hegemonicon 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: hegemonicon 05 October 2011 07:15:34PM *  1 point [-]

My estimate:

  • Lets say 40% of the people are going to do a naive estimate of 25 based on half of the average of random guesses between 1-100
  • Lets say 20% recurse one level and guess 12.5
  • Lets say 15% think they're clever and guess super low like 0/.5/1
  • Lets say 15% of people are going to be anchored to 40 and guess 20.
  • And lets say the remaining 10% just guess more or less randomly, the average being 50

This results in an 'average' guess of ~20.5, half of which is 10.25. I actually guessed 10.5 as I used slightly different estimates.

Of course, had I known this was posted on LW, I'd have used higher probabilities of low guesses.