Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire? | Hacker News Reader

Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire?

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There is a documentary about the incident called "Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal" on Youtube:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEBCve-3Cw

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNMCXWCZzQ

as well as the original episode itself:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h07eO0SKtUI (better quality, split into parts)

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkM10SxmmwU (lower quality, whole episode)

I think it's important to recognize that he still assumed some risk with each spin. That risk was reduced from 1/6 to some much smaller number, but the risk was not zero. His concentration or timing could fail on any given spin, as evidenced by his final spin where he mistimed it but got lucky.

My point is that I don't think you can say he was cheating. He played within the rules of the game and couldn't just drain cash out of the system forever.

Totally. He found a way to turn it from a game of luck into a game of skill. Rather like counting cards at Blackjack (although with more of the luck removed, and with a much better expected return!)

Yes, and if you are caught card counting at Blackjack, big burly men will come and eject you from the casino.

Just because you didn't technically break the rules doesn't mean the house thinks you played fair. Hint: for them "fair" = "house wins". (For a gameshow, winning entails making much more in advertising money than they have to pay out in prizes and spend to produce the show.)

Indeed, that's part of why I figured it was a good analogy.

i just watched the show and he hit spaces other than 4 and 8 a few times. was he just lucky those few times or did i miss something? here's one example when he hit space 6 and 'pick a corner': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0phlwtxwFU&feature=youtu.be...

In case you're wondering, there are 8 digits on the one dollar bill serial number, so assuming a random draw by the DJ, the odds of one of the 100,000 dollars matching the draw every day would be very close to 1 in a thousand. After a year, you'd only have a 30.58% chance of winning at least once. The expected value of combing through the dollars to find a match would be about $30 every day. I wonder if he sorted them into a binary tree.

Of course, the DJ might well have been reading a number off a bill from his own wallet each day, ensuring there'd be no payouts...

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. What kind of radio station has a $30,000 promo budget for a one off contest, especially in 1980s dollars. That's around $60,000 today.

I imagine no one ever won that money.

I was thinking that too. Especially if word ever reached the radio station that some guy just had just withdrawn 100,000 dollar bills from his bank...

He was too focused on finding loopholes in rules of the world he lived in and did not realise there are robbers who didn't adhere to rules at all, robbers who made their own hole in his house.

I feel like this is a guy who is in that danger zone of intelligence where he can recognize an opportunity before others but doesn't have enough lightbulbs on to power through it properly.

He could have really used some CS/math coursework

I think this is where a lot of small-time criminals lie in the spectrum of intellectual capacity I'd say. Add in some arrogance / conceit and you have a recipe for distrust / hatred of authority including those that might actually be smarter than you. He fell victim to a number of pyramid / Ponzi schemes after all.

I think it's more a combination of being creative with above avergage intelligence and determination coupled with low risk assessment (poor judgement).

I think it obvious that he did not sort the bills. The article say that he and his wife spend all their time going through stacks of bills, stopping only to eat and bathe (and they couldn't even check all the money in time). If they sorted the money it would have taken him looking at under 20 bills to determin if he had the matching bill or not.

So they lost because that was what happens when a hacker doesn't take the time to learn about algorithms and data structures, eh?

I think you could probably, after some practice, radix-sort bills into a 10×10 array by a digit pair at about 4Hz by hand, maybe 1Hz at the outset. 100k / 4Hz would be about 7 hours, so your initial sort pass (with piles averaging 1000 bills) would take 7 to 28 hours. A second sort pass over the next most significant digits would take another 7 hours, and then the bills would be sorted into groups of about 10. At that point you'd want to put the money into, say, a thousand or ten thousand envelopes, organized into drawers or folders or something, so that when the DJ calls the number, you open the right drawer, pick out the right envelope, and scan through the five, ten, or twenty bills in there to find the right one, if you have it.

You could do the passes lazily, too. Spend the 7 (or 28) hours to do the first sorting pass into piles of 1000. Then, when the DJ reads out the number, pick out the right pile of 1000 and spend 4 minutes sorting it into 100 piles of 10 or so, which you then stuff into 100 envelopes, possibly calling the DJ at the time. If the DJ calls another number with the same leading two digits, you're prepared; if not, hey, it's 4 minutes.

So you're right.

Sad. He legit hacked the Press Your Luck show by figuring out hidden patterns that he could use to do the apparently impossible. Too bad he didn't have the knowledge to hack the DJ's contest.

Sadder still that he let the money come ahead of his girlfriend.

