July 4, 2020 • 56 mins
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. In this classic episode, learn everything we know about the brain and how it manages this odd, very human act.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everyone, it's your pal Josh. And for this week's
s Y s K Selects, I've chosen How Guessing Works.
It was one of those great ideas for a topic
that didn't pan out to have much information on it actually,
so we just talked a lot about subjective stuff instead,
and it turned out well, I think in the end.
If I may say so, I hope you enjoy Welcome
(00:25):
to Stuff you should know, a production of my Heart
Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome 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,
(00:46):
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. That's how where she's been. Yeah, I
remember we we said that she was at the mall.
She was buying a how she's doing all sorts of stuff.
But she's back now and things are normal again. Yeah,
she was at the beach and she's now eating in
(01:09):
front of me. What I ate about an hour ago?
Do you want to throw up? Or 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
of like boo, yeah, oh man, what a life? I know?
Eating Who needs it? Right? Me? I do too? I
(01:30):
love eating, love it? You know what else? I love? What?
Really good? Magic? Like illusions? Well where does uh? What
do 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.
(01:52):
It's called in and of itself. It's a one man
stage magic I guess you could call it that illusion
show by a guy named Derek del Guadio. That's how
you say his last name. I strongly recommend anyone go
see this show. It's it's um I think they extended
it through the rest of the year, but it's it's
(02:12):
like 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 basis of it
is that this guy must be just one of the
(02:33):
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 it just
appears to be magic. That's one of my favorite things
in the world to see, Like when he talks to
(02:55):
people and like think of a number except obviously more
fun and complex and that. Yes, yeah, and I don't
want to give any of it away. I don't want
to give it any bit of it away. Like for
anybody who's gonna go see it, everyone should go into
it fresh. But um, but yeah, just just after you
see it, go back and listen to this episode again
and you'll be like, oh, yeah, totally now. I think
(03:16):
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, nothing like that. But
powers of suggestion in that if you you can lead
someone to to think of a certain thing that they
(03:40):
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
like science really doesn't have any idea about how we
make guesses. All we know is that we are capable
(04:02):
of making guesses, and that we make guesses almost constantly,
and that like our our brain is basically set up
to guests, Like our construction of reality is a series
of guesses, most of which pan out to be right,
but then can also be terribly wrong, which is what
optical illusions prove, you know. Yeah, and uh, I found this.
(04:24):
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 nature of the topic, Like
there isn't a concise beginning, middle, and end to this
(04:45):
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, complete, understandable, neat
explanation ones are great, and then on the other end
of the spectrum, like this one, were the ones where
(05:06):
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 Stuff Works article
and they started talking about um the in days of
yore with starting with took took and you know, basically
(05:31):
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, right, Like
that's how that's how we learned. Should I go this
way and fall off a cliff? You know, I'm going
to take a guess? Or should I eat this thing?
(05:51):
Will it kill me? Or like in the case of
Lewis and Clark, I remember, um, Clark estimated and you
know they're guesses, and we'll get into 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. I think he's only off about forty miles
(06:12):
when they got to the Pacific. Uh. Oh really, I
don't remember that. Yeah, he he estimated four thousand, one
sixty two miles when 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, he definitely took copious notes. Um,
(06:35):
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,
you can just go ahead and eat it raw and
then you keel over and die, they learned from your
(06:56):
bad guests taking 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. I'm cursed with that new information
(07:17):
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? Yeah, 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, let's go
(07:38):
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 al, whether you're guessing
(08:00):
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 that are lighting up whenever you're
guessing something. Yeah, they they think that it's a global,
(08:23):
a global phenomenon, right, like brain brain a lely 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
(08:45):
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 I think right using
the Wonder Machine night. But that's just one functional part
of the whole process that the brain is going through.
