All We Know About Guessing

Guessing is a weird thing. For millennia, it could have meant the difference between life and death. Now it's not as vital, but we still do it every day, whether behind the wheel of a car, or judging what another person might be feeling. From wild guesses to the educated variety, learn everything we know about the brain and how it manages this odd, very human act.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, stuff you should know is going on tour.
Do do do one of the deeds, my friend. Okay,
So starting August eighth in Toronto, that's in Canada. We're
gonna be at dan Fourth Music Hall. And then Chicago,
we're gonna be there the next night, August nine, at
the Harris Theater at Chicago. We want to see your faces.
Step it up, Step it Up. Vancouver or the Vote

(00:23):
Theater September. That's gonna be a great show, I think,
don't you. It's gonna be a great one. And then
in Minneapolis at the Pantageous Theater where we've been before.
It's lovely September. Yeah, and then we're gonna swing down
to Austin. It's gonna be during Austin City Limits, although
it has nothing to do with Austin City Limits. Will
be there October ten, yes, and then we're going to

(00:43):
Lovely Lawrence, Kansas go Jayhawks on October eleven. Then, hey,
if you're in Kansas City or anywhere in that area,
this is your chance. Get in your car. Yeah. Uh,
if you are anywhere near Brooklyn, well, then you should
go to the Bellhouse October. Will be there all three
nights and finally we're gonna wrap it up here in
Atlanta at the Bucket Theater on November four for a

(01:05):
benefit show where we are donating all of the money's
to Lifeline Animal Project of Atlanta and the National Down
Syndrome Society. Yep. So for all this information again visually
and for links two tickets, just go to s Y
s K Live dot com. Welcome to Stuff you Should
Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome

(01:35):
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
Jerry's over there in the corner. Everybody puts Jerry in
a corner, but you shouldn't, uh, and this is stuff
you should not. She's the opposite of baby. Jerry's back.
She was back from the Mall's how where she's been? Yeah?
I remember we we said that she was at the mall.

(01:57):
She was buying a house. She's doing all sorts of stuff. Okay,
but she's back now and things are normal again. Yeah,
she was at the beach and she's now eating in
front of me. What I ate about an hour ago?
Do you want to throw up? Nor do you want more?
I don't. It's it's this weird in between. I'm drawn
to the smell, but I'm also full, so I'm kind

(02:18):
of like, yeah, oh man, what a life. I know eating?
Who needs it? Right? Me? I do too? I love eating?
Love it. You know what else? I love? What? Really
good magic? Like illusions? Well where does uh? What do

(02:43):
you mean? Because that could mean two different things. Well
let me tell you, um, So I went, you mean,
and I went to New York. Recently we saw this show.
It's called in and of itself. It's a one man
stage magic I guess you could call it that illusionist
show by a guy named Derek del Guadio. That's how
you say his last name. I strongly recommend anyone go

(03:04):
see this show. It's it's um I think they extended
it through the rest of the year, but it's it's
like a kind of his life story. It told like
through these different um these different acts, and like just
the the stuff he's doing is not like, oh man,
that rabbit came out of nowhere, nothing like that. It's
all much more psychological than that. But the the basis

(03:27):
of it is that this guy must be just one
of the better guesters walking around today. He's just good
he's also like a card shark. It's just a really
neat show. It's really original and different. But just to
see somebody do something to where they probably are guessing,
but they're doing such an amazing job at it that

(03:48):
it just appears to be magic. That's one of my
favorite things in the world to see, like when he
talks to people and like think of a number, except
obviously more fun and complex than that. Yes, yeah, And
I don't want to give any of it away. I
don't want to give any bit of it away. Like
for anybody who's going to go see it, everyone should
go into it fresh. But um but yeah, just just

(04:08):
after you see it, go back and listen to this
episode again and you'll be like, oh, yeah, totally now.
I think the deal a lot of times with that
situation is powers of suggestion, correct. I don't know. I
don't know, man, I don't know if that's what this
guy's doing or not. No, he's not doing like cold
readings or something like that like John Edwards. No, no, no,

(04:31):
nothing like that. But powers of suggestion in that if
you you can lead someone to to think of a
certain thing that they then guess I guess, So get
it didn't even mean that, but that kind of dives
into what we're talking about, which is guessing in general. Um,
there's this whole like what like science really doesn't have

(04:55):
any idea about how we make guesses. All we know
is that we are capable of making guesses, and that
we make guesses almost constantly, and that like our our
brain is basically set up two guests, Like our construction
of reality is a series of guesses, most of which
pan out to be right, but then can also be

(05:16):
terribly wrong, which is what optical illusions prove, you know. Yeah,
and uh, I found this. I thought it was going
to be more interesting than it was initially when I
picked this one out, so I was a little disappointed.
And then we found like other supplemental stuff that kind
of helped it. But in the end it felt a
little unwieldy. But I think that's just because of the

(05:38):
nature of the topic, Like there isn't a concise beginning, middle,
and end to this kind of topic, you know, no,
because again science is pretty well stumped, like even and
sometimes Chuck, if you'll remember, these can be our best episodes,
like unless the ones where there's just like a clear
cut completely understandable neat explanation are great. And then on

(06:02):
the other end of the spectrum like this one, the
ones where science is just kind of like maybe this
is it. I don't know, this could be it, those
are usually pretty good too, So this could this one
has has potential. Alright, that's my that's my estimation. Well,
I thought it was interesting that in our very own
house stof Works article and they started talking about um

(06:24):
the in days of yr with starting with took took
and you know, basically up until the point where we
could like you know, measure things or prove things, like,
there was a lot of and there's still a lot
of guessing going on, but like guessing was a daily
survival tactic. That's how that's how we learned. Should I

(06:44):
go this way and fall off a cliff, you know,
I'm gonna take a guess? Or should I eat this thing?
Will it kill me? Or like in the case of
Lewis and Clark, I remember, um Clark estimated, and you know,
there's guesses and we'll it in different types of an
estimation is a kind of a guess, even if it's
informed and well reasoned. In Clark's case, of course, he estimated.

