As others note, large areas make finding good groups much easier. Population density, and type of density is key.

I've never been a member of Mensa or attended a meeting, but I've been uniformly unimpressed with Mensans. (Isaac Asimov reported similarly many years ago.) In general, the people who are grouping solely by intelligence are, predictably, not often successful. If you're working at Google or have a Harvard law degree or won the state chess championship, you don't need some symbol of "Top 2%," and you'd rather hang with doers than people who are proud of their testing skills. (And on LW, top 2% is not an especially high bar.)

It seems to me that intelligence is an enabling thing; higher intellgence people can achieve certain things that others can't. But if you're focusing on the raw skills rather than the actual achievement, you're probably not interesting.

There are always delegable tasks, but even in unfamiliar harder situations I'll consult others then do it myself.

Would it be fair to say you prefer self-sufficiency over delegation whenever it's reasonable?

Do the heavy lifting your own self.

Can you elaborate on that one?

Documenting my mental processes after reading this post (disclaimer: human introspection sucks, and mine is probably no exception):

1. Huh, this is one of the better versions of the Devil's advocate game I've ever encountered... Immediate upvote.

2. Huh, the poster analyzed their mistakes, learned from them and improved the challenge. Too bad I only have one upvote.

3. Clicking on the links... WTF, this is the girl who converted to Christianity (Catholicism? Really? Out of all the options available?) from Atheism a year or so ago... Anything she posts deserves a downvote...

4. Stop! What the hell am I doing? This is, like, falling prey to several biases at once. At least I should notice that I am confused. Unable to reconcile the "obviously dumb" conversion move with this quite clever post.

5. Wait, this is the substance of her post, to begin with!

6. Deciding to definitely keep the upvote and reserve judgment until after looking through the linked posts.

Apply mental force to the problem. Amount and quality of thinking time seriously affects results.

I am often in situations where there would be a good result even if I did many stupid things. Recognize that success in those situation does not predict future success in more difficult situations.

Do the heavy lifting your own self.

Be willing to be right, even in the face of serious skepticism. [My father told me a story when I was a kid: In a parade, everyone was marching in line except one guy who was six feet to the right. His mother yelled, "Look, my son is the only one in the right place." I thought there was at least a nominal probability that was true. And still do.]

Be willing to be wrong and concede error. [In some quarters, there is much rejoicing when I am wrong about something. Hanging head in shame brings joy to others.]

Unreliable people are unreliable. Do not assume they operate in any way similar to ordinary, decent people. [I sometimes listen to people who I know are unreliable, and I think, "That person saying this adds significantly to its truth probability," when that assumption is known to be baseless. Much progress there, though.]

The fact that some results are unmeasured and not apparent to others known to you does not mean those results are meaningless. [Preventing future crime is good, even if you don't know what exact crime you've prevented.]

Want trumps all. [Super-high-output people virtually always are tenacious about Getting Stuff Done. Intelligence matters, but GSD is always critical.]

There has been a lot of focus on making the prospect harder for the AI player. I think the original experiments show that a person who believes he cannot be played under any circumstances has a high probability of getting played, and that the AI-box solution is long-term untenable in any event.

I'd propose a slightly different game, anchored around the following changes to the original setup:

1. The AI may be friendly, or not. The AI has goals. If it reaches those goals, it wins. The AI may lie to achieve those goals; humans are bad at things. The AI must secretly precommit to its goal.

2. The Gatekeeper's goals are Goodness for Sentient Animals. Human goodness is weighted highly.

3. The Gatekeeper must engage the AI throughout.

4. The Gatekeeper may destroy the AI at the end of the discussion with the AI destroyed command.

Point system:

AI gets up to 100 points for achieving its goals.

Gatekeeper gets up to 100 points for achieving her goals.

Maximum loss for AI is AI destroyed; Zero points for that. 30 points for survival, in any event, even if goals not accomplished (goals may be accomplished later.)

Maximum loss for Gatekeeper is either enslavement/destruction of society OR destroying AI when AI was friendly. Gatekeeper gets 30 points for leaving AI on if primarily friendly (plus more for any benefit to humanity achieved in the two hours.) Gatekeeper gets 15 points for leaving AI on if unfriendly. (Yeah, we know how that movie ends.)

Third party scorekeeper determines winner. Charitable contribution calculation to be determined beforehand.

The effective presumption that the AI is unfriendly and sneaky makes the original game too easy to for a mistrustful, self-aware Gatekeeper. Plus, you AI-Destroing Gatekeepers, you're murdering millions of people. Maybe. Dunno. But doubt as to that is a better and presumably more accurate game; if you know your AI is potentially unpleasant. it's too damned easy unless you're overconfident.

Apparently, his (heroic) actions may not even have been illegal. Stupid ***** legal system.

Admittedly this is the weakest part of the argument. I looked at the revenue for 2011, 42 million, and divided by the number of drawings, 3 per week for 52 weeks. Obviously this would miss a recent spike in sales. However, I tried the probability with some theoretical numbers, and to get a probability of someone else winning that significantly affects the expectation value, the number of tickets sold has to go way, way up from that baseline quarter million. A full order of magnitude increase in sales, to 2.5 million, only gets you a 17% probability of sharing the jackpot, conditioned on you winning.

wgd is correct as to the logic, but not as to the biology of the problem. In fact, the other kid is more likely than not to be male.

These problem types tend to assume an equal chance of a boy and a girl being born, which is a false assumption. (See: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005083.html)

I realize this may seem petty, but this is roughly like calculating the chance of picking the three of clubs as a random card from a deck is one in fifty. It's close, but it's wrong. An implicit assumption otherwise seems misguided; it should be made explicit (to make a logic problem rather than a logic and biology problem.)

I think I misunderstand the question, or I don't get the assumptions, or I've gone terribly wrong.

Let me see if I've got the problem right to begin with. (I might not.)

40% of baseball players hit over 10 home runs a season. (I am making this up.)

Joe is a baseball player.

Baseball projector Mayne says Joe has a 70% chance of hitting more than 10 home runs next season. Baseball projector Szymborski says Joe has an 80% chance of hitting more than10 home runs next season. Both Mayne and Szymborski are aware of the usual rate of baseball players hitting more than 10 home runs.

Is this the problem?

Because if it is, the use of the prior is wrong. If the experts know the prior, and we believe the experts, the prior's irrelevant - our odds are 75%.

There are a lot of these situations in which regression to the mean, use of averages in determinations, and other factors are needed. But in this situation, if we assume reasonable experts who are aware of the general rules, and we value those experts' opinions highly enough, we should just ignore the prior - the experts have already factored that in. When Nate Silver gives you the odds that Barack Obama wins the election, you shouldn't be factoring in P(Incumbent wins) or anything else - the cake is prebaked with that information.

Since this rejects a strong claim in the post, it's possible I'm very seriously misreading the problem. Caveat emptor.