(09:08):
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 you're guessing about a visual object
(09:30):
or subject, then your frontal lobe and occipital lobe are
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 sort
of thing? Um, you know, who is a jelly bean
jar guessing champions? My wife really is, yes, longstanding, her
(09:55):
special reasoning is is outstanding well. Spatial reasoning and new
miracle 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
(10:17):
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
(10:39):
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
(11:00):
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,
(11:21):
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 why intellectual
(11:41):
or emotional buckets. BAM just carved them 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
(12:03):
often say, this is just a wild guess if I
had to guess, Yeah, something like that. 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,
(12:24):
which stands for um stuff we all get no scientific uh,
wild ass guessing okay, 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
(12:46):
you know, I've got a little information. I'm not just
wild guessing here. This is a ballpark educated guess, right,
but it's not still less than an estimate. That's when
we have a lot more information. Yeah, just a lot
more information. But you're you're pretty familiar also with the
topic that you're you're guessing at as well. Right. So
(13:08):
Lewis and Clark, I think both 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,
(13:29):
that's remarkable, But if you had had one of us
do it, it would have been a wild guess. So
it has to do with 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
(13:50):
on something. 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
(14:12):
to any type of those three guests, 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
(14:34):
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,
(14:54):
they'll be like, how many people you think this place holds?
I used to let's say like, I have no idea
I know, but now you say, you know better eight
or nine people. Yeah, and you're probably pretty close within
forty miles. All bad. 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. How
(15:16):
about that, Chuck, right? Mm hmmm. Alright, So Chuck, you
(15:41):
said that, um, that you got better at estimating crowd
sizes by just performing at Our Lives shows. Right, So
you were terrible at it before, very bad, 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 that guy, yeah, Nelson
(16:07):
pointed in laughs Portland, Um, 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,
(16:30):
and then learning from that. Yeah, like you're wrong, this
is what the answer is. It's like anything else exactly.
Do that enough, 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, Alea hoyt Um, took, and I have to say, no,
(16:52):
it is Aliyah. It's not Alicia. No, it's Aliyah. There's
no saying Alicia for not only is the C silent,
it's not the 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.
(17:17):
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 that,
(17:39):
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 techniquead. Well, I don't know, I haven't guessed
(18:01):
jelly beans in a jar since I was probably twelve, right,
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
look at a jar and it's filled with jelly beans,
(18:24):
you can say, um, that jar is the volume of
that jar is say a court Okay, but then you
kind of want 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
jelly beans. It just takes a little bit of work.
(18:44):
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 to every situation.
And one of the things you would need to learn
is how to judge the volume of the container to
(19:06):
start correct. 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 another thing you would probably do if you started
(19:28):
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,
they take typically take up about sixty four of the
(19:50):
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 round bouncy balls, right, Um,
you can say, well, those are spherical and they're taking
(20:11):
up about six of the jar. So all I have
to do is figure out the um the basically the
size of each of the 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. Sure, So this all sounds mind numbing. I've
(20:33):
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 spherical by the way, like if it's peanuts
or something like that, or ice cubes, not disgusting circus peanuts.
(20:56):
Oh man, the 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 I'm not gonna
like him now. Well, they hold up for you in
(21:17):
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 mean's method? Did you ask her? She
(21:37):
says she 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?
(22:00):
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. Yeah, right, But you can
train yourself to guess better. What's really up for for
(22:21):
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, you know, how how well they're actually
(22:43):
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 established this kind of field of inquiry in which
they were trying to get to the bottom of what
they called empathic accuracy, which is how accurately we can
(23:07):
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 at all for the sake of your own sanity
(23:28):
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 reason, 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,
so Bully for you, that to me is sanity. He's
(23:51):
like going, how are you really feeling that you can? Uh,
one can spend a lot of time doing that, so
so can I share a little bit about myself here?
I know it's weird, feels gross, but um. For a
very long time, Chuck, I thought that I was a
(24:14):
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. And in figuring this out,
(24:36):
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 I've been walking around wasting just
(24:59):
thinking about know what people really think or you know,
do people really like me? They probably don't, or do they?
Or what do 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
of your mind on any given moment. It's just great.
(25:20):
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
is well put man, You're you're a stoic sage. So
(25:42):
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 is probably the case. UM.
