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orthonormal comments on The Aumann's agreement theorem game (guess 2/3 of the average) - Less Wrong
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Comments (149)
Well, no— I wouldn't be bothered if the modified game still wound up above 0. I'm just interested in the light such experiments shed on the LW community, and the modified version removes one facet that acts as noise to the rest of the group dynamic: the actions of the few merry pranksters, plus the reaction of the rest of us to the foreknowledge of the pranksters' tendencies.
I think you'd get a similar effect to this modification if you instead played this game with significant stakes, such that it was in everyone's real interest to try to win.
It is quite difficult to manipulate people's interests in such a way. "Merry pranksters", for example, clearly derive enjoyment from claiming to vote for something other than zero, and possibly from actually doing so.
If you offered money to everyone if zero won, the question would then become: which is more important to the pranksters, the money or the amusement? That's a very subjective question, and while there may be an ultimate and rational answer, it's not at all clear. The proximate response of people is often what you didn't predict - if the prediction is known, people will often act against it intentionally.
That would be an interesting experiment as well, but I was instead suggesting that most entries would be substantially lower (though perhaps still mostly nonzero) if there were a significant monetary prize for the winner (to be split N ways for an N-way tie), and that this new distribution of responses might look like the distribution that would occur without a prize but if it were known that a certain number of high responses would be thrown out.
You mean, for the people who chose the winning value.
That is a different experiment, but I don't think the difference matters to my point.