who wants to be a milllionaire/fraud: the doc [actually this thread is abt "intuition" btw]

Mostly I felt ppl's rationalisations of this intuition were not to the point: after-the-fact rejigging in favour of the actual tales of the clues unfolding

We most of us have tremendously sensitive antenna for jinks and jags in the behaviour of others — and yet we seem to have desperately poor language for exporing it.

true. it must be a psychological adaptation that helped us survive/reproduce back in the day in our ancestral environment.

The question is how much of this is due to actual knowledge that something was up, and how much is vague engrained tendancy to be suspicious of people, especially those who appear to be doing very well at things (record-breaking sportsmen, political conspiracy theories etc) that was subsequently proved to be justified in this sense.

sebastien i guess i am wondering eg also abt actually real physical pointers like SMELL, which all but the anosmic surely respond to (i have always assumed it is the main mechanism in dowsing for example)

haha the whole office just started debating it

I think it must've been really weird there. the weird things he was saying/doing, the normal things he wasn't saying/doing. and if you'd noticed the coughs. haha.

he would've gotten away with it, too. if he hadn't been so stupid/had been a better actor.

[p.s. anyone that knows anything about magnitude knows nano=v. small, mega=big, giga=bigger. if not knowing the actually powers of ten. but you already know that.]

His wife's body language, especially when coughing, kind of gave things away as well.

a good story abt this = "the mistake of the machine" in the father brown stories

the ingrams's conviction is based on NO unassailable forensic evidence: it's *all* variations of "they are this kind of person = they would never have behaved in such-and-such a way in such-and-such a circumstance"

we all make this kind of judgment all the time, and absolutely rely on it: it is odd the feeling one has of it turning to airy nothing under the microscope

If you've ever watched Darren Brown (of I've remembered the name right - I did start a thread about him), he has an astounding ability to read people's reactions. There was one where he was blindfolded and in a different room, and he could tell whether the person at the other end (a much-decorated army officer) was lying, without error. I can't tell how he does it, but it has to come from these kind of cues, hints of tightness in the voice, micro-expressions, trying to hard to be convincing, all sorts of little things like that. (If I were an advertising agency, I'd pay him an absolute fortune to work for me! He can use these abilities to persuade and even control too.)

Yes, maybe: I mainly think it's interesting that we have this feeling we all share — "something is weird about this" — which we all kind of recognise but don't have an agreed name for. After all, the Major in this instance *wasn't* lying exactly: one of the weird things is that he was actually — in the course of his endless rambling answers — telling a lot of the truth: he very early on announced that he now had a strategy, and he was very open about the fact that his decisions were not based on things he knew about or had heard about. And the people who guessed something was wrong DIDN'T have oodles of arcane specialist knowledge to back them up: and the specialist knowledge they did have — ie a very close working knowledge of how the game had worked previously — was not one they could particularly use in court (because they gained this knowledge by working for the firm which stands to gain by ingrams's conviction...)

I don't think of knowledge as a nuisance that clogs one's "good savage" sensibility

Maybe not, but then by calling it "knowledge" you're prejudging the issue. nuisance = a very good description of some briefly trendy chunk of non-knowledge which everyone involved happens to believe is true (viz that the xyy chromosome produced violent psychopaths, a biological "fact" which was fashionable for a while in the 60s and late 70s). "good savage" is a comical piece of knockabout argument, but almost the entire British legal system is based on the idea that a jury of 12 ordinary people have to be persuaded = arcane knowledge MUST be translated into terms convincing to those w/o this knowledge. Awe before the expertise of the powerful is not a good substitute for common sense. Miscarriages of justice as often as not relate either to "nuisance-knowledge" (ie experts claiming to have proved something they have not proved) or evidence kept from a jury bcz their "good savage" (= common sense) sensibility wd read it differently to the expert's reading.