(07:09):
I think he's only off about forty miles when they
got to the Pacific. Uh, oh really, I don't remember that. Yeah,
he he estimated four thousand, one sixty two miles off.
He's off by forty I mean that's remarkable. Yeah, but
it wasn't a wild guess. It was Clark being a
very smart dude who probably took copious notes. Not probably,

(07:30):
he definitely took copious notes. Um, but I don't know.
I just never really thought about guessing back in those days.
Could you know you could? You could end up a
bad guest means the end of view, Yes, But if
your friends were standing around watching you guess that that
um lizard over there wasn't poisonous and you can just
go ahead and eat it raw and then you keel

(07:52):
over and die, they learned from your bad guests. One
for the team very much. So yeah, that's before the
universal edibility test. Man, you were just have you been
going through the archives or something? No, but I wrote
that article back then, So that one stuck with me
because you know, I mean, we're I thought you were too.

(08:14):
I'm cursed with that new information in old information getting
squeezed out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, So should we get into this.
I guess, So, I'm not I don't mean to do this.
I'm sorry what saying. I guess it's pretty commonplace, but
it does kind of under underscore just how much we
do guess in our lives, you know. Yeah, here's all right,

(08:36):
let's go ahead and start it with the brain then,
because while you're correct in saying that they don't know
the the pathways necessarily of a guess, um, all different
kinds of all different parts of the brain, not all
the parts, but many different parts of the brain are
at work, which makes a lot of sense when you
think about what different kinds of guesses can entail, whether

(08:58):
you're guessing someone's age or guessing you know, because that
involves like, you know, recognition with your eyeballs or a
memory of someone else who was a certain age who
looked like that, like you're you know, recall, Uh, there's
all different parts of the brain they're lighting up whenever
you're guessing something. Yeah, they think that it's a global,

(09:22):
a global phenomenon, right, like brain brain ely global, Yes,
exactly right. So, um, there's like some region of your
brain that specializes in the particular task at hand. The
thing you're guessing about, whether it's say like volume or
like you said, someone's age. UM, that region of the
brain that that has to do with say numbers, UM

(09:44):
would light up. I think it's the um parietal uh
anterior gyrus or something like that that lights up when
you're trying to guess someone's age based on how they look.
But then that that's just one right using the wonder machine, right,
but that it's just one functional part of the whole

(10:04):
process that the brain is going through. They know that
it's there's a number of different regions that are operating
at any given point in time when you're making a guess.
But they still can't say, well, if somebody's guessing this,
this is what's going to happen. Here's the here's the
cascade that's going to go through the brain. We haven't
reached that point yet. Yeah, they think that, um, if

(10:27):
you're guessing about a visual object or subject, then your
frontal lobe and occipital lobe or at work numerical quantities
like how many uh jelly beans are in that jar.
That's kind of the common thing they mentioned that like
that still happens. Is that still a thing. Um, you know,
who is a jelly bean jar guessing champions. My wife is, yes, longstanding,

(10:53):
her special reasoning is is outstanding. Well. Spatial reasoning and
numerical quantities are a big part of trying to guess
the quantity of something into something right, And and so
if you, if your brain is kind of specialized in
that manner, um, you are probably going to be better
at it than somebody whose brain is not right. So

(11:16):
Umi would beat me every time. My spatial reasoning is horrific. Right,
But um, I'm really good at recognizing faces, so I'm
probably better at at guessing the someone's age based on
their face, um or possibly how they're feeling based on
their facial expression, than she might be. That's a whole

(11:37):
like I didn't even think about that being part of guessing.
But the emotional thing of guessing, uh yeah, like someone's feelings,
what they're thinking like that, that's a whole different thing
than guessing jelly beans in a jar, which is different
than guessing someone's age. It's like all lumped into guessing.
It's really more varied than I ever considered, right, And

(11:58):
so with with um, well, let's talk about the different
different types of guesses you might make that. So I
think what you just kind of did, Chuck, was you
divided um guesses into um like buckets. The two buckets.
I'm trying to decide what the buckets would be called, though,
So one bucket would be UM just kind of work,

(12:19):
working knowledge, and the other would be say, like emotional, right, Like, so,
how many jelly beans are in a jar? Would that
be in the working knowledge bucket? What somebody's feeling based
on your guests, based on say their facial expression, that's
that's emotional um or or intellectual. Yeah, that's right, intellectual

(12:39):
or emotional buckets. Bam just carved him up. But I
think those are kind of like the two categories you
can put guesses into. Even though you can break types
of guesses down further. Yeah, and uh, breaking them down further.
You have your wild guesses. This is when you have
no information, no outside input whatsoever. And you know, you

(13:01):
often say, this is just a wild guess. If I
had to guess, yeah, you're saying here, listen to me,
I can speak, has no basis in factor reality or
anything like that. Then you have your educated guests, which
is in the middle, and that's when you have a
little bit of information. Uh. There's a military term that
I had never heard of called swag, which stands for

(13:25):
um stuff. We all get no scientific uh wild ass guessing,
which is like a guestimate. But it's a military term
by all accounts. Uh. Most people say it started in
Vietnam with General Westmoreland. Um. And you will hear military
people say swag, And that's when you know, I've got
a little information. I'm not just wild guessing here. This

(13:49):
is a ballpark educated guess, right, but it's still less
than an estimate. That's where we have a lot more information. Yeah,
not just a lot more information it you're you're pretty
familiar also with the topic that you're you're guessing at
as well. Right, So Lewis and Clark, I think both

(14:09):
of them, Um, we're surveyors, So they would have had
a lot of training as far as you know, judging
distance goes. They would have had some information to put together.
So Clark coming up with, you know, with an estimate
of how why the continent is and just being off
by forty miles, like you said, that's remarkable. But if

(14:29):
you had had one of us do it, it would
have been a wild guess. So it has to do
with the the training, the expertise really UM, and then
the amount of information you have. That's that's what an
estimate is. Yeah, and you may not even know that
you have information stored away in your brain that you're
recalling when you're trying to hazard a guess on something.

