This is one of the reasons it's interesting to be married to a former high-level athlete. We've had this very argument about various situations over and over again.
In games where the player about to be eliminated gets to challenge another player in a mini-game and the loser of that mini-game is actually eliminated, she feels like the only fair move is to challenge the player with the lowest score because "they're performing the worst anyway".
I get the intuitive appeal of that line of reasoning, but that's... not how chance works! Why would you penalise the unlucky one further? The fairest thing would be to pick someone at random.
(Similarly, I tried suggesting replacing penalty shoot-outs in soccer after a draw with a dice throw because that's what they pretty consistently end up being. She didn't even know how to respond to that.)
She could answer: penalty shoot-outs are a relatively recent addition to soccer. Before them... They'd throw a dice. So I guess they always knew that shoot-outs are just a (more exciting?) replacement for a dice roll :)
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This is one of the reasons it's interesting to be married to a former high-level athlete. We've had this very argument about various situations over and over again.
In games where the player about to be eliminated gets to challenge another player in a mini-game and the loser of that mini-game is actually eliminated, she feels like the only fair move is to challenge the player with the lowest score because "they're performing the worst anyway".
I get the intuitive appeal of that line of reasoning, but that's... not how chance works! Why would you penalise the unlucky one further? The fairest thing would be to pick someone at random.
(Similarly, I tried suggesting replacing penalty shoot-outs in soccer after a draw with a dice throw because that's what they pretty consistently end up being. She didn't even know how to respond to that.)
She could answer: penalty shoot-outs are a relatively recent addition to soccer. Before them... They'd throw a dice. So I guess they always knew that shoot-outs are just a (more exciting?) replacement for a dice roll :)