I like (a slight variant of) this game as a simple example of an infohazard.
Suppose you’re playing as player A, and the card is initially dealt face down to you. Before you decide whether to reveal your card to player B or not, you also have to decide whether to look at it yourself. Do you look at your own card?
If you’re an ideal UDT agent, whether you look or not (and which card you see) shouldn’t matter. If you’re the kind of person who would always reveal a low card once you saw it, knowing your own card has an expected value of −0.25. Most humans are probably somewhere in between these two points. So perhaps a more interesting question is: how much would you personally pay to avoid being told what your card is?
I like (a slight variant of) this game as a simple example of an infohazard.
Suppose you’re playing as player A, and the card is initially dealt face down to you. Before you decide whether to reveal your card to player B or not, you also have to decide whether to look at it yourself. Do you look at your own card?
If you’re an ideal UDT agent, whether you look or not (and which card you see) shouldn’t matter. If you’re the kind of person who would always reveal a low card once you saw it, knowing your own card has an expected value of −0.25. Most humans are probably somewhere in between these two points. So perhaps a more interesting question is: how much would you personally pay to avoid being told what your card is?