And then polarized thinking is another bucket, I guess since
(26:05):
we're bucketing 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 the elementary school. You can apply
this to anyone walking into a room and basically reading
(26:27):
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 I think polar is thinking is a type
of cognitive distortion. I think that's the umbrella term for
(26:49):
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 saying 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 lens of your
past history. Right, So, like if if you were raised
(27:12):
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. But because
of the history of how you grew up, that's what
(27:34):
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
humor they might even walk up and engage them and say,
what do you guys laughing at? Right? Huh? And if no, no, nothing,
(27:56):
never mind, then you may be onto something. Right. But
there was the some there's this blog post and man,
I wish I could remember what the site was. I
apologize sight, but it was basically like stopped 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,
even if the person who thinks that that they're laughing
(28:18):
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
derail your day. Yeah, and you and you have to
(28:40):
find it within yourself, Yeah, for 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 of every day necessarily. Yeah. Boy, people
(29:00):
with just too much confidence are 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 with
so much confidence totally lost on the other person. So
I have another theory that's not scientific at all. It's
(29:22):
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 gonna say it's absolutely true, but
I agree with you. Yeah, because who knows. It's just
(29:45):
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 that they're doing the
same thing to you, even when they're not. It's your own,
(30:06):
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, like judge, being judgmental, or being
(30:29):
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 when you when you realize that and you
(30:51):
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 so I cologists 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. And her advice, which is very
(31:14):
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's that same
shrink also pointed out that one of the big problems
(31:35):
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,
(31:55):
you're gonna basically walk around 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 are
going to 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 we we've
(32:41):
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 or
have been different theories over the years, like well, first
(33:03):
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 guess. I don't remember that, do you. Yeah, yeah,
if you guess 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
(33:25):
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 guess B,
and you're gonna be right one out of every five
(33:46):
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. Yeah. Um, but this guy wrote a
he actually did a little studying um, Paula pound Stone.
(34:07):
That 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
(34:30):
tests and he has four what he calls four ways
to 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
(34:50):
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 or all of the above
are correct of the time. Him. 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,
(35:14):
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 you there's some
techniques you can choose to to to increase the likelihood
that your guests will be right. Right, So all the
(35:35):
above 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
(35:57):
any multiple choice test, right, 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,
(36:18):
and the the test writers probably not going to go
to the trouble of 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. Really, did you remember scantron sheets? Yeah?
(36:40):
Did you ever? Were you ever so recklessly wild that
you like, made 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 get into
(37:01):
the details, but I made a big snake and it
was bad. And I 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's still really stands out
(37:23):
in my mind. Is what a jerk move that was
on my part. I'm not only surprised, though, Chuck, I'm
a little delighted. Good a outed myself. Um alright, So
one of the other pieces of advice from Dr pound Stone, Doctor,
I don't think he's no doctor. He did write a book, though,
it's called Rock Breaks Scissors colon. Why does everything you
(37:46):
have to have a colon? Now it makes it smarter?
Rock Breaks Scissors Colin a practical guide outguessing and outwitting
almost everybody. One of his other ones is to look
at the surrounding answers because he's found 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
(38:09):
the answer behind it, then it's probably not one of
those two. So if you've you've just whittled down your
options yep. Advice No, not not bad at all. What else? 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
(38:30):
rid of that. And then conversely, if there's anything if
there are two answers 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.
(38:51):
Get rid of those two. You're down to two. You
got a chance of getting at right. Yeah, I thought
the example they used in here was pretty fascinating because
they didn't even use the question sen or give the
question on this s a T practice test. They just
give the answer for A, B, C, D haphazard, uh
is too radical, inherent is to controversial, improvises to startling,
(39:14):
methodical is the revolutionary derivative is to gradual. And if
you just look at 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. Right, radical, controversial, startling, revolutionary,
gradual doesn't makes sense, right, So that makes I mean,
(39:34):
that's really a good piece of advice. And then if
you look on the left hand side for A and C,
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
(40:01):
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
(40:23):
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 on
(40:44):
my 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 call him on motherboard from vice yep um.
