Either it isn't, or many people do an incredibly poor job. There are even specific events for getting rid of flop gifts (white elephant parties) and a phrase for how to get rid of a poor gift (re-gifting).

I'll do this if I think there's any chance of my wanting the product again, and I don't want to have to pay the "entry fee" twice.

Ah ha, upon wiki'ing, I was bungling how up-arrow notation worked. Thank you!

But why is "3" chosen rather than another single-digit integer? I can see why 0 or 1 would not be chosen, obviously, and 2 could confuse people by appearing non-arbitrary due to the role of binary in computer science. Is 3 simply the first viable positive integer that came along?

I'm noticing a lot of comments about the use of online dating websites. How are we using the word "dating" in this thread? Is it being used to mean "engaging in a systematic filtration of persons in search of a plausible recurrent event/romance/date partner"? I always used it to mean the practice in which you engage once you have found such a suitable partner. Just meeting people is not "dating" to me, and looking through pictures of people online is certainly not dating, as that seems to configure "dating" as unilateral which is out of keeping with the traditional use of the term. To me, dating is what happens when I have already met a person and we are seeing eachother regularly with a mutual understanding that we have mutual romantic interest and that these meetings are for our romantic emotional pleasure.

I didn't know that other people thought they were bad at dating, either. What is there to be bad at? You pick people you wind up not liking, over and over, or something? That doesn't seem to happen with friendships... Or is it that people select on the basis of liking people's personalities, but then they expect that person to function as a business/life partner with character virtues that make them competent and easy to work with, even though that was not what was selected for?

I do not understand why people using dating apps. It is very hard to gauge chemistry, which has a strong physical mannerisms component, through a profile. There is also something dissuading to me about the very fact of someone having a dating profile. It would make me feel like they just wanted something, anything, and I didn't flunk the criteria so I was good enough. I want to date someone who met me and despite having not been on the hunt for a partner, became personally interested in me and I them, on our own merits.

How is that not dating? What do you mean by dating?

I took it to mean "You create some measurement that orders all of the N drivers (labeled with the natural numbers). They do not know their numbers. 90% of them will estimate that their number is >= the ceiling function of N/2".

I am interested in this phenomenon as I have run afoul of it many times. I will describe what I have experienced in the role of the person doing the unwanted calculations. Let's suppose that people have made what appears to me to be a "guess choice", and I do the math and realize that another choice makes more sense optimizing for the thing they are representing themselves to be optimizing for. I point this out, and it is rejected. Here are some reasons I have perceived.

• Laziness proper re: calculations.
• Belief that the time spent doing the calculations is worth less than the value obtained by using the would-have-been information.

But most commonly (in my observation), and most importantly (to me)!

• Fake belief that (see above). It is seen as uncool to choose things too carefully. I do not know the function f where uncoolness = f(would-be value). Risk tolerance corresponds to, or is seen to correspond to, many positive masculine attributes. Someone who would not bother to break down the price would typically be see as bolder, more fun, more focused on the goal (getting into and seeing the movie), etc.