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Comment by jihadjihad | Hacker News Reader

> I loved using it while watching Season 50, and it identified several interesting threads early on.

The ideas in TFA are interesting, but it’s important to keep in mind that when we watch Survivor, we’re not watching something that happened in real time and then was simply compiled together. Survivor is edited after the fact, once the winners and all the arcs of contestants are known.

And don’t get me wrong! I love watching the show even knowing that in my mind. But a model built on the edited material is necessarily biased due to the format of the show itself.

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The first and third most correlated stats are completely out of the player’s control. The confessional stat is reasonable if you’re trying to guess the winner, but as a player, there’s no obvious way to control it.

Interesting to see Russel as the biggest upset. He is probably my favorite and completely changed some aspects of the game (idol hunting without a clue or game information about an idol even being present). He burned everyone, but his strategic game was flawless while his methods were still novel. Once they were known, however, his game collapsed.

Russell is famous for playing a different game than survivor, and then getting mad that he wasn't rewarded for it. His game didn't really collapse, because he was never going to win.

The stats say otherwise. Of the stats that are most correlated, with winners he was the biggest upset.

He was a rich asshole who personally wronged everyone on the jury in his first season, and carried by luck/ignorance/Parvati Shallow in his second season. Which stats capture that?

It’s been a very long time since I watched Survivor, but in the early seasons at least it was obvious that the producers were also manipulating the game as it went along to increase the drama.

Tribe shakeups, double/no immunity, second chances… usually just when a particular alliance seemed set on a strategy that was going to make the next few tribal councils predictable.

>Survivor is edited after the fact, once the winners and all the arcs of contestants are known.

That might make it easier for the model to pick up on clues from the editing process. Like winners get more on-screen confessionals or something like that.

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