I think I found this (basically terrible) documentary interesting bcz the clumsiness of the translation from one species of knowledge to another was so very clumsy.

more on your comments later maybe

of course what they ended up building was an Artificial Stupidity machine which could be spotted and stopped by people who didn't know the answers or how the machine worked...

sadly when he moved into the hotseat TW could no longer make out the giveaway smells over the stench of tarrant's eau-de-cologne

In the end up, the documentary was so gauche to the point that you could see the bits that just weren't translated.

or yeah, maybe just the sound of a rheumy-eyed brain clicking off :)

barthes would have made something good up

I think it would be possible if you worked on the show to think something was up. Also it's hardly as though they're fabricating this, unless all the stories of the producer being called etc are all lies too.

Note: almost all I know about this I read on this thread.

like. they played the tapes of tec asking about paris and the guy telling him and tec saying "I thought so." and then coughing. and then the guy said "no, I remember him asking but it was after the question had been answered and he said "did you know that?"."

if the documentary had been totally confident their version of events was unassailable, they'd have shown the whole of the defence version: they chickened out = the proesecution story has confusions and breakdowns

i believe the major etc wz guilty as sin btw, i wz just fascinated by what counted as evidence and how: for example, when he took the phonecall from celador that they taped and they said "we think you were cheating and we're not going to pay" he replied "oh right ok er er er i mean i refute that claim of course" => he was totally expecting the call and expecting to be caught (cf father brown passim heh) and responded accordingly => he wasn't shocked or outraged or angry or upset

I think coupled with the wife's reaction, it is quite plausible.

What do you think were the reasons they "knew something was up"? I mean it seems clear they did, because producers were notified etc.

I thiunk the first to formulate their suspicions caught a whiff of something palpable but hard to describe: like maybe how the audience as a whole were not quite responding as usual? I think oddness wd have been magnified by that: there'd have been an unusual kind of tension or mood, even noises. If the ppl who claimed they noticed something was up all noticed it, then others noticed it too — and still others wd have been responding to the unconscious response to this, w/o knowing what it was they were responding too.

the floor manager was certain enough to act, but he also totally passed the buck of decision, to someone who wasn't even there!

Well the production ppl have a few series worth of experience in doing these millionaire shows. they have a pretty good idea how the contestants behave when q's are asked.

The major's behaviour (the way he would dramatically change his ans) surely gave these ppl a clue that something was wrong. The audience w/ their reaction as well (as you point out mark).

Tarrant didn't notice anything bcz he was surely concentrating on the job. and even if he did I think he would have (unconciously) suppressed any suspicions.

One of the things which I don't think was mentioned was the fact that by taking so long he was stopping the other contestants having a crack at winning the million. If you sitting watching him take 10 minutes to answer a question a. you'll be pretty pissed off with him watching your chane slip away b. you'll probably start paying attention to what other people i.e Tec and his wife are up to.

Plus they're thinking he's a major? A leader of men, how can he be such a ditherer, this isn't what's expected from an officer. No wonder people were suspicious.

(But you can still learn about body language to try to judge if someone's lying or flirting or whatever - like you didn't know. It might come in handy in the case where you say to your friend, 'That girl was flirting with you,' and he's like, 'she was not,' even though you know he knows. You can say, 'Come on, she had her wrists opened towards you and she was touching her skirt!')

I have also read that research is being done into how we read body language, and how we can do it better - some scientist has actually developed a short training regimen which teaches people to become much better at decoding expressions with a tremendous degree of success (or at least one source says so).

I believe the term 'intuition' as it stands is simply a catch-all for a great deal of small things we pick up (perhaps involuntarily) using the standard suite of five senses that are then processed 'under the radar' of the conscious mind (in the way that most people do not break all songs down into arrangements and individual notes when they hear them, while even the most rudimentarily-schooled musicians tend to automatically do this).

As we continue to advance research into the ways we observe and interpret things outside of our linguistic capabilities for dissection and description and gradually systemize things like reading expressions, we will have more and more basis for using the left side of our brain to process the same information.

I wish I could find that face-reading research and some documentation on winning poker faces, I'd link to it.