I certainly agree with you that sorting makes sense, and that sounds like a logical algorithm. I think 4Hz, or even 1Hz, is wildly optimistic though. 100,000 bills is bags and bags of cash. You're going to be spending a lot of time dealing with the envelopes and folders and things. You're certainly not going to be able to make 10 piles of 10,000 bills each in front of you. As soon as you get more than a few bills in a pile you'll need to spend time straightening them, putting them in envelopes or whatever, pulling more bills out of the bags, etc. Not to mention resting your hands and eyes. You could make it easier with cash trays or something to keep them from flying all over the place as you sort, but even so, there's no way you're going to be firing out more than one a second continuously for hours.

I wasn't suggesting making 10 piles; I was suggesting making 100 piles. (With cash trays with cubbyholes you could reasonably do 1000.)

You can take, say, 300 bills in your off hand, use your thumb to flip each new one, and use your good hand to take it from the handful and place it into one of the 100 piles within arm's reach on the table, according to the digits you saw on it while your hand was returning from placing the last one. If you're doing this in 800ms, then when your hand is empty, you have spent 240 seconds and can easily spend 10 seconds picking up and riffling another 300 bills, bringing you to 270. After two hours of this, you have sorted 8000 bills into 100 piles of 80 or so bills; you should now take a ten-minute break. After another two hours, you should spend five minutes putting those 100 piles into envelopes so they don't fall over, and take another ten-minute break. (Or a half-hour break for lunch, which I wasn't counting as part of the workday.)

That's what 1Hz looks like, and I think you can get to that speed pretty much right off the bat, especially since accuracy is not crucial here (unlike in almost all cash-handling operations!). And yeah, 4Hz sounds "wildly optimistic", but it isn't, really. That kind of speed improvement for manual movements with experience is common for assembly-line tasks. Watch the knife movements of a sous-chef on video, and consider that every one of their movements is irrevocable; they don't get a chance to spend time straightening crooked cuts.

That's still a lot of bill sorting though. Not sure if you can demand sequential bills from the bank, but getting your bills pre-sorted might have been the best option, then it's just a matter of looking at the first and last bills.. Could have even just left it at the bank knowing the digit range and avoided the whole theft problem.

Oh sure, and take all the fun out of the problem by invoking an oracle....

hey lateral solutions are the most fun.

some other obvious ideas:

- only the serial numbers matter not the physical bills, write them down on a ledger with an index

- bill reading machine with simple ocr, scans all serial numbers into a db

- solve the opposite problem: given the dj's serial number, is it possible to track down that particular bill? Arbitrage the opportunity by running the same contest in other states for a lower sum

I guess a binary tree is not necessary. Just separate them in bricks by the first few digits, and sort them inside too. Then, just put all the bricks that start with 1 in the kitchen, the bricks that start with 2 in the bedroom, ... People is fast scaning a few items and select the right brick from the vault.

(Disclaimer: I didn't try this at home.)

Can you imagine actually trying to sort 100,000 bills by serial number? Even if you can sort a bill every 10 seconds continuously, which you obviously can't, it would be about 7 weeks of full time work. Radio stations tend to run contests for what, a few months? So your expected return is perhaps a few thousand dollars. I can't imagine many worse jobs.

See my comment above for a better complexity analysis of this task.

some sort of hashtable/BST hybrid - where each entry in the table points to a BST, and the hash function just returns the first base-10 digit off of the bill.

Presumably the 10^8 space doesn't get exhausted, though. They don't run bills until they've literally printed 83,200,000,000 of them.

So the operative question is how many bills were ever in circulation, not how big the theoretical space of the serial numbers are.

Well the dj would presumably be searching within the theoretical space, since he wouldn't have access to the list of actual serial numbers printed.

Oh, maybe I didn't read it well enough. I thought he was pulling a bill out of his own pocket and then checking to see if anyone had a matching serial number.

Does anyone know if the serial numbers are printed in order? I didn't see the answer in a very cursory web search. If they are, presumably it would be trivial for such a contest to avoid ever paying out -- just choose from the upper end of the SN range.

Perhaps I don't understand your thought process, but how could anyone have a matching bill that way? If the DJ was reading off a serial number, the only person to have a match would be the DJ himself, since they are unique.

Afaik, the only time serial numbers get reused is when a bill is reissued because it is damaged or worn, in which case they would shred the old bill (also, the new bill would get a neat star next to its serial number).

To begin, there are 32 bills on a sheet. In addition, they can re-run the process, but increment the letter portion of the serial each time.