(14:50):
You might just be uh, you might think it's a
wild guess, but you're really kind of picking out something
that happened in your past maybe, right. Or another way
to look at it is that um is intuition, which
is um. From what I understand, intuition is kind of
its own category. But if it's most closely related to

(15:10):
any type of those three guess as we just mentioned,
it would be an estimate. And it comes from years
and years and years of training UM or exposure to
whatever you're guessing at to the point where your guesses
don't even seem like guesses. It just seems like for
knowledge of what you're about to do. Yeah. Like I

(15:32):
used to be really really bad at guessing crowd sizes,
but through our live shows, I've gotten pretty good at
it because when you go to these theaters, you know
how many people are in there, and then you stand
in front of that many people, and if you do
that enough times, I can now say, like, you know,
when people when I'll go to a show or something,

(15:52):
they'll be like, how many people you think this place holds?
I used to be let's see, like I have no
idea I know, but now you say, you know better
around eight or nine hundred people, and you're probably pretty
close within forty miles all back. And that's just because
of exposure and learning, right, And that actually brings up
a really good point that you can actually get better
at guessing. And we'll get into that right after this break.

(16:14):
How about that, Chuck, right mm hmmmm. Alright, So Chuck,

(16:39):
you said that, um, that you got better at estimating
crowd sizes by just performing at our live shows. Right,
So you were terrible at it before, but just from
from exposing yourself to it, going out on stage and
exposing yourself to crowds that you could judge the size
of Um, and everybody clapped yeah, Nelson happointed and laughed. Um,

(17:10):
you you got better at it. And when it comes
to especially but probably both but especially intellectual guesses intellectual
bucket guesses, UM, you can train yourself to get better
at it. And part of that is making a guess,
getting um, pretty much immediate feedback, and then learning from that. Yeah,

(17:30):
like you're wrong, this is what the answer is. It's
like anything else exactly. Do that enough if you're gonna
get better at it. Yeah. Um. And there's this pretty
interesting um I guess. That was interesting little kind of
sidetrack that the author of the Guesses article, Aliah Hoyt Um,
and I have to say, no, it's Aliyah, it's not Alicia. No,

(17:52):
it's Aliyah. There's no say not only is the c silent,
it's not there, it's invisible. So Aaliyah hoyt my hats
off to her because doing supplemental research for this, there
are not a lot of people who are coming up
with really substantial stuff about guesses. It's like it's barren.

(18:16):
It's probably the least amount of research I've ever encountered
in all of our almost thousand plus episodes. So the
fact that she put this together, my hats off to her.
But a sidetrack she takes is to teach the reader
how to um get better at guessing. A jar full
of jelly beans. Yeah, well that was exciting. I mean

(18:37):
that oh yeah, yeah, because always, I mean, my method
was always to pick out a smaller area, like the
bottom inch of the jar, count as many as I
could and estimate that and then multiply that out. That's
actually a great technique. Well, I don't know, I haven't

(19:00):
has jelly beans in a jar since I was probably twelve,
But that was always my method, which has a little
there's a little bit of method to it, but it's
definitely not as good as as this one. Okay, So
so this one it sounds a little more complex than
than it actually is. But if you say, if you

(19:20):
look at a jar and it's filled with jelly beans,
you can say, um, that jar is the volume of
that jar is say a court Okay, But then you
kind of wanted to begin with sure, right, But you
can learn, right, you can just look around, Like here's
the point. If you want to get good at guessing

(19:40):
jelly beans, it just takes a little bit of work.
Most people would walk up, say a million jelly beans,
and they're off by like nine thousand. They're like, well,
I'm terrible at guessing jelly beans. I'm going to sleep
for the rest of my life. But if you want
to get good at guessing at jelly beans. All you
have to do is poke around, learn a few things,
and then you can basically apply those every situation. And

(20:00):
one of the things you would need to learn is
how to judge the volume of the container to start.
So that's one part, right yeah, which you know most
people would do that that by comparing it to like
a milk jug or a two leader bottle or something
like that, right, But in this case to get a
really accurate estimate, you would want to know specifically, say
how many ounces a container held, correct um. And then

(20:24):
another thing you would probably do if you started researching
guessing jelly beans and jar on the internet, um, you
would you would run across some research that found that
if you have uh, spherical objects in a jar, they
typically take up about if you fill the thing up,

(20:44):
they take typically take up about sixty of actual volume
of the jar. And that's if it's they're just randomly dumped. Right.
So if you come across a jar and you say, um,
and it's filled with like perfectly round um, okay, perfectly
around bouncy balls, right, um, you can say, well, those

(21:07):
are spherical and they're taking up about six of the
jar so all I have to do is figure out
the um the basically the size of each of them
ball right, and then divide it by the volume, and
then bam, you just guessed how many are in there,
and you're probably pretty close to right. So this all

(21:30):
sounds mind numbing. I've got a little um, a little
trickle blood coming out of my ear right now. But
you can the whole point, and you can train yourself
to make better guesses, to estimate better. That's the whole point. Yeah.
And if it's a non sphericle, by the way, like
if it's peanuts or something like that, or ice cubes,