They have a German outfit called appropriately Motherboard Germany. And
(41:08):
they ran 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
(41:28):
they got together with some researchers at the University of
hang Zoo in China, and um, they got three hundred
and sixties students to pair up and play three hundred
rounds each of rock paper scissors. Uh. And then they
tracked that please please let us stop, and they said, no,
(41:51):
this is communist China. Do it again again. Uh. So
they charted all those out and then summarized it 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 says, there's the October
surprise where somebody just pulls something out of nowhere. Well,
(42:14):
so I mean a kid dynamite, right, 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 Motherboard article talks about UM,
(42:36):
there's this other guy who came up with, um, a
whole different variation of it. That's like five 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, yeah right, but
so so okay, there's a few things. And this this
(42:57):
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.
Within a game of rock paper scissors. Starting with that,
men tend to open a game with rock. Of course
they do. Yeah, that's such a man thing, rock smash,
(43:21):
you know, right, So if you're if your opponent as
a man, um and there's a pretty good chance they're
going to come out with rock the first time, go paper. Yeah,
although they do say statistically the opening uh scissors is
the one that will win you the most games. But
I guess that's if you're not playing a man. I
(43:43):
guess they kind of counteract themselves or contradict themselves statistically.
More women play rock paper scissors, I guess is that true.
Here's what 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 here's one that I thought was
kind of funny. Basically, this is like the Babe Ruth move,
say what you're going to pick before the game, Like,
(44:06):
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 rocky. It's like that the Princess Bride. And
what part was that with the man sitting at the
place talking about the poison drink? Oh yeah, yeah, remember
(44:28):
like trying to get the other guy to drink the
poison drink? I wish Yeah, he was awesome. Uh inconceivable?
What is another strategy? Um to counter attacks? So if
you played scissors and your opponent plays rock on the
first move, uh, and they win, obviously the chance that
(44:49):
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, And you can also mirror um
your opponent. Right, So if you just one around, play
(45:11):
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 with and if you
one don't do that, and that'll frustrate them to that's
the rock paper scissors version of why you're hitting yourself.
(45:36):
If 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 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,
(45:59):
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 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
(46:19):
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 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
(46:41):
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 do next. Right, So you would say, um, well,
I know most times when I grab an apple, I
take a bye it out of it because I'm usually hungry.
(47:01):
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
that's triggered that that um that that sets that off right.
That gives you that the basis the foundation for making
(47:22):
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
with a short list of possibilities of what the person
is going to do with that apple, and it includes
(47:44):
rubbating 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 neat freak?
If so, they're probably going to put that apple away
in a cupboard, which who does that except for neat freaks?
And you may be right at at your guess, right, well,
(48:07):
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. And what some research found was that the
ultimately what we're doing here is called theory of mind
(48:29):
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 for granted that we can attribute mental states
to other people. But that's that's a pretty significant thing.
(48:49):
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 and do the same thing. They can attribute
mental states like thoughts and feelings and emotions to other
apes UM. And that's that shows like a higher form
(49:11):
of reasoning. That was basically the gist of it. That
makes sense, And they found that true in chimpanzees, bonobo's
and orangutangs. H. That's pretty neat, it is, and one
of them so sa UM. Sasha Barren Cohen, his cousin
Simon Barren Cohen is one of the leaders in UM
(49:32):
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 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
(49:55):
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 false beliefs to
other people. This is like an early part of human development.
And apparently apes are good 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
(50:16):
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 hungry for three musketeers.
She knows it was last on the table. Where is
she going to look for the three Musketeers? And people
(50:38):
with um with theory of mine, 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 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,
(51:02):
a 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 do
a theory of mine. Interesting, isn't it. And it has
to do with guessing. It all has to do with guessing. Man,
(51:23):
you got anything else? Well, just that Tommy should uh
not be so uh touchy? Well, yeah, and like share
the three Musketeers, Yeah, you go around. Do you know
why 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
(51:47):
they just went with chocolate after a while and kept
the name because why not. Yeah. Interesting, Well, that's it
about 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,
(52:08):
on the birth of their firstborn child. Yeah, how about that.
