You’re asked to estimate the number of jelly-beans in a jar. You have a group of friends with you. Each friend privately writes down her estimate, then all of the estimates are revealed, and then each person has the option of changing her estimate.

How should you weigh: (a) your own initial, solitary estimate; (b) the initial estimates of each of your friends; (c) the estimates your friends write down on paper, after hearing some of the others’ answers?

I start by asking them how they made their initial estimates, and how they used others'.

This might seem ridiculously obvious, or outside the intent of the thought experiment, and maybe it is and this comment is needless noise. But, I'm sort of worried that the focus on individual estimation and guessing about others' belief-formation processes that I see in most of the discussion here, might lead us to want to overuse our cool individual estimation techniques when asking people about their opinions is easy and a better choice. I'm not sure how well-founded that worry is, but in any case, I'd like to see more discussion on LW of group truth-seeking; and if nothing else, it seems like a good idea to explicitly prime the thought "ask people what they think!".