(21:52):
not disgusting circus peanuts. Oh man, that conjures up so
many memories. Did you like those? Well? I think I
might have when I was a kid, but I haven't
had one in forty years. But I still remember the
taste you me just had something. She says, they still
hold up, and I'm like, I didn't like him, then

(22:13):
I'm not gonna like him now. Well, they hold up
for you in a bad way, right right, Yeah, exactly.
So I know, I know I'm not supposed to yuck
anyone's young, but yuck. So uh, if it's circus peanuts.
Let's say, Um, that would be between fifty and of
the space, not sixty four. Yeah, So, uh, what is
you me's method? Did you ask her? She says she

(22:36):
just kind of knowsh So she's a precock exactly. She
she shaves her head once a while and lays around
in a vat of liquid. Wow, that would be see,
I would that would scare me if that would if
that was my wife's answer, if she just like kind
of walked by and said I just know, right, yeah,
I would be like, well, what else do you just know? Yeah?

(22:58):
She's kind of unstoppable too. You have no idea how
many calves we've won at county fairs in the last
year alone. Our house is overrun with them. Um. All right,
So that's just guessing volume of a thing and a
thing that's an it's intellectual guessing, right, But you can
train yourself to guess better. What's really up for for

(23:20):
questioning is whether you can train yourself to get better
at the other bucket of guessing, emotional type of guessing.
Right where you're walking around and you are interacting with
other people and you're making judgments about how they're feeling. Right,
then about what they're thinking, right then what their motives are. Um,

(23:40):
you know, how how well they're actually listening to you
all of these things right, It's part of our interaction
with other people. And there's something that UM two researchers
called X and took great combo that back in established
this kind of field of inquiry in which they were
trying to it to the bottom of what they called

(24:01):
empathic accuracy, which is how accurately we can we can
surmise what someone actually is feeling or thinking just from
interacting with them. Some people are supposedly good at it,
some people are not. And from what I saw, there's
a big kind of push and pull about whether it's
worth practicing or whether you should just not do that

(24:24):
at all for the sake of your own sanity and
just say, if you tell me that you're in a
good mood, I'm going to take that at face value.
And if you're actually not, then you're you're covering up
your feelings for your own reasons, And that's that's fine.
If you want to just keep them to yourself, that's fine.
If you want to share them, I'm here, but I'm
gonna I'm gonna take what you're saying on face value,

(24:46):
so Bully, for you, that to me is sanity, like going,
how are you really feeling? That's uh, one can spend
a lot of time doing that, So can I share
a little bit about myself here? I know it's weird,
it feels gross, but um. For a very long time, Chuck,

(25:10):
I thought that I was a born and bread and
path that like I could understand what anyone was thinking
and feeling, maybe even better than they knew how they
were thinking and feeling. And I finally finally came to
the hard truth that I was wrong almost all the time.

(25:33):
And in figuring this out, like this was really jarring,
and it took a little while for me to like
really for this to sink in. But once I figured
out that I'm actually terrible at reading engaging other people's
thoughts and feelings, it was one of the most liberating
things that's ever happened to me because I just stopped.
I stopped, and I realized how much of my life

(25:54):
I've been walking around wasting just thinking about you know,
what people really think in care? You know, do people
really like me? They probably don't? Or do they? Or
or what did they mean by that look or whatever,
and just taking people in life on face value, UM
is so much. It's just it occupies so much less

(26:15):
of your mind on any given moment. It's just great.
That's my prescription. Stop trying to figure out what other
people are really thinking and feeling. You should have You
should have just asked me a long time ago. And
when he told you, I was like, you're terrible at that. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I don't know if I want to listen. You know,
it took it took a little while, but to walk
through their own doors. You know what I'm saying. That

(26:37):
is well put man, you're you're a stoic sage. So
cognitive distortion is is a phrase you hear pop up
a lot when it comes to assessing another person's emotions.
And these are these inaccurate thoughts that you have in
your brain. Sometimes they leave to negative thinking or encourage that.
I think probably most times that's probably the case. UM.

(27:00):
And then polarized thinking is another bucket I guess since
we're bucketting everything today, UM, which is you know, everything
is great or everything is terrible. And the example they
give in this in this article is you know, it's
simply I mean it's a little boy reading a girl's
face that you know she doesn't like me, but that
that's a kid in elementary school. You can apply this

(27:21):
to anyone walking into a room and basically reading either
the room or reading a person and saying like, you know,
I don't like the way that that person just looked
at me. Um, that's bad, and so I don't think
they like me. And those are both of those things
at work, cognitive distortion and polarized thinking, right, which which

(27:44):
I think polarized thinking is a type of cognitive distortion.
I think that's the umbrella term for that kind of thing, right, Yeah,
that makes sense, so um yeah, I think this is
kind of where you get to why a lot of
people are terrible at guessing or get get their guessing wrong,
especially when it comes to what other people are thinking
and feeling. Is that your guess is, whether you realize
it or not, are actually colored and come through a

(28:06):
lens of your past history. Right, So like if if
you were raised in a house where people your family
members are really critical of you and one another, if
you see two people in a corner like kind of
like having a quiet conversation but laughing too, you're probably
gonna think they're laughing at you, even though they may
not even be paying the least bit of attention to you.

