Survivor: Samoa, Episode 9 Missing Intelligence Award – Russell the Swan

At first, this week’s Missing Intelligence Award looked pretty simple. I’ve been on Team Monica since Day 1, as I picked her to go to the end, and gosh darn it, she’s just so cute.

So when she actually had a good idea — splitting up the votes just in case Russell had found another hidden immunity idea (and he had) — and Dave just dismissed it, I was screaming at my screen. “LISTEN TO HER, YOU FOOL!” If you have the choice between a straight vote, and accomplishing the same thing with a contingency plan, you always go with the contingency plan.

The more I did the math, though, the more I realized it wouldn’t work. Splitting up seven Galu votes 4-3 or 5-2 to make sure there’s a blowback on the idol’s use against another Foa Foan only works if not all of old Foa Foa, still four strong, is voting against you. If Galu goes 4-3, and Foa Foa has four votes against a Galu member, the Galuan is going home.

Obviously, Laura thought Galu had at least Natalie in its pocket. That’s a poor assumption. Remember the old saying about what happens when you assume things? Moreover, it was even a little bit foolish to assume they’d have Shambo’s vote.

So while Dave wasn’t too bright to dismiss off-hand the suggestion that Galu have a Plan B, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. The safest course of action would have been to simply not vote Russell if they were really afraid he had the idol, but the odds were greatly against that happening.

Galu just got caught by a Black Swan event within the game of Survivor.

The so-called “Black Swan Theory” suggests incredible, unexpected events with such a force of impact that they essentially change history, as conceived by writer and modern philosopher/mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb. World War I and 9/11 were prime examples of this concept.

One of the qualifications is that nothing in the past points to the likelihood of a Black Swan event occurring. You might say Russell found the first idol on his own, which suggests it could happen again, but I say it’s a Black Swan because it would be unprecedented and unthinkable that he should find two immunity idols in one season without helps, especially given that he didn’t know the second existed.

In this context, the Black Swan (so named because of the old assumption that all swans are white, therefore a black swan cannot exist) is simply an event the Survivors shouldn’t have been able to prepare for, and really that’s what this was — except for the fact that Monica saw it coming.

So there’s no Missing Intelligence Award this week. The odds of Russell being armed with another immunity idol were so preposterous that Dave and the other Galu members can be excused for not taking the idea seriously. Frankly, were I in their shoes, I wouldn’t have either — I would have played the odds. That’s almost always the right thing to do. Pesky outlier events.

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out these other recent articles on Reality News Online:

Chris Harris is a newspaper journalist from Somerset, Kentucky, and enjoys picturing Russell as a swan. You can email him at wokosaurus@msn.com.

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