AnarcoB

One could switch, but there would be no empirical reason to do so. Why switch at all if there is no evidence tipping the odds of 50:50? Hi, If you read the previous posts, you'll see your logic is incorrect. You have twice as high a chance of winning if you switch. Empyrically speaking I suppose if the initial question were worded differently I would be incorrect, but I still don't see it. For instance, if I make a second guess, the odds of being correct will be better than the odds of being correct with the first guess. If however we look at whether I "should" make a second guess because it increases my odds... I don't see it.

One could switch, but there would be no empirical reason to do so. Why switch at all if there is no evidence tipping the odds of 50:50?

Sorry to hear about your struggles. As far as the board community and your feelings towards it, I think I can relate. It seems like a great place to connect. I have not had that experience. In fact my impression seems to fit with the following analogy I've come up with. Imagine a huge round room. You, or someone else creates it to discuss a specific idea. Its entire outer wall is lined with closed doors. People from all over the world enter the room unseen by anyone else, one at a time. They go to the middle of the room where a table is placed. On that table are tablets of paper and a pencil. One person at a time can enter the room and write anything they desire on a sheet from the tablet. They then must leave before anyone else can enter to read what they have written. Pretty soon, piles of notes accumulate in this "discussion". You never see any of the other participants, and it may take a week to write what would normally occur in 2 minutes of face to face discussion. Tangents, distractions, and the limitations of the written notes abound. Just my 2 cents.

Stef has made this argument in the past in relation to medicine, NASA, and other fields which have been co-opted by gov't control. The logic goes something like this. All that is and has been great in human history has come from individuals working voluntarily. Unrelenting hard work, innovative thought, resistance against the status quo, and oftentimes rare personalities have created nearly everything we value today. The effect of such is the creation of a strong vibrant optimistic new thing furthering human progress, health or knowledge. As the state co-opts such an endeavor, there is an initial inertia which resists the negative effects of the state. An industry/field can be carried for several decades on the residual culture and energy of the past before it succumbs. The question is simple. Has this also occurred within the political arena itself? It's hard for me to tell. It seems that politics is really really good at what it does. I wonder if it is reaching a pinnacle of purity, free from any true individual courage or integrity. It makes sense to me from a natural selection perspective. The men behind democracy when it was conceived might as well be a different species compared to their progeny of today. Over the centuries, has democracy now created the greatest and purist forms of political vomit the world has ever known? Have we finally lost any of the (perceived) valor of political participation at the individual level now? How many coin tosses (elections) does it take to define an outcome of a coin toss? Or am I just watching the news too much again? As an aside, I'm not really asking out of frustration or anger, but kind of an amazed curiosity at the absurdity;)