Well, in fairness it's only the trivia nerd offs that are weak. Probably because they have to make them for TV. Plus, most of the nerds on the show aren't what I'd call nerds anyway. I mean, they're letting people in whose sole qualification is that they are gamers or like comic books. They probably had to dumb it down to keep it from being ridiculous.
What the heck would you consider a nerd, then? It's perfectly possible to be a gaming nerd, or comic book nerd, or sci-fi nerd. For example, someone who lives and breathes Star Trek will absolutely be considered a nerd by pretty much everyone you'd ask. Having a PhD in some technical or scientific field doesn't make you a nerd. I'd say of all the people on this season, Amanda is the only one I wouldn't actually consider a nerd. She's a book worm, and that's hardly something that is considered nerdy in the adult world compared to stuff like comic books, math, and video games. Unless she only reads high fantasy or something.
So I was really sick this weekend and just watched a bunch of random shows, decided to watch this based on this thread. I'm surprised at how easy all the questions are. The riddles were all variations of classic riddles, except made slightly simpler. It just doesn't seem like they are actually being challenged. The group challenges are a little better, but still seem pretty simple. Ironically I feel like they have people who aren't nerds trying to come up with nerd challenges and are failing to make them actually difficult.
Let's be honest: you're a horrible measuring stick for the difficulty of the challenges. Given your post history, you're much more well-read and have a much broader knowledge base than the vast majority of people who would watch or be on this show. You're not the norm (nor do I think most posters in this community are).
Anyway, they have to strike a careful balance between making challenges too easy (given how specialized some of the people are, i.e., anime experts, comic books, etc.) and too difficult. I think a good example of this is the "middle school math" portion of the boat challenge. Sure, they could have done some super complex math, but the producers probably couldn't guarantee that there would be someone on each team who would have the knowledge to do such difficult problems. So instead they made some moderately difficult math that almost everyone had probably encountered at some point in their education, and put in the extra logic aspect of figuring out the letters showed the correct order.
I really wanted Todd to win just to see the strife in the house. It would have been like Crater-face dude from last season all over again. Caitlin was lucky in this nerd off. If she had been going up against almost any of the other nerds she would have had a much harder time winning. I think both Todd and the guy she beat last time were complete idiots and two of the stupidest, weakest players. Ori would be another, and the only reason he is still around is because his nerd off happened to be in his specialty.
I think Caitlin will be gone eventually, as soon as she gets into a nerd off one of the other overall strong players.