(28:28):
But because of the history of how you grew up,
that's what you're gonna guess at, right. Whereas if somebody
was raised in a house where they were instilled with
a lot of confidence and like a great sense of humor,
that person might just think, man, they must be talking
about something hilarious. I wish I knew what the joke was,
or they might have so much confidence in sense of

(28:48):
humor they might even walk up and engage them and say,
what do you guys laughing at right? Huh? And if
they nothing, never mind, then you may be onto something. Right.
But there was this, um there's this blog was a man,
I wish I could remember what the site was. I
apologize sight, but it was basically like stop trying to
read other people's minds was the gist of it. And
they actually used that example, and they went on to say, like,

(29:12):
even if the person who thinks that that they're laughing
at them turns out to be right, that's not the
worst thing that can happen to you. Yeah, it's fine,
who cares you know, like like some people aren't gonna
like you, some people will. It doesn't really matter. Like
if somebody doesn't like you, you've got to have a
little more self confidence than the let that just completely

(29:34):
derail your day. Yeah, and you and you have to
find it within yourself. Yeah. Sure. And some people get
that through years of therapy. Some people are born with it,
some people never achieve it. Yeah. I think it's you know,
even if you are born with I think you can
lose it from time to time. If you're not born
with it, you can gain it from time to time.
But it's not something I think you have every moment

(29:56):
of every day necessarily. Yeah. Boy, people with just much
confidence or so annoying, they really are because everyone wants that,
you know. I think that's why it's annoying. Sure, just
like man, I wish I could be that confident about everything.
I hate that guy, and then you end up in
a corner talking to somebody else about how much you
hate that person. Is so much confidence totally lost on

(30:18):
the other person. So I have another theory that's not
scientific at all. It's just my personal theory that when
it comes to guessing things, your own not well your
past experiences certainly influence it, but your own how you
are also influences, like oh yeah, like I think a
liar is more apt to think people are lying to
them precisely. Yeah, no, that's absolutely I agree. I was

(30:39):
gonna say that's absolutely true, but I agree with you. Yeah,
because who knows. It's just a theory, right, but I
mean it's it's based it's based on some pretty ancient
folk wisdom, like that whole thing about how um you know,
when you're pointing a finger at somebody three fingers pointing
at you, or judge not lest you be judged. Like
when you think about people in that way, you think

(31:01):
that they're doing the same thing to you, even when
they're not. It's your own, um hilarious little personal hell yeah,
and it's not always that, Like, you know, I think
that dude's ripping me off. Maybe you've been ripped off
before and that's where that's coming from. Or maybe you've
ripped someone off before, but about one of the two
has happened, I think, though. What more, what you're what
you're talking about is are like core core character traits though,

(31:24):
like judge, being judgmental or being a liar, or um,
you know, being a b S or something like that,
like when when you do notice that, though, what's great
is there's so much room for growth when you when
you realize that that, like, wait a minute, I think
everybody's judging me because I'm so judgmental. I need to
work on being judgmental. What's what's almost magical is that

(31:47):
when you when you realize that and you work on
not being judgmental, you stop thinking that other people are
judging you, and your life is just freer. Well, there
are these uh psychologists um and all over this article
that uh Aaliyah just rocked my world with that wrote,
and one of them was talking about these interpretations without evidence,

(32:10):
and her advice, which is very simple and it seems
like a no brainer though, is to like maybe just
focus on things you know to be true and not
inventing and surmising, like well what if what if they're
talking about this and you know you're you're just kind
of inventing all that. Like if you concentrate on what
you know to be true, then life gets a lot simpler, right,
But that that same shrink also pointed out that one

(32:33):
of the big problems with guessing and especially guessing incorrectly.
Is that, Um, we tend to forget that we're guessing
at stuff. We take our own guesses as as fact,
and since they can be so horribly wrong. Um, if
you if you're guessing that other people are judging you
even when they're not, Uh, you're gonna basically walk around

(32:55):
feeling judged all the time because you think that that's
absolutely accurate when it's when it's not necessarily fascinating. All right,
you want to take a break. I was just gonna
say the same thing. All right, Well, we'll take a
break and we're gonna come back talk a little bit
about guessing on tests, how to win it rock, paper
scissors and apes and guessing. M h all right, So

(33:40):
we we've talked in esoteric terms about guessing so far.
But I think what everyone really wants to know is
how do I pass a multiple choice test? Right, because
that's another kind of guessing. Um, it's you know, guessing
runs the gamut, uh, from emotional to stuff like this.
There have been different theory over the years, Like well,

(34:01):
first of all, back in the day and I guess
until semi recently, for like the S A T and
A C T and other standardized tests. You would be
penalized for an incorrect guest. I don't remember that, do you. Yeah, yeah,
well you gets something wrong. It's like a quarter point deduction.
I think was the deal. Oh it sounds familiar. I
think I may have blocked it out. But they don't

(34:23):
do that anymore. So now they say guest guest guests
if you don't know the answer, um, and you know
they're there. That has run the gamut from always guests
C because it's in the middle to uh, this one person.
I don't necessarily agree with this one, but they say,
just choose the same letter every time, like always guests B,
and you're gonna be right one out of every five

(34:44):
times if it's A B, C, D right. Which makes
sense though, I mean, because if you jump around, you
lessen your chances every time, whereas if you use the
same one, you have the same chances of getting it
right every time. Um. But this guy wrote a he
actually did a little studying. Um, PAULA. Pound Stone. That

(35:05):
wasn't his name, was it. It was William pound Stone,
her brother. Yeah, and he did actual research on He
studied tests and did a statistical analysis of one hundred
different tests, ranging from middle school, high school, college, professional exams,
driver's tests, firefighters, radio operators. He studied all kinds of

(35:29):
tests and he has four what he calls four ways
outsmart to multiple choice tests, and a couple of these
make a lot of sense to me. The first one,
he said, is to ignore conventional wisdom because you kind
of always have heard teachers say like avoid answers that
say never, always or none, so like all of the

(35:49):
above or none of the above, don't choose those, And
he found the opposite to be true. Yeah, he found
that none of the above are all of the above
are correct of the time. Yeah. So if that's offered
up as an option and you have, first of all,
we should couch this with always try and you know,
deduce the answer with intelligence, well yeah, pound Stone says,

