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gwern comments on Rationality Quotes May 2012 - Less Wrong
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I take he does not discuss whether he actually ever did that.
He further claims to have once saved $1,200 over the price quoted on the Internet for a car he negotiated for his daughter, who was 3000 miles away at the time.
Apparently being a game theory expert does not prevent one from being a badass negotiator.
Why did you guess otherwise?
Typically people describing clever complex schemes involving interacting with many other people do not actually do them. Mesquita has previously tripped some flags for me (publishing few of his predictions), so I had no reason to give him special benefit of the doubt.
Maybe many of his predictions are classified because they are for the government?
"I'd love to tell you, but then I'd have to kill you..."
Theoretically could you make an approximation of his accuracy by looking at fluctuations in death rates among relevant demographics?
Even theoretically, you would then need to have perfect information every single other factor influencing relevant-demographics death rates, assuming you somehow magically know the exact relevant demographics. If there is even one other factor that is uncertain, you end up having to increase your approximation's margin of error proportionally to the uncertainty, and each missing data point is another power factor of increase in the margin. Eventually, it's much smarter to realize that you don't have a clue.
Now, take into account that you don't even know all of the factors, and that it's pretty much impossible to prove that you know all of the factors even if by some unknown feat you managed to figure out all possible factors... quickly the problem becomes far beyond what can be calculated with our puny mathematics, let alone by a human. Of course, if you still just want an approximation after doing all of that, it may become possible to obtain an accurate one, but I'm not even sure of that.
Thanks for the food for thought, though.
What does he mean by "price quoted on the Internet"? If it's the manufacturer's suggested retail price, then depending on the car model and various other factors, saving $1,200 over this price sounds unremarkable at best, and a badly losing proposition at worst. If it was the first price quoted by the dealer, it could be even worse -- at least where I live, dealers will often start with some ridiculous quote that's even higher that the MSRP.