Be careful what you wish for...

In the high-and-far-off-times, O Best Beloved, when the Coalition was so-new-and-all, I exhorted them thus on the subject of gambling, in a post on punters taken for a ride by dodgy fairground stalls:

Here's an idea for Michael Gove & Co.; if you want lessons in school to be relevant and useful in later life, you could forget about Citizenship GCSE's and teach some basic probability and a realistic calculation of the chances of winning.

And behold, not eighteen months later, a plan is afoot to introduce lessons on gambling. But it isn't what I meant at all!

Instead of incorporating into maths lessons the ability to work out odds and calculate risk, the proposed course will be part of PSHE and include a class discussion in which pupils are asked 'to identify some of the more positive aspects of gambling'.

This, together with the stated objective - "to enable students to increase their knowledge and understanding of gambling" - is, I suppose, hardly surprising, given that the project is the brainchild of an industry-funded organisation specifically to tackle problem gambling and its given aim is to teach "responsible gambling" instead.

Since my main area of concern is the 'tax on stupidity' aspect of the situation, I don't hold out much hope that this will improve matters; according to The Times, 'In its submission, Gamcare admits that an initiative in Canada left pupils more aware of how gambling works but 'not more likely to know about the signs of problem gambling''.

Now I ought to declare my position on this - I have a long-standing aversion to gambling. This is due in part to generations of Calvinist ancestors glaring down from the hereafter (even atheists sometimes find themselves looking over their shoulders) but mainly to my experiences at school.

The annual bazaar was the province of Sister Patrick, who ran a bottle stall from which nearly all the winning tickets had been extracted in advance. Pupils also had to run the gauntlet of Sr Mary's dartboard (blunted darts), Sr Seamas' coconut-shy (glued down) and Sr Clare's tombola (you've guessed it). Most of us had worked it out by the time we left, but by then there was always a new crop of bright-eyed youngsters, eager to win and well-supplied with pennies.

The nuns had it nicely calculated - just enough pupils won prizes to keep everyone's hopes up while extracting the maximum amount of profit. I may not have derived much spiritual benefit from that education, but being thus parted on an annual basis from my hard-earned pocket-money gave me a lifelong aversion to risking cash ever again.

One of the problems with lessons on gambling is that teenagers' brains are hot-wired for risk-taking and primed to respond to the prospect of reward. Some never grow out of it; the same phenomenon sells millions of scratchcards and Lottery tickets every week, even when the purchasers are struggling to make ends meet.

Instead of appealing to a judgement and reasoning ability pupils are unlikely to have, surely it would be better for government initiatives to use maths to illustrate exactly how remote are the chances of winning.

But then, of course, no-one would play the National Lottery*.


(*Nick M at Counting Cats sums up the situation admirably in a comment)

It could be you...

I seem to have won some sort of prize.

‘Good morning’, said the voice on the telephone, ‘I’m calling about your recent car accident’.

In truth, accident is hardly the right word for someone reversing at a snail’s pace into the parked car where I was sitting. It was all very polite and amicable; he got out and apologised profusely – ‘so sorry...wife’s car...wrong gear’ – and his insurers agreed to have the minor dents repaired.

A routine affair and easily sorted, I thought, but I was obviously missing the point. The voice on the telephone was insistent;

‘You were in a collision’, it said. ‘The other driver has admitted liability. That means you can claim at least £1,500 for injury.’

I put the phone down, but that wasn’t the end of it. A few days later, the Spouse took another call:

‘Did you know that the other driver’s insurer will already have put at least £1,500 aside for compensation? If you have suffered any injury, however slight, or any inconvenience at all as a result of the accident, however slight, all you have to do is make a claim’.

It appears that, from the day you contact your insurers, the genie is out of the bottle. Your details are available on a database for any ambulance-chaser to see and, before the respray is dry, there they are on the phone and by text, day after day, promising you untold riches if you can conjure up some sort of injury.

Had I taken up their offer, the other driver’s insurance company would be £1,500 worse off. Multiply that by the number of minor shunts taking place every day on our overcrowded roads and you have one of the reasons that premiums are sky-rocketing.

