Talk:Platonia dilemma

I have expanded the discussion of the Luring Lottery, but the following points still need clarifying:

--Ekaterin 13:59, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)
 * 1) How close did the magazine come to telling the readers the "superrational" strategy? I believe, from memory, that they introduced the basic concept of superrationality and described how it applied to the Plutonia Dilemma, but left the application to the Luring Lottery (which is similar but not the same) as an exercise for the reader.
 * 2) The details of the superrational strategy need checking and possibly proving. As the article says, you have to start by estimating the number of potential contestants (IIRC, Hofstadter guessed that it would be about 10% of the readership, not 5%).  For the original Plutonia Dilemma, the simulated die should have N sides, where N is the number of participants.  The Luring Lottery is slightly different, because if two people send in postcards, the prize it not wiped out, only reduced in value.  This means that the optimum size of the simulated die is reduced (the probability with which one should send in an entry to get the best possible result is increased), but I can't remember all the mathematical details, and Hofstadter may not have discussed them himself.

"Reputedly the publisher and owners were very concerned about betting the company on a game." <-- If they were worried, couldn't they have just sent in a postcard saying "1000000", and that would have guaranteed the prize would be no more than $1?

Some of the contestants were clearly not thinking rationally. For example, the one who sent in a postcard with a googolplex---even if he had won, his googolplex would have diluted the prize to less than a cent, all by itself.


 * It is you (along with Hofstadter) who isn't thinking rationally: receiving less than a cent is still better than receiving nothing. The "superrational" strategy isn't rational at all for those who don't win the die toss, unless their goal is for the magazine to have to pay as much as possible -- but why would that be anyone's goal? People's goals are self-oriented, and the people submitting astronomical numbers were hoping to win the contest (winning a significant amount of money clearly being out of reach) -- or they were hoping, as a number of us were, to demonstrate how wrong Hofstadter was. -- 98.108.198.236 (talk) 01:20, 19 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Hofstadter doesn't claim to be thinking rationally, right? (I haven't read the book.) Also, in many places you can't "receive less than a cent", so it is equivalent to "receiving nothing", not "better". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.118.164.245 (talk) 22:46, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Either way, the expected monetary award is far outstripped by the efforts made, so the value must be in entertainment alone. Proving DRH wrong might have been one of them. However, it seems obvious that most participants did not think all that deeply and interpreted the column (incorrectly, I know) as: "Send me a description of the largest integer that you think you are able to describe on a post card." 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:5920:D38A:97EF:EAFB (talk) 08:02, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

a new solution
I have a new hyperrational solution for the platonic dilemma. Send a tellegram if and only if your name is the firs in the alphabet of all participants and then share the prize with others. Eugene willow 13:52, 11 July 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Eugene willow (talk • contribs)


 * Clever! However. You need to know these names and trust that the same idea occurs to them. Knowing all names sort of goes against the idea of data sharing among the participants, but the problem is too ill-stated to know one way or the other. Trusting that the same idea has occurred to them nicely exhibits the fatal flaw in the notion of super-rationality: there are a great many ideas (ways out, loopholes, avenues) such as yours that might qualify as super-rational, and you just have to trust that all of them have occurred to you as well as everybody else within a reasonable scope of time. That trust is itself not rational at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:5920:D38A:97EF:EAFB (talk) 07:57, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

...a minuscule fraction of a cent.
From memory, Hofstadter used a phrase describing the total value of the award with a phrase that stuck in my mind. He said the value "was so close to zero that God himself couldn't tell the difference." Bunthorne (talk) 14:31, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Redirect
Should "Luring Lottery" redirect here? JacobLance (talk) 00:45, 18 March 2015 (UTC)