the answers given converge anywhere. Like if a lot of people put 91 for the answer above, that would be pretty interesting. As a bonus, you could try this test on the crazies at the casino that keep track of roulette outcomes, as if it could improve their betting. Would be interesting if their answers converged as well.
And if anyone is thinking of trying this for, say, their undergrad honors thesis, please let me know. One suggestion I have would be to start the tests with some obvious ones, like 2,4,8,16,32_ or 1,2,3,5,8,13,21_ just so the participant gets into a rhythm of thinking they're real and also to establish a trend of each question getting harder.
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Also, just wanted to add to the Fox Business thing. It wasn't until the guy on the left stated, "oh the Arabs!" that I actually gleeked my coffee onto the screen.
Glad you gave a little shout-out to the Fibonacci sequence.
Posted by: David | November 19, 2007 at 02:30 PM
Glad you gave a little shout-out to the Fibonacci sequence.
Posted by: David | November 19, 2007 at 02:31 PM