[bnegreve]

> the one described has a massive failure mode

Well, if you're really interested in generating random numbers using a group of people, then yes, this may be a problem.

But you should take this as an illustration of the more general problem of generating uniform random numbers from a distribution that is not.

If you think about it this way, author's solution can be applied in a number of practical scenarios. For example, if you want to generate a hash values for objects using properties that are not uniformly distributed. Or if you want to generate random numbers from a physical artifact that is not perfectly uniform.