Congratulations you guys. Good looking baby too. Yeah? Is they're
not all good looking? No, No, it's true, especially 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 what you do?
(52:30):
It is they are pretty New York. It's awesome. But congratulations.
It's one congratulations Bars. Okay, well, since we said congratulations Bars,
it's time for listener mail. Yeah, this one was a
little long, but it's about registering to vote in Texas.
You got an email for Monica and her story goes
as such, Uh, two thousand thirteen to move from Alabama
(52:53):
to Texas. Had 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 filled out in advance. It
took my Alabama driver's license, my lease, my birth certificate,
and because I'm divorced, my divorce decree stipulating my legal
name change. You'd probably think that would be else you needed,
(53:14):
right right, no. No. Once I got there, I was
told that the lease was not sufficient to 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 day waiting in
line waiting UH for my power and gas bill to
come in order to add the other documents. A couple
of weeks later, with all of the documents in hand,
(53:34):
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. This was a name change that was ordered
by a court in Alabama and explicitly spelled out in
a notarized document that the clerk was disputing its validity.
When I asked what the problem was, he said, well,
(53:55):
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 a judge, a shootout. What's
that called a shot? 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
(54:17):
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.
That correct. His reply was, well, when you put it
that way, it sounds silly, but yes, though. I demanded
to speak with a supervisor. Clark got the supervisor, who
looked over everything and asked why I didn't just go
(54:39):
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 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. The supervisor said, okay,
(55:03):
gave my stuff to another clerk who simply smiled to
enter 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
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
(55:24):
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,
uh and welcome to Texas too. By the way, Yeah Um.
If you want to get in touch with this and
(55:46):
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
Ran on Facebook or at Facebook dot com slash Stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email the
Stuff podcast at how Stuff Works dot com and has
(56:07):
always joined us at at home on the web. Stuff
you Should Know dot Com. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio, app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
H
Hi, everyone, it's your pal Josh. And for this week's
s Y s K Selects, I've chosen How Guessing Works.
It was one of those great ideas for a topic
that didn't pan out to have much information on it actually,
so we just talked a lot about subjective stuff instead,
and it turned out well, I think in the end.
If I may say so, I hope you enjoy Welcome
(00:25):
to Stuff you should know, a production of my Heart
Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome 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,
(00:46):
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. That's how where she's been. Yeah, I
remember we we said that she was at the mall.
She was buying a how she's doing all sorts of stuff.
But she's back now and things are normal again. Yeah,
she was at the beach and she's now eating in
(01:09):
front of me. What I ate about an hour ago?
Do you want to throw up? Or 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
of like boo, yeah, oh man, what a life? I know?
Eating Who needs it? Right? Me? I do too? I
(01:30):
love eating, love it? You know what else? I love? What?
Really good? Magic? Like illusions? Well where does uh? What
do 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.
(01:52):
It's called in and of itself. It's a one man
stage magic I guess you could call it that illusion
show by a guy named Derek del Guadio. That's how
you say his last name. I strongly recommend anyone go
see this show. It's it's um I think they extended
it through the rest of the year, but it's it's
(02:12):
like 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 basis of it
is that this guy must be just one of the
(02:33):
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 it just
appears to be magic. That's one of my favorite things
in the world to see, Like when he talks to
(02:55):
people and like think of a number except obviously more
fun and complex and that. Yes, yeah, and I don't
want to give any of it away. I don't want
to give it any bit of it away. Like for
anybody who's gonna go see it, everyone should go into
it fresh. But um, but yeah, just just after you
see it, go back and listen to this episode again
and you'll be like, oh, yeah, totally now. I think
(03:16):
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, nothing like that. But
powers of suggestion in that if you you can lead
someone to to think of a certain thing that they
(03:40):
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
like science really doesn't have any idea about how we
make guesses. All we know is that we are capable
(04:02):
of making guesses, and that we make guesses almost constantly,
and that like our our brain is basically set up
to guests, Like our construction of reality is a series
of guesses, most of which pan out to be right,
but then can also be terribly wrong, which is what
optical illusions prove, you know. Yeah, and uh, I found this.
