Personally I’m surprised it’s only 7%. If the Board was more representative of the public as a whole I’d expect to see something like 10-15% voting that way.
Remember, 5% was the correct choice for a majority of the people who picked it. Currently, there are 379 responses. Thus, 18 of the 28 people who picked 5% were correct to do so.
Haha this is so hilarious! I love it 
I never dreamed this thread would be so entertaining.
The thing about this is that only one person can win the challenge, but in order for that ONE person to win it, everyone else has to act appropriately and help them win. A person who looks ahead and sees which response still needs a vote, and chooses to vote, is sacrificing their only chance of winning so that another person might win.
So looking ahead of time might help you, but if you look ahead and vote for a category that still needs a vote, you obviously aren’t going to win unless yours is the last vote needed. It would ONLY help YOU win if there were only one vote left needed to get the percentages. So, looking ahead of time, for the VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE CHOOSING TO VOTE IN THE POLL WILL NOT HELP THEM WIN. It MIGHT help, if there were only ONE vote needed and YOU were that vote.
I also am shocked that 5% isn’t higher than it is. I see it as amazing that it’s only as high as ~7.5%. I am also shocked that 50% isn’t more like 30%! More of you want to work together than I could have possibly imagined.
…I’m not sure there’s a winner here.
Several of you seem to be ignoring the likelihood that some of the 5% voters are deliberately throwing off the proportions. Do you imagine that you can get hundreds of people to play this game without anyone deciding to mess with it? And given the setup, for someone with perverse motivation, just a single extra vote in the 5% line pushes the whole thing significantly off. It’s gotten farther off since I voted a couple days ago.
Well, the thread title offered the challenge to the whole board, so I’m not surprised that most people ‘played’ in a cooperative spirit.
But when you put it like this, you encourage more people to throw it further off, to guarantee that no individual can ‘win.’
It’s for this exact reason why I think any scientific poll that comes out in the media always shows no less than about 7% of a given population supporting the most absurd principles. Sure, some of that 7% might actually believe that slavery should be reinstated, or women should never be allowed to speak in public, or whatever, but a good chunk of that 7% is probably just fucking with the pollster.
I figured ahead of time when I made this poll that a few people would probably fuck with the results on purpose, and so far, we’ve had one poster here who admitted to doing so already, in this thread! And I smiled and thought, “how predictably quaint.”
Apply this to rectitude and perversion.
I think this is a good exercise in management: if the rules are clearly stated, and the goal is understood, and the rewards articulated, then most people will indeed want to work together and contribute.
I submit that the important part of the instructions was buried too far into the OP to be recognizable, and that there was no reward for anyone to comply with the rules anyway.
Meh. What the fuck do I know? I’m not Tom Peters.
I’m too scared to vote.
i would but i have no idea what you mean.
Voted blind for 10% and got the following results:
This poll will close on 03-08-2013 at 08:22 PM
50% 188 48.96%
20% 75 19.53%
15% 55 14.32%
10% 38 9.90%
5% 28 7.29%
Voters: 384.
Cool poll!
The similar poll that Little Nemo put up shows this perfectly - there are more votes for the 0% option than for the 100% option.
But at the time almost all of them voted they were putting the 5% group increasingly over 5%. More who bothered to read the op and who had some basic reading comprehension then tried to offset them but more who both then came along and bumped 5% even higher. The second person to vote 5% most certainly did so before there were 20 votes cast. The third before 60 were.
As for “winning” – I did not see the goal for any single person to “win” so much as this was a challenge to see if this group could function in a cooperative manner to achieve a very simple goal. There was a token prize for the person who proved that the group achieved the goal, not for having been the person who achieved the goal. It should have been achievable with 20 posters with any sort of functional teamwork and any basic reading comprehension, or barring that, less than 5% believing (sorry but no other way to put this) stupidly that they would need to be the special one to put the 5% vote in.
In short it proves that as a group this board is unable to achieve even *a very basic *goal that requires teamwork because of a minority that is some combination of unwilling to read, unable to comprehend, too stupid to figure out what a reasonable tactic would be (even if voting blind), or perhaps a few who were just jerks intentionally trying to make the goal impossible to achieve.
All in all it shows this to be a pretty pathetic group, brought down by a sizable minority of idiots and jerks. Which perhaps is no great surprise.
Interesting because this group is not a particularly stupid population. And of particular interest to those of us who in our real lives need to get a variety of professionals to work towards common goals that do not immediately effect their own bottom lines but do impact their long term success as a group.
DSeid, you have just described how democracy works.
Okay, let’s try to calm down and ease off insults or finger pointing.
It’s meant to be just a harmless experiment in polling, any outrage and/or hostility should be dialed back a little.
Hahaha!
groan
Yes, this poll is obviously unimportant. But I don’t get the attitude that unimportant means it’s okay to mess up. I’m not being emotional here, I just don’t get it. I don’t get the mischievous impulse that so many people seem to have.
I do understand voting out of spite, but I don’t understand why people finding something important that you do not would make you spiteful.
Do you think most people who voted for 5% at points that no more 5% votes were needed did it out of spite?
Personally I doubt that many did (while I am sure it is nonzero), and the posts here argue against it. Most stated that they thought they should vote blind and decided the best vote in that case was 5%. They were honest about it. It was after the fact that they then said, oh this is stupid then.
Idle Thoughts, yes it was an experiment in polling and behavior of a group. If your instruction was directed at me I fail to understand how discussing what the experiment reveals about us is “outrage” or “hostility” just because we do not like what the results appear to reveal.
If you were honestly voting blind, you should vote for the fifty percent group because that’s where the most votes should be needed. The only people who should have honestly voted blind for five percent are those who went to the trouble of generating a random number and followed its result.