(36:13):
there's nothing. None of this is meant to replace knowledge
of your subject, and you get knowledge of your subject
by studying ahead of time. But he's saying, if you're
facing a question on a multiple choice test and you
have no idea what the answer is, there's some techniques
you can choose to to to increase the likelihood that
your guests will be right. Right, So all the above

(36:34):
or none of the above. If you really have no
idea about that, I would I would say pick that one. Um.
That's weird though, because later on he says he says
so first he says, ignore conventional wisdom, but then later
on the one piece of conventional wisdom I've always heard,
um he says, is actually true. That is that you
want to choose the longest answer on any multiple choice test, right,

(36:57):
because if if you are saying something's true, most of
the time you have to add qualifying language to make
it absolutely true, because you don't want somebody come back
and be like, well, that's actually not quite true. So
when you start adding qualifying language into an answer, it
gets longer than the other ones, and the the test
writers probably not going to go to the trouble of

(37:20):
making the wrong answers similarly long. So the longest answer
is very frequently the correct answer. Yeah, I thought that
one was a really good piece of advice. That's the
one I always heard. That's really the only one I've
ever known. Did you remember scantron sheets? Did you ever
were you ever so recklessly wild that you like made

(37:44):
a Christmas tree out of a test? Did you ever
have the gall to do that. Oh, I think never
did bad because there are kids that listen to this.
But I had to take a test one time that
was not for school, but it was something I didn't
want to do. I won't into the details, but I
made a big snake and it was bad and I

(38:07):
looked back and I'm ashamed of it. I made a
mockery of their process. Uh. And I wasn't that kind
of kid. I don't know what happened. I was generally
a good kid and a good student. I'm surprised to
hear this, I know, but it sticks. It's I feel
so bad. It still really stands out in my mind.
Is what what a jerk move that was on my part.
I'm not only surprised, though, Chuck, I'm a little delighted

(38:30):
outed myself. Um alright, So one of the other pieces
of advice from Dr pound Stone doctor he's no doctor.
He did write a book, though, It's called Rock Breaks
Scissors Colon. Why does everything have to have a colon?
Now makes it smarter? Rock Breaks Scissors Colin a practical

(38:50):
guide outguessing and outwitting almost everybody. One of his other
ones is to look at the surrounding answers because he's
found that the correct answer choices are rarely repeated consecutively,
so you rarely get two b's in a row as
the answer. So if you definitely know the answer in
front of it and the answer behind it, then it's
probably not one of those two. So if you you've

(39:11):
just whittled down your options, yep, not good advice. No,
not not that at all. Um. And the last one
he's got eliminate the outliers. If there's anything that that
seems like it doesn't really fit with the rest of
the stuff, you can automatically get rid of that. And
then conversely, if there's anything if there are two answers

(39:33):
that seem extremely close, they probably can be gotten rid
of as well, because it's the same thing basically. So
if you have say five, five potential answers, and one
of them doesn't fit with the other four, get rid
of that. Two of them are similar, get rid of
those two. You're down to two. You got a chance
of getting at right. Yeah. I thought the example they

(39:55):
used in here was pretty fascinating because they didn't even
use the question or give the question shton on This
s a t practice test they just give the answer
for A, B, C, d um haphazard, uh is two radical,
inherent is, the controversial, improvises to startling, methodical is the revolutionary,
derivative is to gradual. And if you just look at

(40:17):
the right hand side, you have radical, controversial, startling, revolutionary,
and gradual, And obviously gradual stands out is just being
different than those other words. Radical, controversial, startling, revolutionary, gradual
doesn't makes sense, right, So that makes I mean, that's
really a good piece of advice. And then if you
look on the left hand side for A and C,

(40:38):
haphazard and improvised are really close. So he says you
should eliminate those two as well. Yea, I wish I
would have had this kind of advice for the S
A T. Well, I'll tell you what. That's an actual
S A T set of answers. So if you ever
run into haphazard, radical, inherent, controversial, improvised, startling, methodical, revolutionary,

(41:00):
and derivative gradual, you want to go with the methodical, revolutionary,
And we just got you into college, you ever wanted
to take the S A T again, Like, now, no, no,
that's funny, I really don't. I've never wanted to. I was.
I've been glad since the moment I finished that test
that I was done. I only took it twice. I

(41:22):
took it once and I was like, good enough. Yeah,
I took it twice. I did not score very well
the first time, and I scored pretty well the second time,
and I was like, I don't want to know which
one is the real me. I said, So I'm done. Yeah,
I scored blandly the first time, and I was like,
that's fine, that's fine, that's fine. I'll get by my

(41:43):
my wits and real life skills. Look at you. You've
done great. I've done okay. Um, so you want to
talk about rock paper scissors a little bit? Yeah, I
thought this was awesome. Our friends over at Motherboard and
we can say that because we used to have a
short lived column on Motherboard from vice Um. They have
a German outfit called appropriately Motherboard Germany, and they ran

(42:07):
a post um called win at rock paper Scissors every
Time with math colon What's with the colon's And they
basically got into how using game theory, you can win
at rock paper scissors basically all the time. Yeah they did, uh,
or they didn't do the research. But they got together

(42:28):
with some researchers at the University of hang Zoo in China,
and UM they got three hundred and sixty students to
pair up and play three hundred rounds each of Rock
paper scissors, And then they tracked that please please let

(42:48):
us stop, and they said, no, this is communist China.
Do it again again. Uh. So they charted all those
out and then summarized it, uh with some strategies. I
don't know if this would you would win every time? No,
I mean there's always like the what they call in
Rock paper scissors, the October surprise where somebody just pulls

(43:11):
something out of nowhere. Well, so I mean kidite, right, yeah, yeah,
those are off shoots. Remember kids that would do those?
Oh really yeah, some interesting people. Yeah, they would add
other other weapons basically, well, the the UM this the

(43:32):
Motherboard article talks about. UM. There's this other guy who
came up with UM a whole different variation of it.
That's like or twenty six different different possible ones. I
would never remember all of them, No, how could you?
But at least one guy does. No one can remember things, right,

(43:53):
but so so okay, there's a few things and this
this falls in line with learning how to get better
at guessing, um, how many jelly beans are in a jar.
If you arm yourself with a little bit of fore knowledge,
you can better guess at what your opponent's gonna come
at you with. In a game of rock paper scissors.
Starting with that, men tend to open a game with rock.

