Nope, he lost his will and gave up the challenge under the guise of being noble.
Thanks for that. Knowing, as Ayn Rand did, that all human decisions are basically selfish, I was trying to make sense of the Ian decision. I just couldn't put my finger on Ian's true motivation. You and Kingu helped me to see it was both a cop-out and calculated. But millions of liberals all over the world will laud him for his "selflessness."
One thing I noticed from this "Final 3" is that to me, it seems that the Final Two more often than not devolves into one good player taking one despicable/lazy/coattail riding player into the Final Two. I'd like to see the Final 3 Immunity challenge be "first one off loses - out of the game"
On another board, they're calling Tom out for his hypocrisy and meanness to Ian after he found out that Ian "would have had a hard choice" if Tom had lost the Final 4 immunity. I saw it a little different. Tom had gone to Jenn after he won and said "you know, I think you're wonderful but I made a deal with these people and I'm going to stick by it, and so I'm going to have to vote for you, potentially losing Jenn's vote, whereas Ian can safely say "oh, wow, maybe I wouldn't have voted for you Jenn," which might give him a leg up with Jenn in the final voting. Like I said, just an impression I got.
And Gregg's little rant about "YOU PROMISED FINAL 5 to me and Jenn" while forgetting "Please ignore, by the way, that I was planning to screw you over at 6 and vote your ass out. I wasn't aware that Tom was required to keep his word to someone who was planning to backstab him in order to keep him in the game. I guess Gregg forgot what he said in his exit interview when he was voted out, that they had turned the tables on him.
It was selfish, if you want to think of it that way. He was simply more concerned about how Tom and Katie (and perhaps the audience) felt about him than he was about the money. He paid to restore his honor. In economic terms, he exchanged money for something that was more valuable to him. I've you don't see any value in honor and the respect of others, then I can see where that might be difficult to understand.
I just couldn't put my finger on Ian's true motivation.
It must be amazingly easy to fit everyone's decisions into your worldview if you exclude any explanations that don't fit your worldview and look for the "true" explanation that more neatly fits. So you know what was going on in Ian's head better than he did and would rather call him a liar than accept his simple explanation that explains his behavior quite well?