Depending on which parts of the serial number the DJ read off (just number, or number and letter), there could be up to 832 bills for a single serial number: http://onedollarbill.org/decoding.html

> Does anyone know if the serial numbers are printed in order?

That's generally what the "serial" part of "serial number" means. And why the smarter bank robbers ask for non-sequential bills, because new bills generally have consecutive serials which are simpler to trace

The government prints about 2-5 trillion dollar bills each year. I'm pretty sure the entire range of serial numbers has been exhausted for $1: http://www.moneyfactory.gov/uscurrency/annualproductionfigur...

http://onedollarbill.org/decoding.html

Billion, not Trillion!

1 Trillion is 150 singles for every human alive

Oops - I was off by an order of magnitude. Regardless - the treasury prints about 5% of the total serial numbers each year and according to the links I provided they already cycle through serial numbers.

To be pedantic: you were off by three orders of magnitude. An order of magnitude is a 10x multiplicative factor.

Your expected value calculation is also missing an important factor. He had a ~30% chance of being +$30k after a year, sure, and he probably did that math. But he also had a non-zero chance of being -$100k through robbery. He was spinning the wheel each day the cash was in the house, with less control over the odds than he had on the game show, and in the end he whammied after all.

Yeah, the problem is you have to sort your 100,000 dollar bills. If you had 100 boxes with 1,000 bills each -- maybe sorted into 10 smaller stacks of 1000 bills each -- then you'd only have to spend a few minutes each day checking whether you'd won.

But how long would it take to sort out those 100,000 dollar bills in the first place?

I wouldn't be surprised if this guy had a tough time dealing with people and couldn't stand working for anyone or managing employees. I think if he was born 20 years later he would have gambled all his money away on day trading schemes.

There are a lot of losers out there -- isolated, paranoid and looking for their loophole in the system. They'd be just fine if they'd realize that getting some social skills and learning to work well with others would fix most of their problems with the world.

If the definition of "loser" is being isolated, paranoid, and looking for a loophole in the system, then nearly every philosopher qualifies.

The word loser is a shitty judgmental word, almost always used perjoratively, and never descriptively.

He didn't want to live an ok life and fix his problems.

This is a man who wanted to find a way to the very top.

His failing thought was that he thought he could get to the top by himself by executing some tricky scheme, as if he were some sort of comic book character. It did work for him, for a bit. However, most people who don't win the lottery get to the top with the help and cooperation of a lot of other people. He didn't seem like the kind of guy who was trusting enough to develop relationships such that he could advance in life.

Some think the game that we're all invited to play (i.e. the one you're advocating) is rigged. Indeed, they would say that the real "losers" are the ones who think they can beat it by working harder.

Really?

I think that if he was born 20 years later, he would have been a web developer. He has a knack for pattern-matching, kind of a programmer-brain feature, don't you think?

It's amazing how many people in the world are looking for "easy" money that is actually much harder to obtain than legitimate money. For example, the odds of winning more than $1 million in any lottery in the US are nearly always less than 1 in 10 million. By contrast, the odds of a US adult becoming a newly minted millionaire in a given year are about 1 in 420 [1]. While the idea of living by your wits alone seems to appeal to many people, the reality is that for most people "easy" money comes from work, entrepreneurship (in many cases), and investing wisely.

[1] According to http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/14/news/economy/us-millionaires... more than 600,000 new millionaires were minted in the US in 2013, out of an adult population (age 18+) of roughly 250 million. Thus 1 in 417 US adults became a new millionaire in 2013. The odds are actually much better than this among people actively trying to become millionaires, because most US adults are not engaging in activities that could possibly position them to achieve this.

Aggregate odds are not individual odds. About one in three of my meals are breakfast, but the odds of my next meal being breakfast are incredibly low.

If you want to convince someone that a lottery is a bad bet, you have to convince them that working and investing is a better investment for them: it's irrelevant that it's a better investment for the public as a whole. And the people who market lotteries know that, and choose who they target based on that. You'll see more ads for lotteries on the subway than you will in an in-flight magazine.

I like this breakfast example.

BTW: Pick a random moment from a 24-hour period, and there is a better than 50% chance that my next meal is breakfast.

I firmly believe in breakfast any time of day

> Aggregate odds are not individual odds. About one in three of my meals are breakfast, but the odds of my next meal being breakfast are incredibly low. If you want to convince someone that a lottery is a bad bet, you have to convince them that working and investing is a better investment for them

Odds are odds. And I think that if people understood that they are at least 24,000 times more likely to become a millionaire by starting a business than they are by playing the lottery, they would start a business instead of playing the lottery.

