The official site of author CM Sharp
if (logic == perfect) … then why did 1,000 PhDs get a game-show puzzle wrong, why do auctions sell a dollar bill for $20, and why was the prisoner still surprised? Thirty-five puzzles that reveal where logic ends — and human nature begins.
Dominant strategies. Backward induction. Bayes' theorem. The clean geometry of what a perfectly logical agent should do.
Fairness, ego, fear, hope, sunk costs and surprise — the forces that make real people defy the equations, sometimes wisely.
inside the book
Each puzzle is presented with its history, the trap it sets for your intuition, the resolution (where one exists), and the boardrooms, battlefields and ballot boxes where it plays out today.
PART I
From RAND's Cold War interrogation rooms to Monty Hall's three doors — where individually rational moves produce collectively absurd results.
Chapters 01–17 → Prisoner's Dilemma … Unexpected Hanging
PART II
When saving impoverishes, when pursuing happiness defeats itself, and when a utopia demands one child suffer in a basement.
Chapters 18–27 → Ellsberg Paradox … Paradox of Choice
PART III
Black swans, butterflies, trolleys, and a galaxy that should be teeming with civilizations — yet answers us with silence.
Chapters 28–35 → Goodhart's Law … Fermi Paradox
don't just read them — play them
The book argues that abstract warnings don't work — experience does. So this site lets you fall into the traps personally, safely, and repeatedly.
Play the game that buried Marilyn vos Savant in 10,000 angry letters — then let the simulator run a thousand rounds and watch ⅓ vs ⅔ emerge.
PLAY → CH. 02Shubik never lost money auctioning dollar bills at Yale. Bid against a rival who refuses to quit and feel the escalation trap close around you.
PLAY → CH. 09A scroll-through telling of the Unexpected Hanging Paradox — five days of airtight logic, demolished on a Wednesday at noon.
READ → CH. 17
get the book