pedanterrific comments on Apply your knowledge: pick half a number - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Eneasz 04 October 2011 04:49PM

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Comment author: pedanterrific 04 October 2011 09:19:29PM *  4 points [-]

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).

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.

Comment author: shminux 04 October 2011 09:28:35PM *  3 points [-]

I'm curious whether anyone picked a number higher than twenty-five - and what would you call that, a zero-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.)

Comment author: pedanterrific 04 October 2011 09:38:23PM *  0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: atucker 04 October 2011 11:47:30PM 0 points [-]

Every time I've played this in real life there's been someone who's done that.

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