I think parent's point, though, is that for many people the odds of becoming a millionaire starting a business are effectively zero. Their odds are actually greater with the lottery.

Also, starting a business is a lot of work, whereas buying a lottery ticket costs you maybe $2, so their expected ROI from the lottery is considerably higher.

Of course, that just means neither one is a good investment, but what you're really buying with a lottery ticket is the fun of imagining what you would do if you win, which isn't necessarily a bad deal for the price.

You seems to forget that starting a business requires a capital much higher than buying a lottery ticket.

While the odds are much better, the capital I need to risk/invest is much higher.

and you're infinitely more likely to become a millionaire by writing code than by writing HN comments. Everybody reading this should bugger off and do something useful! :)

I am not going to become a millionaire anytime soon writing code for my employer at my rate while I might have a chance getting some inspiration through all these comments and jotting out some thoughts to push me to finally pull the trigger.

Depends on the code :) .

And the comments.

whoosh =p

Here's another thing to keep in mind: Me losing $5 on a lottery ticket has a lot less impact on me than winning $1,000,000.

So, while the expected return is negative, it's only marginally negative. And if I do manage to win, the outcome is hugely positive.

It's not rational, sure, but it's less irrational than you make out.

Yup, absolutely. With a $5 investment in a lottery ticket, I can get one-in-tiny odds of becoming a millionaire in the next year as a result. With a $5 investment in starting a business, I can get absolutely, unequivocally, zero odds of becoming a millionaire in the next year as a result. If all you have to invest is $5, the lottery ticket is, sadly, a better investment.

But the average lottery player doesn't spend $5/year on lottery tickets.

Those with a income < $10,000 a year and who play the lottery spend an average of $597/year

table 10: http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ngisc/reports/lotfinal.pdf

True. And certainly buying more than one ticket for a given draw makes very little sense. One ticket gives you basically all the enjoyment of knowing you might win, which has value even aside from the fact that you might actually win. Beyond that though, all you're doing is spending money with negative expectation.

I always buy two tickets, because I like doubling my odds. Beyond that I don't see the point. And I don't buy until the jackpot becomes larger than the overall odds, making the expected payout somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:1.

> With a $5 investment in starting a business, I can get absolutely, unequivocally, zero odds of becoming a millionaire in the next year as a result.

That isn't necessarily the case if you're resourceful. Someone can teach themselves to code, register a domain for 99 cents, get a Microsoft BizSpark account and have a free server for 3 years, etc. If you want to write apps you're at $125 ($99 for an Apple Developer account and $25 for a Google Play developer account) but that is still far less than most lottery players spend on the lottery each year.

Time is money, as the saying goes. You've still invested a lot more than $5. (I'm not saying it's a bad investment by any means, but there is an opportunity cost.)

I would venture that a large fraction of lottery players have a day job and a family to provide for. To participate in the lottery on top of that schedule takes them maybe an additional minute or two each day. To write apps and become a millionaire takes well over a minute or two. In order to do that, they'd have to give up their ability to provide for or spend time with their family, at least temporarily.

Not sure why you are downvoted. This is a reasonable rationale for playing the lottery.

The other positive is the entertainment in the anticipation that you may win - watching the numbers roll out.

Disclaimer: I don't play the lottery it is a waste of money.

The outcome of winning is positive in the sense of cashflow, but the actual outcome on you is more likely to be negative:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2012/11/28/why-winnin...

So while not winning in the lottery might seem like a bad outcome, in fact you've avoided an even worse one. Which confoundingly means rational winnings maximization strategies (such as picking less commonly chosen numbers to reduce the odds of sharing a prize) in fact make the expected outcome of lottery playing even worse.

Nothing in that article supports your statement that winning the lottery would be a negative event.

All that can really be said is that winning a lot of money doesn't make people much happier than they already were.

Well, a lot of those new millionaires are simply people moving from a ~$950k worth...

That report does not say how those people became millionaires. You seem to be assuming that those 600,000 millionaires became so due to working, but that figure must include people whose property value increased, inherited money, had legal payouts, or indeed won money through gambling.

Even if we assume most of those did become millionaires through "hard work", you can't say that becoming a millionaire is just down to the odds. If you already have $900,000 then your odds of becoming a millionaire next year are vastly greater than if you have $5.

