Then I did something monumentally foolishly nosey. Can't ever go into details without making it worse, so please don't ask, but it was about the worst, most personally specific possible thing I could have done under the circumstances. Kindly assume it's someone who you care about very much (or who one of your friends cares about very much, or at worst someone two or three steps away, for the community is so well-entangled...) who I may have offended and alter your opinion of me a step away from "trustworthy" and a step closer to "untrustworthy".
Went for a walk into town to clear my head. My favourite sandwich shop had sold out of salad by the time I got there, but this is much less a bad thing than the others.
In news which isn't pertinent to a bad day: happy slightly belated birthday to
jumbach, starcrossedgirl and tranquillo, whose birthdays were yesterday, and also to ericklendl whose birthday was a little further ago but he was so ill at the time he decided to postpone it to yesterday anyway.Results of the game theory experiment: counting the people from the first poll, 8 people went for Foo, 19 went for Bar and 15 went for Quux. Accordingly, going for Foo is worth -11, going for Bar is worth 1 and going for Quux is worth 0. As ever, it's not a competition to try to score more than everyone else, it's a competition to try to score as many as possible.
A very similar experiment was run on a mailing list that
bateleur and others are on. There, the analogue option to Foo turned out to be worth -4, the analogue option to Bar turned out to be worth 0 and, of course, the analogue option to Quux turned out to be worth 0 as well. The three options were called "Be nice", "Be nasty" and "Be cautious"; we wondered whether people would be more likely to choose each option when it had a less emotively loaded name. The distribution here (8/42 ~= 19%, 19/42 ~= 45%, 15/42 ~= 36%) doesn't vary particularly much from the distribution there (2/14 ~= 14%, 6/14 ~= 43%, 6/14 ~= 43%) so I don't think we can conclude it makes a difference from this data set.There is no overtly right or wrong way to play this game, but
bateleur has said that the equilibrium strategy is to pick the first option about 25% of the time, the second option about 25% of the time and the third option about 50% of the time.Many thanks for playing. Debate is now welcome.
