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I take offense to a small part of 1-6 "1600 people had named 50 and obviously they hadn't gone through all the reasoning..." where they pose the Keynes Beauty Contest question. They say pencil to paper the answer is 1. And pencil to paper the answer is 1. But when you put the question to the real world, the answer isn't 1. They show this and should expect this. People don't have pencils or papers or recognize the application of Nash's equilibrium to the problem before them.
So when they wonder why so many people guessed 50 that tells me that they're failing to calibrate their thinky-thoughts to reality. It's not the 50-guessers that didn't run through all the reasoning, it's the instructors who didn't by expecting everyone to hammer in 1.
When you ask people to guess a number 1-10, people say 7, people commonly know this or will answer to themselves 7. It extends that when you ask for a number 1-100, the number will be 77. Undercutting that as we so cleverly would puts us at 50. Making 50 a good guess to give.
To undercut 50 and go with 33 requires us to have an expectation that the majority of people will be sitting at 50. This is an expectation we can't have without having already calibrated ourselves to the reality of the people around us.
To undercut 33 to 22 because you assume everyone was confident enough to undercut 50, is again floating on reasoning that needs to be calibrated to reality.
Occams Razor translates into a lazy razor for people. The easiest answer to give is the first one that pops in there. The slightly more difficult one to give is going one step further to your advantage. And this continues, but not til infinity, since no one has time or energy for that. Unless they're skipping ahead as their first step. People will more probably laze in their answers over investing effort in their answers. And they'll always be a scatter, because we're all god damn snowflakes.
Seems to me, we're in trouble every time we assume everyone is rational. Because even the rational ones are being irrational for holding that very assumption.
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