How people come up with “random” numbers:
A: “Pick a random number from 1-10”
B: 
°(1 and 10 are too obvious. 5 stands out in the middle. Half way between 5 and 10 is hidden in the mix. It won’t be the same number other picked 
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“Seven”
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/acow6y/asking_over_8500_students_to_pick_a_random_number/ …pic.twitter.com/aufTJjQkk4
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In every Twitter snail race I've participated in so far snail #3 won by a landslide. _
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https://twitter.com/search?q=snail%20race …
(It was my pick too.) -
There exists a nash equilibrium where everyone expects the #3 to win so it gets all the votes. Why #3 though?
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Same logic as
@page_eco's really, except inverted. 1 and 4 are "too obvious, nobody's gonna pick them". Between 2 and 3, "most people are right-handed and drive on the right, so the right choice feels more 'safe'". -
Notably, you have to mentally convert the vertical ordering of Twitter surveys to the horizontal ordering we use to envision numbers (the "Zahlenstrahl") to get there...
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Oddly enough, there's a common explanation for why both "pick the most likely choice" and "pick the least likely choice" come up with the same answer. It's "pick the cattle in the herd that's most likely to survive."
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Love the people who said “0”.
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@hela_luc thought the bit of patter about "everyone picks 7" was just that, but !! -
Not news I’m not impressed
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I'm trying
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Pick a number between 1 and 10 Small brain: 7 Galaxy brain: 0
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Ok, that's all fine and clear, but 0? Who answers with 0 when 1 to 10 ist the given range?
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Contrarians
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yes, that's possible.
Or, perhaps, nihilists...
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But not Romans.
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Maybe part of it is that people understand something other than uniformly distributed when they hear the word "random." I would think it is something like "particularly hard to figure out in advance" and that leads to a search for "least obviously generated by a simple rule."
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Those who scoff at the results are perhaps not aware that "random" is not the same as uniformly distributed. People here sampled perfectly from the empirical distribution. ;-)
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What is a "random number" anyway? I guess they meant "pick a number randomly" but for me it's a fixed quantity and it's equal to 7 :)
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From a distribution that has 100% probability at 7 and 0% elsewhere.
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