I find your hypothesis implausible: The game was not about the ten dollars, it was about a question that was highly important to AGI research, including the Gatekeeper players. If that was not enough reason for them to sit through 2 hours of playing, they would probably have anticipated that and not played, instead of publicly boasting that there’s no way they would be convinced.
Maybe they changed their mind about that halfway through (and they were particularly resistant to the sunk cost effect). I agree that’s not very likely, though (probability < 10%).
(BTW, the emphasis looks random to me. I’m not a native speaker, but if I was saying that sentence aloud in that context, the words I’d stress definitely mostly wouldn’t be those ones.)
Thanks for the feedback on the bold formatting! It was supposed to highlight keywords, sort of a TL;DR. But as that is not clear, I shall state it explicitly.
[TL;DR keywords in bold]
I find your hypothesis implausible: The game was not about the ten dollars, it was about a question that was highly important to AGI research, including the Gatekeeper players. If that was not enough reason for them to sit through 2 hours of playing, they would probably have anticipated that and not played, instead of publicly boasting that there’s no way they would be convinced.
Maybe they changed their mind about that halfway through (and they were particularly resistant to the sunk cost effect). I agree that’s not very likely, though (probability < 10%).
(BTW, the emphasis looks random to me. I’m not a native speaker, but if I was saying that sentence aloud in that context, the words I’d stress definitely mostly wouldn’t be those ones.)
Thanks for the feedback on the bold formatting! It was supposed to highlight keywords, sort of a TL;DR. But as that is not clear, I shall state it explicitly.