Closing time again
A LOTTERY scratchcard has been withdrawn from sale by Camelot – because players couldn’t understand it.
The Cool Cash game – launched on Monday – was taken out of shops yesterday after some players failed to grasp whether or not they had won.
To qualify for a prize, users had to scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card. As the game had a winter theme, the temperature was usually below freezing.
But the concept of comparing negative numbers proved too difficult for some. Camelot received dozens of complaints on the first day from players who could not understand how, for example, -5 is higher than -6.
The immediate response is to laugh when the true response is to ask: how can this be right? How is this allowed? Of late I’m trying to be nice, I’m trying not to be negative, I’m trying to make suggestions. But, I’m sorry, two generations of education ministers should be dragged out this very night and horsewhipped.
It’s the 21st century. We’ve got huge brains and opposable thumbs. We’ve barely begun to explore our potential as a race. We should be on Pluto by now. But no: we’re stuck on this rock, the gears jammed in reverse. I’ll say it again: we’re on the cusp of a new Dark Age.
(Heads up from Eugenides)
Update: A fair point from Jamie:
[U]nless you think it’s the job of education to train stupid people to know just enough to make stupid bets, then the fault isn’t really with the education system. The scandal here is that the state promotes the exploitation of stupidity by licensing a lottery system in the first place.
Posted on November 6th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
I caught this on Fark, but wanted to read the actual text on the scratch card before passing judgment. What if some of the ‘dumb’ people involved are smarter than they look?
For instance, the phrasing of ‘match any three amounts to win’ on scratch cards caused one hell of a ruckus a decade ago in Sydney; people who had matched three amounts (e.g. 2 x $20 and 2 x $750 and 2 x $100,000) all started claiming a ‘win’.
The Lottery, a tax on the poor fuckers who don’t pay tax.
[...] Via Chicken Yoghurt. [...]
It might not be so bad overall. Lottery players probably tend to be more inumerate than the general population.
But as the daughter and mother of engineers, and as one myself, I weep.
We’ve barely begun to explore our potential as a race
On the contrary, we have been exploring our potential as a race ever since the first pithecanthropoid picked up a handy stone and bashed his neighbour’s head in with it.
Personally I believe the game should have been based upon discovering the square roots of imaginery numbers – that would learn them.
Incidentally, if the game were based on complex or other numbers which were two dimensional or higher orders, the concepts of “higher” and “lower” do start to go out of the window. You are left with comparing the moduli of numbers. In which case, Tina in the quoted example, would indeed have won. You can’t rule out the fact that Camelot may have withdrawn this lottery because players with advanced mathematical skills were walking away with large amounts of cash.
Bloody stupid idea though.
People do have difficulty with negative numbers.
My former partner, an intelligent woman who left school at sixteen, used to struggle with the fact that there were two different temperature scales, possibly because she didn’t actually realise this. When it was warm, she’d say it was seventy, or seventy-two, or whatever. If it was cold, she’d say it was zero, or one, or two.
It was only when I showed her a thermometer and tracked her answers down its different sides that she understood her error.
Meanwhile I could never understand why, if I looked at a physics textbook, the circuit diagram was rectangular, but when we did the actual experiement there were a couple of wires of irregular shape…
[...] Via Chicken Yoghurt. [...]
You seem surprised that most of the people in this country are fuckwits, which is sweet, if mis-guided.
Most people I meet are virtually illiterate, functionally innumerate & scientifically incompetent.
If natural selection could be relied upon to take these mug-wumps out of the gene-pool before they encountered the oppurtunity to replicate then the rest of us might just have a chance, but Health & Safety legislation prevents them from shuffling off this mortal coil as a consequence of their own stupidity at a sufficiently young age.
For the future development of humanity, we must be prepared to watch countless millions of our own kind perish as they piss onto mains outlets, sniff the gas, walk back to the ‘dud’ firework, look down the rifle barrel to see what the problem is etc., etc.
So, ejh, do you or your ex have any kids?
BTW, where I come from the lottery is known as the ’stupid-tax’.
“It’s a struggle, but I know that my £1-a-week flutter guarantees cheap ballets & subsidised operas for the downtrodden merchants & bankers of the City of London.” says Mrs. Poorprole of Shittown, Northshire…