On Dave and the Strictly Week 6 scores

[danieldwilliam]

Well, it had to happen eventually. The Dave Myers Juggernaut of Dance unseats someone who probably didn’t deserve to go.  All around the country feckless Strictly watchers who listened to that buffoon Brand and didn’t vote will be wondering how it could possibly be allowed that two people who were not at bad at dancing could have been in the bottom two.

A bit of drive by psephology.  It’s obvious that Abbey must have finished bottom or second from bottom in the public vote. If she finished bottom her aggregate score would have been eleven. What is a little less obvious is that quite a few of the top ranked dancers must also have finished quite a way down the public vote leaderboard.  In order to avoid the dance off Dave must have finished at least 5^th in the public vote. This would give him 11 points overall. He avoids the bottom two by being the most popular of those finishing on 11. Similar stories for Mark and for Fiona. Which implies that one or two of the better ranked dancers have finished quite a way down.

Of course, the gap between the top of the public vote and the bottom of the public vote might very narrow. 

I’m guessing here but it looks to me like Dave and Mark are polling very strongly and we can expect a few more upsets in the next few weeks.

Comments

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I think that the most significant factor here is that people only vote if they think their preferred candidate is in danger - i.e., in the bottom half or so of the leaderboard. That means that Rachel, whose fan base kept her out of the bottom two in week 5, was at risk because her score was so good that her fans thought they could relax. Et cetera.

I think it will always be like this, as long as (i) the scoring mechanism is not transparent, and (ii) voters cannot be convinced that everyone is at risk. It's possible that Abbey's appearance in the bottom two might have gone some way towards the latter, but basically we are an apathetic bunch and continually subject to cognitive bias.

[hano.livejournal.com]

I'm in mourning. I wanted RR to stay all the way through. Granted she's nearly as terrible a dancer as I am, so her chances of staying were pretty slim, but even so, I'll miss her.