Quote:
Originally posted by tswaney
John, did you find anything interesting with the "occupation" component of your experiment?
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Here's the distribution of occupations:
Engineer (engineer, machinist, mechanic, etc) 5
Info Tech (programmer, tech services, IT manager, etc) 6
Attorney 2
Student 2
Business (sales, consulting, small business, etc) 8
Retired 3
Education 1
Other 3
Did Not State 2
The three lowest picks (1, 1 and 4) were by persons in the "retired" category, which includes self-described ner'do'wells as well as actual retirees; perhaps these folks have too much time on their hands and/or are particularly Machiavellian thinkers.
Of the four picks closest to the correct answer, three were by engineers and one from a consultant.
There were seven picks of numbers exceeding 50, although under no circumstances could the correct answer be above 50. There was no pattern of occupations among these picks.
An interesting thing about this game is that, if we played it again and again, I suspect the picks would get lower and lower - assuming we knew and remembered the results of each previous game. When I look at some of the cyclical stock sectors, I notice that investors seem to be getting more and more anticipatory with each cycle. Perhaps these are related.