Indeed. The odds of becoming a millionaire via ANY method are by definition better than the odds of becoming a millionaire by winning the lottery, since the latter is included in the former. The meaningful statistic would be obtianed by breaking down the new millionaires into categories by method of enrichment, and determining the odds of each method.

This. On paper I'm "wealthy," mostly because of how my home has appreciated. That's very, very different than someone who has 1m in the bank as cash or sitting in investments. Selling the house isn't an option, as this is where we live, raise our kids, etc.

Most middle-class retirees are millionaires now, considering inflation and property values, not to mention how much someone with even a modest salary can squirrel away over 40 years in savings and retirement funds. The metric the parent poster used is very misleading. Personally, I don't consider someone a proper millionaire unless that value is separated from the "need to live" stuff like a house or car or retirement fund.

I think getting rich like this is pretty darn rare. I don't belittle the "gambler's approach" or the crazy business idea approach. I've seen others win before with things I considered stupid or super risky. Life is funny that way. The guys who "made it" all remind me of Michael. They just didn't screw up step 2 - go low risk after the first big win.

For most people, easy money comes from being born to rich parents.

The problem is that, while the seconds odds are better, you need skill, time, effort, luck and, in most cases, you will have to spend more money than in a lottery (be either for investments, or studies).

The lottery odds, while a lot smaller, requires you only to invest a couple of bucks each week and to remember to check if you won.

Also there is not a formula that you can follow that will guaranteed you to become a millionaire from work/enterpreneurship and investments, while the formula for lottery winner it's quite easy. Buy a ticket.

And I would love to see the chance to make $1e6 dollars per economic quintile.

I have a gut feeling that those in the bottom 40% income brackets have a much, much lower chance of making $1e6. I'm guessing that it is probably closer to that of winning the lottery.

I would like to see the numbers/proof though, to see if my hypothesis is correct.

As referenced at the end of the article, there's a This American Life podcast from a few years ago about the whole thing: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/412/m...

Really worth the listen.

Among the many interesting things in this story is the reaction of the show producers and how different things were back then. Today's producers would jump ALL OVER this and make him a huge celebrity, driving up ratings and attention for the show. It seems absurd to think of not airing the show at all.

Counterexample: Terry Kniess

Life imitates fiction? Jack London wrote a short story (part of the Smoke Bellew series) about something similar:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Smoke_Bellew/Shorty_Dreams

that was a fun way to waste a few minutes! thanks!

I initially thought "Wait Jon Carpenter won 1M $ on Who Wants To Be Millionaire in 1999" which is way before 2006. I guess what the last paragraph of the article meant to say was "Michael Larson held the record for the most DAYTIME game-show winnings in a single day until". Millionaire was not a Daytime show.

Millionaire is a multi episode (day) process, as well

Reminds me of this article about scratch cards and how some are not random: http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_lottery/

Always interesting to read about people being about to connect the dots in what most people would consider complete randomness / chance / luck.

I don't understand why the producers thought it was such a horrible thing (according to the article) -- surely they are making several magnitudes of the cost per episode, this kind of thing should provide promotional value more than anything else.

They are doing the show to make money not to make ordinary people rich. If people start getting rich, the situation would be exactly like those math nerds winning at Las Vegas Casino's.

According to them this is about fun and entertainment, a little winning here and there is ok. But winning big is a problem here.

> the situation would be exactly like those math nerds winning at Las Vegas Casino's.

The math nerd's winning at Las Vegas casinos probably brings more profit in terms of suckers that read "bringing down the house" and an introductory black-jack counting book then they could cost ever them. The Casino's hard-line against this is some kind of deep-seated and antagonistic mob-mentality more than any actual losses.

Here's show about it/him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNMCXWCZzQ

The full unedited episode is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkM10SxmmwU

He reminds me of Lazlo Hollyfeld, in the movie Real Genius, who won 31.8% of the prizes in a Frito-Lay sweepstakes by submitting 1,650,000 entries. “No purchase necessary, enter as often as you want”.

For a long time that movie was not available on DVD. I'm glad they finally rectified that.

Some of Real Genius was adapted from real pranks perpetrated at Caltech and elsewhere.

Ah, I learned a new colloquialism today with their error message for an overloaded server. "... accidentally Lennie us." http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=lennie

Voltaire would be proud [0], the dude cracked their non-CSPRNG fair and square.

0: http://www.damninteresting.com/the-enlightenment-guide-to-wi...

How much does the seated bearded guy in front of the array of screens, in the image a third of a way down the article, look like the Architect from the Matrix architect scene? Is that where the Wachowskis actually got their inspiration -- that bizarre episode? "Your life is the remainder of an unbalanced equation..." And there's Larsson rebalancing the equation for all the times other people unluckily had their winnings taken by pressing their like one more time.

