In retrospect, our guesswork was a lot messier than it should have been.

Chapter 25:

One set of problem-solving groups had been given the instruction "Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any."

The other set of problem-solving groups had been given no instructions. And those people had done the natural thing, and reacted to the presence of a problem by proposing solutions. And people had gotten attached to those solutions, and started fighting about them, and arguing about the relative importance of freedom versus efficiency and so on.

and

Starting out by looking for solutions was taking things entirely out of order. Like starting a meal with dessert, only bad.

While Less Wrong discussants are usually prone to less fighting and arguing than the norm, they are not prone to being inefficient.

What we should have done was forbade any and all solutions until two days after the chapter was released. We had five full days to guess, we didn't need to have all our solutions down the first twenty-four hours. Not to mention that instead of simpler solutions, we continued to look for answers more complex than the ones already proposed after we thought we already cleared the low-hanging fruit.

While some people have made an attempt to analyze first, listing everything in the room, things that only Harry knows, et cetera, the majority of us just proposed solutions right away. This was probably not what Mr. Yudkowsky wanted.

Word of God:

One thing I did notice was that many readers (a) neglected simple solutions in favor of complex ones, (b) neglected obvious solutions in favor of nonobvious ones, and (c) suggested that the correct hints had been put there for deliberately deceptive purposes.

...which in my mind I parsed as keep it simple, stupid, and you all were looking in the wrong direction and why the hell are you all proposing one preposterous idea after another, are you trying to look intelligent or something.

My only conclusion after reading that was that if we drew a map first we probably would of found the more probable solutions a lot quicker. Also reading through 1.5k+ comments full of solutions was headache-inducing.