To anyone thinking this is not random, with 42 votes in:
The p-value is 0.895 (this is the probability of seeing at least this much non-randomness, assuming a uniform distribution)
The entropy is 2.302bits instead of log(5) = 2.322bits, for 0.02bits KL-distance (this is the number of bits you lose for encoding one of these votes as if it was random)
If you think you see a pattern here, you should either see a doctor or a statistician.
Well, it's worth noting people seem to be trainable to choose randomly: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85192141/1986-neuringer.pdf
Apropos of the PRNG discussion in http://blog.yunwilliamyu.net/2011/08/14/mindhack-mental-math-pseudo-random-number-generators/ for which I wrote some flashcards: http://pastebin.com/CKif0fEf
You can now write Less Wrong comments that contain polls! John Simon picked up and finished some code I had written back in 2010 but never finished, and our admins Wesley Moore and Matt Fallshaw have deployed it. You can use it right now, so let's give it some testing here in this thread.
The polls work through the existing Markdown comment formatting, similar to the syntax used for links. Full documentation is in the wiki; the short version is that you can write comments like this:
What is your favorite color? [poll]{Red}{Green}{Blue}{Other}
How long has it been your favorite color, in years? [poll:number]
Red is a nice color [poll:Agree....Disagree]
Will your favorite color change? [poll:probability]
To see the results of the poll, you have to vote (you can leave questions blank if you want). The results include a link to the raw poll data, including the usernames of people who submitted votes with the "Vote anonymously" box unchecked. After you submit the comment, if you go back and edit your comment all those poll tags will have turned into [pollid:123]. You can edit the rest of the comment without resetting the poll, but you can't change the options.
It works right now, but it's also new and could be buggy. Let's give it some testing; what have you always wanted to know about Less Wrongers?