Watching the GSN video on YouTube I was struck by the generic presentation of non-cash prizes. Press Your Luck was apparently content to just mention the contestant won a "Sailboat" without tethering it to a brand which seems like overlooked opportunity even for the simpler time since contemporaries like The Price Is Right were integrating brands into their show.

Seems to be down. Archive.org version from last year: http://web.archive.org/web/20141109113413/http://www.damnint...

Doesn't work.

And I shall keep staying on website with the server down page because even that is fun to read.Someone please comment when the site is up and running again.

Bill Murray once agreed to appear in a film adaptation of this story (directed by Nicolas Cage).

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=116245

I wish I could disavow this guy as a hacker, but he was clearly a hacker. And I think this story demonstrates a kind of weakness that we're all a bit prone to. (See my deeper comment for algorithmic analysis.)

I had read somewhere (don't recall where) that a few other people had figured out the patterns too but just didn't make it to be contestants.

I love that if you google "unbeardily," all the results point to this story. Do you think it's a "trap street"?

Well that blog certainly lives up to its' name! Fascinating!

Has anybody ever worked out what he did?

Damninteresting.com is a truly underrated website. I bought their book a few years ago, which was a collation of nearly all their articles up to the time of print. They're listed in the book alphabetically, but every article was fascinating and well-written, regardless of topic. I highly recommend it if you have time and/or need a reason to procrastinate :).

Seems a sad waste of a life. A shame - I wonder what turns a boy into that man?

An initiation ritual.

the real Del Boy

This kind of thing is less about easy money and more about outsmarting people. This guy wasn't trying to make an easy buck, he was trying to make a buck by outwitting other people, beating them, winning. It's antisocial (in a clinical rather than pop culture sense) behavior. The guy seems to have the symptoms of antisocial personality disorder. [1]

I'm just an internet commenter though, not a psychologist, so take it for what it's worth.

1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder

I think it's more than that. I got a vibe that something wasn't right with the guy just looking at the first picture of him and pushed aside the feeling believing it to be just an old picture. Then, at the very beginning of the article, there's a bit where one of the producers said that something didn't feel right about the guy but they couldn't quite put their finger on it.

That's one of the biggest tell-tale signs of a sociopath. I couldn't piece together much about his personality from the article, but I'd bet a Jackson that this guy was a sociopath.

"I don't know what I'm talking about, but this guy feels off, and I don't like that, so rather than examining my own biases and predjudices and irrationalities I'm going to use mental health language to give him a (controversial, relatively new) diagnosis from thecomfort of my armchair".

This attitude fucking sucks.

Better classified, and as a non-psychiatric condition: He's just a businessman.

And the best businessmen (CEOs) have the highest amount of sociopaths than any other profession:

http://mic.com/articles/44423/10-professions-that-attract-th...

Being a great businessman doesn't mean he's less likely to be a sociopath, it actually probably means he's more likely.

The only time it would be a disability is if it really is a dis-ability.

I do not consider sociopathy to be debilitating all the time. The same can be said for claustrophobia. A mild form of it produces discomfort the person can control. Severe cases would qualify for more drastic treatments.

So, it may be true there are more sociopaths in business. I would not refute that. But whether the sociopathy is debilitating is to be examined. And that, I would assume require assessing the individual if they are happy with their life.

I quoted the producer of the show, so it wasn't just my own preconceptions. I was pointing out how I felt the same vibe that he did, even before I read the article. I doubt it was just a coincidence.

And it's nice of you to try and generalize away my point by calling me some sort of armchair psychologist. I was just stating my observations from reading the article. I didn't outright call the guy a sociopath; I said I would bet money on it though.

> This attitude fucking sucks.

Recognizing sociopaths and other personality oddities is not a "sucky" attitude. It's a self-defense mechanism.

He is what he is. Everyone here knows he's not the type who would work well in a career, have a best friend who he meets every week for a beer, marry his girlfriend and have 2.2 kids. What do you achieve by calling him a sociopath? Everyone has their place in this society, even if it's to punish TV shows and radio programs who don't do randomisation properly. He was an arbitrageur for TV programs. What have we to gain by calling him a sociopath?..Not like you have to be friends with him. He made his winnings from a TV show, fair and square, even if contrived.

the couple spent months counting and cataloging the serial number of their money for a radio contents, and when the money was stolen police was unable to find it?

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