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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

You right that the two lifelines are used at differing stages in the game. I wonder though, what the accuracy rates look like after controlling for what stage of the game you are in. Maybe people SHOULD save their ask the audience for later in the game.

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Another variable is the subject matter of the question. Anecdotally, it feels that the audience almost invariably nails the answer by a wide margin on pop culture questions. On questions of a scientific or technical nature, the audience opinion is much less clear and more often actually wrong. Phone those questions to a domain knowledge expert.

About the worst thing you can do, but contestants love doing this, is to burn the valuable audience lifeline early on a question when you already have a good sense of the answer but just want to "make sure". What a waste! Save that for a question when you have no clue, which WILL happen before you reach the million level.

Something else they often do is say something like "I'm thinking it's B, but I'm not sure so I'll ask the audience". Well guess what the audience guesses after hearing that?

My intuition is that the accuracy would drop a fair bit in later stages and anecdotes support this too.

My intuition is that for ask the audience to be useful the number of people who know the answer has to be well above the noise or you don't get any wisdom from the crowd.

So that means that enough people have to know the right answer AND the wrong answers should be distributed as evenly as possible.

People don't often answer multiple choice trivia questions wrong in an evenly distributed way so this makes sense to me.

It would be cool to see some actual data on this though, I thought I remembered seeing something back when the show was huge but it's a vague memory.

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