(44:14):
Of course they do. Yeah, that's such a man thing,
rock smash, you know, right, So if you're if your
opponent as a man, um, and there's pretty good chance
they're gonna come out with rock the first time, go paper. Yeah,
although they do say statistically the opening uh scissors is

(44:35):
the one that will win you the most games. But
I guess that's if you're not playing a man. They
kind of counteract themselves or contradict themselves statistically. More women
play rock paper scissors. I guess here's one I thought
I don't think, so here's one. I've been making a
lot of this stuff up in this episode. Um, here's

(44:56):
here's one that I thought was kind of funny. Basically,
this is like the baby ru move, say what you're
going to pick before the game, like I'm gonna pick
scissors next, and then the persons like, they're not gonna
pick scissors, but you just psyched them out. And when
you throw scissors, baby, they're gonna be blown away because
they threw paper and they thought you were gonna throw
a rock. It's like that the Princess Bride. And what

(45:19):
part was that with the man sitting at the place
talking about the poison drink? Oh yeah, yeah, remember like
trying to get the other guy to drink the poison
drinksh yeah, he was awesome. H inconceivable? What is another strategy?
Um to counter attacks? So if you played scissors and

(45:42):
your opponent plays rock on the first move, uh, and
they win, obviously the chance that they h they have
confidence now in that move, so you might be able
to guess that they will play rock again because the
chances are pretty high that they will do. So then
you anticipate that play paper. So basically it says play
the option that wasn't played in the previous round, right,

(46:03):
And you can also mirror um your opponent. Right, So
if you just want around, play what your opponent just played,
because they probably are thinking that you're going to play
with the same gesture that you won with a second ago.
Really throws them off. So the idea is they're probably
going to play the same thing that they just won

(46:24):
with and if you one don't do that, and that
will frustrate them too. That's the rock paper scissors version
of why you're hitting yourself. You get into that thing
when you're you both throw rock, and you throw rock again,
you both throw a rock and you keep That's when
the psychological warfare starts, like who's gonna break first and

(46:45):
go with paper and then ideally you go with scissors
and you have thus outsmarted your opponent. Right, So interesting,
So we were talking um, you mentioned that we were
going to talk about apes, right, Yeah, I didn't fully
understand this, so maybe you can help me. I don't
know that, um, that science fully understands it, but basically so,

(47:10):
so let me give you an example here. Okay, we
were talking about how the brain. They're trying to figure
out what regions of the brain are activated to form
like this cascade of thought that results in a guess. Right.
One of the things I ran across was one theory
of how we guess what other people are going to do, UM,

(47:31):
is through mirror neurons, where if we see somebody doing
something our mirror neurons are activated, and it puts us
in a mind of how we feel when we're doing something,
and we use that past experience and that current sensation
of like the example I ran across with somebody grabbing
an apple, to guess what the person is going to

(47:52):
do next. Right, So you would say, um, well, I
know most times when I grab an apple, I take
a bite out of it because I'm usually hung. Agree
when I grab an apple, that's after I rub it
on my shirt to give it a nice shine. Right, Well,
that's that's just showboating. If you're gonna if you guess
the person is going to rub it on their shirt
first before taking a bite, that's showing off. But that's
so your mirror neurons are the part of your brain

(48:14):
that's triggered that that um that that sets that off, right,
that gives you that the basis the foundation for making
a guess of what the person is going to do next.
And then it gets run through again that lens of
your past experience, your history, everything from how you were
raised to what you do with apples, to what you've
seen other people do with apples, and you come up

(48:36):
with a short list of possibilities of what the person
is going to do with that apple, and it includes
rubbing out on their shirt, taking a bite, putting it
away in a cupboard, throwing it at a wall. And
then you're going to pare down based on what you
know about that person, like is that person a neat freak?
If so, they're probably going to put that apple away

(48:58):
in a cupboard, which who as that except for neat freaks,
And you may be right at at your guess, right, well,
they're definitely not wall throwers at least right right, because yeah,
so if and that's that's how you that's how Apparently
that's one theory for how we make guesses, starting from
brain based, going through personal history and then making the guests.

