I am both a dumbass and irrational
I switched 13 times in the first round until I realized that you had to click twice to get any points at all (dumbass) causing me to switch 14 times in the first round. Then, I switched 6 times in the second round, causing me to be irrational.
I about did the same thing… then for both I just clicked the center door every time. I don’t think that means much more than I’m apathetic when it comes to clicking doors. 
Meaningless bollocks.
I made ZipperJJ’s mistake initially, then just started over again after I re-read the rules. They didn’t explain the numbers would randomly change - or maybe they did and I just didn’t read the rules carefully enough - so even after I started over I tried every door to find the door that would give me the highest points, but after I clicked the same door twice I THEN realized the stupid numbers changed after every click. After that I just stuck to the one door.
I’m not sure what that says about me. That I lack reading comprehension skills, I guess.
I found this to be interesting. Almost a personality test, in a way.
[spoiler]In round one, I clicked on a door a few times and decided that 30 would be the mid-point. If it was lower than 30, I would switch doors. Score: 2277.
I went into round two with a similar approach in mind, but decided that the risk wasn’t worth it and stayed on one door. Score: 2446.[/spoiler]
You switched 13 times more when the doors were shrinking.
More frequent switching when the doors are shrinking is most likely a reflection of an irrational tendency to keep your options open.
This tendency cost you points in the game, but it could have much larger implications in life…I’ll go with that.
I don’t consider myself the most rational person, but what I ended up doing was
sticking with the same door for both rounds… didn’t touch the others. Scored 2300ish both rounds.
Upon further reflection, I have to ask - why is keeping your options open considered irrational?
HazelNutCoffee, if there is no significant difference between the various options (and given the scores reported here, there doesn’t seem to be) the costs of keeping the options open are outweighed by the benefits of sticking with a single, and scoring, choice.
I don’t know why on earth we’re using spoiler tags, but in the interest of maintaining consistency…
Switched doors 16 times on the first round, scored 1518. Switched doors 4 times on the second round, scored 2317.
Can someone tell me what the hell that means about me? 
The rules do not explain the most important point:
the first click on a door doesn’t score
So you should
pick one door at random and click on it repeatedly
Nothing else affects your score as much.
I don’t think this has anything to do with personality or rationality. If you beleive the waffle, you may be gullible. 
It’s not so much that keeping your options open is irrational. It’s the fact that the option you’re choosing to keep open is a bad option.
I THINK that they assume you should have figured out by the second round that the distribution of the numbers is the same for each door, and that the cost comes from switching.
Follow me here:
If you have figured out that switching is the cost – and that’s a big IF; it seems to be true, but they didn’t explicitly state it – and you still switch more because the doors are shrinking, that is irrational.
However, it does not say that you are irrational if you haven’t figured out that switching is the cost.
FWIW I switched 3 times in the first round. Zero times in the second.
I don’t think the game is necessarily showing you how rational or irrational you are, I think it is a cute way to get you to go to his website so that you buy his book. If you read the reviews of the book by itself you may or may not buy the book, but if you read the reviews and excerpts after playing the game and you think about what he is saying in relation to your recent behavior you are more likely to buy a copy, and it is a good way to get people to send the link to their friends and ensure that more people will see that you are selling a book.
The NY Times had a brief piece on the game yesterday, with a link to the paper that was published from the original experiment.
Hmm. It said “costing you points in the second round”, but I scored -more- points in the second round. Odd.
So evidently, the most rational thing to do is to blindly pick an option based on no information whatsoever, and then stick with it no matter what. Ri-iiiight.
I looked at it like I do a healthy diet. You don’t want to pick the same thing every time. You need to mix it up. That is why I got zero points which I assume is very good like a low score in golf.
From ultrafitler’s article, the conclusions of the study were drawn from this aspect of the experiment.
The real conclusion about “rationality” could be drawn about the group based on the comparison of the frequency of switching after controlling for learning. I thought the study at the individual level was weird.
Well, actually, kind of. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but if you subscribe to the efficient market hypothesis, a random selection of stocks with similar profiles perform pretty much as well as index funds based on those profiles. That’s how a stock-picking monkey (as Adam Monk, of the Chicago Sun-Times) can so often outperform the S&P500 and even people like Jim Cramer. I’m not an economist, though, and efficient market hypothesis does have its criticisms. A Random Walk Down Wall Street would be the best place to get a more in-depth analysis and explanation of this.
Ditto. Two switches in round 1 = 2262. Zero switches in round 2 = 2497