They have turned car insurance into a lottery – sure, you pay a bit extra up-front, but if your number comes up, there’s at least £1,500 waiting to be claimed every time. Having someone run into me and freely admit liability was the equivalent of a Premium Bond coming up.

And in today’s Lottery-obsessed culture of entitlement, if the callers' incomprehension is anything to go by, few people ever say no.

A tax on stupidity

How much would you spend if your 'chances of winning were 2,600-to-1'? Turns out, according to the Mail, that those were the odds of winning a prize at a Blackpool hoopla stall, as calculated by a maths expert at Lancaster University.

Trading Standards stepped in after secretly filming two girls aged 14 and 15 spending £70 without winning a single prize. The stall's equipment was sent to Lancaster for analysis and the operators successfully prosecuted by the council for breaching gambling laws.

'Council public protection officer Shaun McKinney said: "One individual who had come to Blackpool had spent £1,200 to £1,500 playing the hoopla game.

"Obviously a lot of it was to try and win their money back from the initial losses, and it's a case of keep playing until they think they can win it back." '

Here's an idea for Michael Gove & Co.; if you want lessons in school to be relevant and useful in later life, you could forget about Citizenship GCSE's and teach some basic probability and a realistic calculation of the chances of winning.

Of course, the National Lottery would take a nosedive...

Update: From the Telegraph,

'Staff at the stall would bully "vulnerable" tourists to keep playing to win back their lost holiday money, Blackpool magistrates’ court was told. Prosecutors said some were even led to cash machines after falsely being told they would eventually win prizes.'

A question of probability

‘I'm a reliable witness, you're a reliable witness, practically all of God's children are reliable witnesses in their own estimation, which makes it funny how so many versions of the same affair get about.’
(John Wyndham: The Kraken Wakes)

Seems the Met Office got it all wrong – forecast a mild winter and then watched us all freeze for weeks. And it’s not the first time – remember the barbecue summer predictions?

Well, yes I do. As it happens, I consulted the seasonal forecast pages for both summer and winter 2009, and I recall something a little bit different. The predictions in each case were clearly expressed in terms of probability and illustrated with helpful graphs – as far as I remember, 60% chance of this winter being milder than average and 40% chance of average or colder.

But hey, who wants to hear about percentages? What the public want is a good story, so the news media reported that it would be a mild winter, tout court. What a pity there wasn’t a handily-coined pithy phrase to match the ‘barbecue summer’ a Met Office spokesman unwisely mentioned earlier in the year.

So the Met office helpfully rounded things off for the media, and the media helpfully simplified it for the public - after all, this is a nation where millions of people believe they have a good chance of winning the national lottery. It's worth bearing all this in mind when the papers produce yet another figures-based story.

And all the while the probability graphs were there for all to see - 60% chance of a warmer than average winter. How much would you bet at those odds?

It could be you....and you....and you...

‘The Lottery – a tax on people who flunked math’ (Monique Lloyd)



Quick! Grab a pen and paper – Derren Brown’s going to predict the lottery numbers!

Sadly for those who fancy riding on his elegant coat-tails to untold riches, this latest stunt will doubtless involve some kind of envelope, frustratingly sealed from the eyes of slavering viewers until after the draw has taken place.

How much more fun would it be if he announced the numbers before the draw? A bumper day for newsagents and kiosks up and down the land as customers flock in for their tickets, travel chaos as queues reach unprecedented lengths and millions of people sitting down breathlessly in front of their televisions, each fervently clutching a sheaf of winning tickets.

And best of all, the expression on their faces when they realise that their share of the prize money will be about 57p. If Brown kept the numbers to himself, of course, he could clean up – every week! At least he could if he weren't such a principled individual; naturally that must be the only thing stopping him.

In the words of Jay Leno, “Here’s something to think about; how come you never see a headline like ‘Psychic Wins Lottery’?

Update: Comment from the TimesOnline article:
'What he's done here is spend the last year pre-recording all 14 million (or whatever) outcomes! Then as he has walked from the TV over to the balls they spliced in that pre-recorded segment.'