(49:20):
And what some research found was that ultimately what we're
doing here is called theory of mind, right where we
are have a capability of bestowing the idea that other
people have thoughts and feelings on other people, right that
we it's so common to us that we take it

(49:41):
for granted that we can attribute mental states to other people.
But that's that's a pretty significant thing. And for a
very long time, researchers thought that just humans were capable
of of that. But they found out that no, actually
some apes, at the very least just apes UM can
do the same thing. They can attribute mental states like

(50:01):
thoughts and feelings and emotions to other apes. UM. And
that's that shows like a higher form of reasoning. That
was basically the gist of it. That makes sense, And
they found that true in chimpanzees, Benobo's and orangutans. H.
That's pretty neat, it is. And one of them, so

(50:21):
sa Um. Sasha Baron Cohen, his cousin, Simon Baron Cohen,
is one of the leaders in UM in theory of mind. Yeah,
we've talked about him before, I remember, but UM. One
of the one of the big areas that it like
influences is autism. UM that that people with autism tend

(50:43):
to have more difficulty attributing mental states and theory of
mind to other people than people who don't have autism. Right,
And but one of the one of the ways that
they find this out, and I think one of the
ways that they detect autism and young kids is by
attributing also beliefs to other people. This is like an
early part of human development. And apparently apes are good

(51:05):
at it too. Where you are an observer, right, and
you're watching a scene and there's a little boy named Tommy,
and Tommy comes in the room and he grabs the
three Musketeers off of the kitchen counter, and he walks
over to a chest of drawers and he puts it
in one of the drawers and walks out of the room. Well,
Sally comes in, and the narrator says, Sally is really

(51:28):
hungry for three musketeers. She knows it was last on
the table. Where is she going to look for the
three musketeers? And people with um with theory of mind,
who are able to attribute false beliefs to other people,
will say, well, Sally is gonna go look on the table,
even though it's not there any longer. Because Tommy put
it in the drawer. You can know that Sally can

(51:52):
believe something that's no longer correct. If you have trouble
with theory of mind, and specifically if you're testing for autism, UM,
that child, the child with autism might say, well, Sally's
gonna go look in the drawer because that's where it is.
They have trouble attributing false beliefs to people. What's true
is true and everybody would know that. And that's one
way that they test for autism. And it has to

(52:14):
do a theory of mine. Interesting, isn't it? And it
has with it all has to do with guessing. Man,
you got anything else? Well, just that Tommy should uh
not be so touchy? Well? Yeah, and like share the
Three Musketeers. Yeah, do you know? Do you know why

(52:34):
three Musketeers are called that? I have no idea, my friend.
It used to be a Neopolitan candy that came in
three different pieces, chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla, and they just
went with chocolate after a while and kept the name
because why not. Yeah. Interesting, Well, let's say it about

(52:54):
three Musketeers for today, and hey, Chuck, before we go
to listener mail, I want to give a huge congratulations
from us to Stephen and Jane, our buddies the Bars,
on the birth of their first born child. Yeah, how
about that congratulations you guys? Good looking baby too? Is
they're not all good looking? No? No, it's true, especially

(53:19):
like right after birth. And because they're New Yorkers, they
walked home from the hospital. Like, how great is that?
They I'm surprised they didn't take the subway but that's
what you do. It is. They are pretty New York.
It's awesome, so they congratulations. It's one congratulations Bars. Okay, well,
since we said congratulations Bars, it's time for a listener mail. Yeah,

(53:41):
this one was a little long, but it's about registering
to vote in Texas. We got an email for Monica
and her story goes as such. Uh, in two thousand thirteen,
to move from Alabama to Texas at a really horrific time,
trying to register to vote where I went to the
county clerk's office. I looked online to check what I needed,
downloaded the application so I could have a filled out
in advance. It took my Alabama driver's license, my lease,

(54:04):
my birth certificate, and because I am divorced, my divorce
decree stipulating my legal name change. You'd probably think that
would be else you needed, right right? No. No. Once
I got there, I was told that the lease was
not sufficient prove residency and that I would need to
bring two pieces of official mail, like utility bill, tax bill.
So I leave after spending the better part of a

(54:25):
day waiting in line waiting UH for my power and
gas bill to com in order to add the other documents.
A couple of weeks later, with all of the documents
in hand, I took another day off work went back
to try again. This time, the clerk looks over the
divorce decree and notices my name change wasn't to go
back to my maiden name. Uh. This was a name
change that was ordered by a court in Alabama and

(54:46):
explicitly spelled out in a notarized document that the clerk
was disputing its validity. When I asked what the problem was,
he said, well, that's in Alabama. If you want to
that to be your official name in Texas, you have
to go through the courts. Uh, have a a draw
at noon in the center of town with the judge,

(55:07):
a shootout. What's that called a quick draw? Now? He said,
you'll have to go through the courts and have it
declared here in Texas. After literally blinking at him silently
with my mouth agape for a moment, I said, you're
telling me that the divorce in Alabama is a valid
because it was judicated in Alabama, that I am going
to have to go through the whole process of getting
a divorce again for it to be official in Texas.

(55:27):
Is that correct? His reply was, well, when you put
it that way, it sounds silly, but yes, so I
demanded to speak with a supervisor. The clerk got the supervisor,
who looked over everything and asked why I didn't just
go back to my maiden name, which I replied, it
doesn't matter what I changed my name to. You have
the official document, signed by a judge and notarized, and
this should be all you need because of the Constitution

(55:50):
of the United States that all judicial rulings and contracts
that are valid one state are valid in every state.
At that point, the clerk walked off. This supervisor said okay,
gave my stuff to another clerk who simply smiled, entered
my application and took my check uh, pointing me toward
the desk where I could get my picture taken. Uh.
And then she closes by saying, imagine how this would

(56:12):
have gone. I would have been an hourly worker, had
less of an understanding boss and not known about the
ins and outs of the Constitution, or didn't have access
to all these documents. Chances are I would have been
disenfranchised driving around with an expired license. These laws are
absolutely created to suppress voter registration and participation and they
work spectacularly well man. And that is Monica's story. Thanks Monica.

(56:39):
Uh and welcome to Texas too. By the way. Yeah Um.
If you want to get in touch with this and
tell us a real life adventure that has something to
do with one of our episodes, we want to hear
about it, you can tweet to us. I'm at josh
um Clark and at s Y s K podcast on Twitter.
You can hang out with Chuck at Charles W. Chuck
Brian on Facebook or at face book dot com slash

(57:00):
Stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email
to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com and
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