> I loved using it while watching Season 50, and it identified several interesting threads early on.

The ideas in TFA are interesting, but it’s important to keep in mind that when we watch Survivor, we’re not watching something that happened in real time and then was simply compiled together. Survivor is edited after the fact, once the winners and all the arcs of contestants are known.

And don’t get me wrong! I love watching the show even knowing that in my mind. But a model built on the edited material is necessarily biased due to the format of the show itself.

Love this!

I played with doing something similar, where my features were based on Edgic charts I found online[1]. This ends up implicitly factoring in people’s _perceptions_ of the players/editing, which can be useful. Ultimately it was just a bit of a toy still, somewhat better than random.

Like other people mention, Survivor is edited with a lot of intention, I think if you really want to predict winners you need to somehow capture cues from the editors.

I wonder if you could derive per-player 1st and 2nd person sentiment from transcripts of the episodes. Could be interesting to factor that in.

[1]: Example - https://www.reddit.com/r/Edgic/s/2v0nA93odi

> By the finale, Kalshi’s “Survivor” market had reached a volume of $32.7 million

I don't get this. How are people "betting" on something that is "known information" for other people? What's the point? I get betting on stuff that no one can know, but who's taking "the other side" on these bets? Why would you put money into something knowing that there are people who already have the absolute answer?

The model in reality is “Hope the producers like you enough to write you into the show as the winner.” Survivor is hyperreality, not an actual competition.

Interesting, but it misses a lot in not factoring social dynamics (which the author admits). IMO the greatest Survivor player of all time was JT Thomas in Season 18. The guy was a down-to-earth cattle rancher from Alabama, and he was so good because his personality did all the work. He had that rare perfect combination of traits that you see in true born leaders, and was so loved by the group that no one ever cast a vote against him, not even once. It’s almost like they subconsciously let him win because they believed he deserved it more than they did.

I haven't followed these sort of programs, but aren't they promoting and celebrating psychopathic manipulative behaviour.

In real history, often what's at stake is survival of a community and people want to genuinely work together. Here for some reason it's an arbitrary forced conflict if only one individual can win.

>"What that means: if you pick a player at random, you’ll get the winner right about 10% of the time (this varies with how many people are left, but 10% is an average). My model’s #1 pick is right just over 20% of the time. That 2x improvement holds for most of the game, basically after two episodes have elapsed (once the features have enough data)."

Ok... but no one picks a winner at random. How does this do against anyone who has watched the show and picks someone based on their knowledge of the game? Seems like a really complicated way of just barely doing better than a dartboard.

Well I didn't want apoilers so I stopped reading. If the author is here, please remove the navigation floater from the side. The article is so narrow. I had to zoom all the way in on my tablet to get one graph to be full sized. Impresaiveely it wasn't pixelated. I want to see your graphs better.