Aren’t you choosing an anti-Schelling point? It seems to me that people avoid playing low Kolmogorov-complexity lottery numbers because of a sense that they’re not random enough—exactly the fallacious intuition that prompts the shocked faces you enjoy.
Choosing something that’s “too obvious” out of a large search space can work if you’re playing against a small number of competitors, but when there are millions of people involved, not only are some of them going to un-ironically choose “1-2-3-4-5-6″, but more than one person will choose it for the same reason it appeals to you.
So whether this choice is Schelling or anti-Schelling depends on reference sets that are quite fuzzy on the specified information, to wit, the set of non-random-seeming selections and (the proportion of players in) the set of people who play them.
I still think many more people pick any given low Kolmogorov-complexity combination than any given high Kolmogorov-complexity combination, if anything because there are fewer of the former. If 0.1% of the people picked 01-02-03-04-05 / 06 and 99.9% of the people picked a combination from http://www.random.org/quick-pick/ (and discarded it should it look ‘not random enough’), there’d still be 175 thousand times as many people picking 01-02-03-04-05 / 06 as 33-39-50-54-58 / 23. (Likewise, the fact that the most common password is password doesn’t necessarily mean that there are lots of idiots: it could mean that 0.01% of the people pick it and 99.99% pick one of more than 9,999 more complicated passwords. Not that I’m actually that optimistic.)
Aren’t you choosing an anti-Schelling point? It seems to me that people avoid playing low Kolmogorov-complexity lottery numbers because of a sense that they’re not random enough—exactly the fallacious intuition that prompts the shocked faces you enjoy.
Choosing something that’s “too obvious” out of a large search space can work if you’re playing against a small number of competitors, but when there are millions of people involved, not only are some of them going to un-ironically choose “1-2-3-4-5-6″, but more than one person will choose it for the same reason it appeals to you.
Thank you for that insightful observation.
Just to follow up, army1987′s actual choice is:
So whether this choice is Schelling or anti-Schelling depends on reference sets that are quite fuzzy on the specified information, to wit, the set of non-random-seeming selections and (the proportion of players in) the set of people who play them.
I still think many more people pick any given low Kolmogorov-complexity combination than any given high Kolmogorov-complexity combination, if anything because there are fewer of the former. If 0.1% of the people picked 01-02-03-04-05 / 06 and 99.9% of the people picked a combination from http://www.random.org/quick-pick/ (and discarded it should it look ‘not random enough’), there’d still be 175 thousand times as many people picking 01-02-03-04-05 / 06 as 33-39-50-54-58 / 23. (Likewise, the fact that the most common password is
passworddoesn’t necessarily mean that there are lots of idiots: it could mean that 0.01% of the people pick it and 99.99% pick one of more than 9,999 more complicated passwords. Not that I’m actually that optimistic.)