Counterintuitive problem: People in a room keep giving dollars to random others

Re:Counterintuitive problem: People in a room keep giving do... by ineedasername on Sunday July 09, 2017 @03:07PM (#14731158)

I'm disinclined to attribute them with having much of any point at all. Their discussion is too brief, and their presentation style is more clickbait thance science. They tout a counterintuitive result (It's really not, at least not for anyone used to thinking about data or state changes, certainly not once you think about what the 4th or 5th state change looks like) And then it ends the headline with the overused, even in for content farm clickbait, "you'll never guess what happens next". This tells me they're less interested in discussing an interesting result than getting eyeballs on the page via a shallow observation passed off as insight. If there's a deeper point to be made, they haven't made it.

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Re:Counterintuitive problem: People in a room keep giving do... by evilDagmar on Sunday July 09, 2017 @11:32PM (#14733206)

Thank you. Finally someone said it. This was not the least bit counterintuitive to anyone familiar with randomness.

We're they trying to imply that people should assume the distribution would remain uniform?. That strikes me as more "insane" than intuitive.

It's simply a function of how the tokens are being exchanged that would almost require some actors get the short straw, and since this is happening 100 times per round, that randomness ensure some actors get progressively shorter straws over time, because randomness is neither fair, not even. It's randomness.

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Re:Counterintuitive problem: People in a room keep giving do... by Applejinx on Monday July 10, 2017 @10:26AM (#14736183)

No, they're making a simple digital model that conclusively disproves the notion that 'because disparity in wealth exists, meritocracy exists'. Knowingly or not, that's the point being made.

If you want an even more insanely staggered distribution, let people with resources increase their chances of being given a dollar. This establishes that even in the complete absence of merit, a striking distribution will arise and stably persist, and it's created out of the mechanical behavior constraint of 'possibly being broke and having no dollar to give'. That alone creates what looks like a 'meritocracy' with 'high performers'.

Add literally any form of actual merit, and this gets more extreme still. The funny thing is, the merit-less distribution is not wildly out of line with what people think the distribution should be WITH merit.

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