= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
shminux comments on Apply your knowledge: pick half a number - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (24)
My mental model of the NPR experimenters suggests that, after running a simulated Keynesian bubble, they are modeling an "anti-bubble", where the participants are expected to pick a very low number, probably 0, which is the number that would let everyone win, were it a cooperative game.
However, my mental model of an average NPR contest participant without any feedback from others is that of a one- or two-leveler (people rarely spend a lot of time thinking about poll answers). The former would expect the average to be 50 and then pick 25, the latter would pick something like 12. Any higher, and you are likely to converge to the fixed point.
The best guess would depend on your exact priors, but, given that there likely to be a fraction of participants who would not recurse all the way, the answer is likely to be non-zero. As any closed-loop model, this one is also subject to positive feedback, so there should be a correction for that, etc.
Of course, if the current average was publicly known, it would quickly drop to zero.
I would be interested in knowing the values of the individual votes, perhaps after the poll is ended. In particular, I'm curious whether anyone picked a number higher than twenty-five - what would you call that, a zero-leveler? I guess someone who picked a number higher than fifty would be a negative-one-leveler.
Actually, a sizable fraction of clever pranksters may get a kick out of thwarting the "rational" choice, since there is no punishment for guessing wrong, and pick 100.
(No, I am not telling you what I picked.)
This thought did occur to me, yes. But I figured the "rational" choice - which is not actually rational, since it's predictably not going to win - of zero was doomed anyway, so chose 1 rather than guarantee a loss with 100 for no purpose.
Edit: Oh. There's nothing preventing you from voting multiple times. Hmm... in that case 49 is probably the best bet.
Every time I've played this in real life there's been someone who's done that.