Nornagest comments on SotW: Check Consequentialism - Less Wrong
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Comments (311)
Doesn't that rely on everyone eating candy? One person who doesn't eat candy and therefore isn't invested in the outcome could wreck that.
Also: theoretically, a student could win hundreds of pieces of candy? I'm sure the parents were very happy about that.
Doesn't need to be candy, necessarily. Money's the first thing that comes to mind, but if that's prohibitively costly to maintain while keeping the prizes attractive, you could play with probabilities: build a set of diverse prizes of approximately equal value, say, and instead of money or candy distribute tickets to a raffle where the winner'd be able to choose one prize. That might have some funny consequences in this experiment, though, depending on the quirks of how people think about probabilities.