(04:24):
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 nature of the topic, Like
there isn't a concise beginning, middle, and end to this
(04:45):
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, complete, understandable, neat
explanation ones are great, and then on the other end
of the spectrum, like this one, were the ones where
(05:06):
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 Stuff Works article
and they started talking about um the in days of
yore with starting with took took and you know, basically
(05:31):
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, right, Like
that's how that's how we learned. Should I go this
way and fall off a cliff? You know, I'm going
to take a guess? Or should I eat this thing?
(05:51):
Will it kill me? Or like in the case of
Lewis and Clark, I remember, um, Clark estimated and you
know they're guesses, and we'll get into 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. I think he's only off about forty miles
(06:12):
when they got to the Pacific. Uh. Oh really, I
don't remember that. Yeah, he he estimated four thousand, one
sixty two miles when 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, he definitely took copious notes. Um,
(06:35):
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,
you can just go ahead and eat it raw and
then you keel over and die, they learned from your
(06:56):
bad guests taking 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. I'm cursed with that new information
(07:17):
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? Yeah, 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, let's go
(07:38):
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 al, whether you're guessing
(08:00):
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 that are lighting up whenever you're
guessing something. Yeah, they they think that it's a global,
(08:23):
a global phenomenon, right, like brain brain a lely 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
(08:45):
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 I think right using
the Wonder Machine night. But that's just one functional part
of the whole process that the brain is going through.
(09:08):
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 you're guessing about a visual object
(09:30):
or subject, then your frontal lobe and occipital lobe are
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 sort
of thing? Um, you know, who is a jelly bean
jar guessing champions? My wife really is, yes, longstanding, her
(09:55):
special reasoning is is outstanding well. Spatial reasoning and new
miracle 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
(10:17):
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
(10:39):
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
(11:00):
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,
(11:21):
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 why intellectual
(11:41):
or emotional buckets. BAM just carved them 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
(12:03):
often say, this is just a wild guess if I
had to guess, Yeah, something like that. 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,
(12:24):
which stands for um stuff we all get no scientific uh,
wild ass guessing okay, 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
(12:46):
you know, I've got a little information. I'm not just
wild guessing here. This is a ballpark educated guess, right,
but it's not still less than an estimate. That's when
we have a lot more information. Yeah, just a lot
more information. But you're you're pretty familiar also with the
topic that you're you're guessing at as well. Right. So
(13:08):
Lewis and Clark, I think both 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,
(13:29):
that's remarkable, But if you had had one of us
do it, it would have been a wild guess. So
it has to do with 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
(13:50):
on something. 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
(14:12):
to any type of those three guests, 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
(14:34):
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,
(14:54):
they'll be like, how many people you think this place holds?
I used to let's say like, I have no idea
I know, but now you say, you know better eight
or nine people. Yeah, and you're probably pretty close within
forty miles. All bad. 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. How
(15:16):
about that, Chuck, right? Mm hmmm. Alright, So Chuck, you
(15:41):
said that, um, that you got better at estimating crowd
sizes by just performing at Our Lives shows. Right, So
you were terrible at it before, very bad, 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 that guy, yeah, Nelson
(16:07):
pointed in laughs Portland, Um, 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,
(16:30):
and then learning from that. Yeah, like you're wrong, this
is what the answer is. It's like anything else exactly.
Do that enough, 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, Alea hoyt Um, took, and I have to say, no,
(16:52):
it is Aliyah. It's not Alicia. No, it's Aliyah. There's
no saying Alicia for not only is the C silent,
it's not the 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.
(17:17):
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 that,
(17:39):
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 techniquead. Well, I don't know, I haven't guessed
(18:01):
jelly beans in a jar since I was probably twelve, right,
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
look at a jar and it's filled with jelly beans,
(18:24):
you can say, um, that jar is the volume of
that jar is say a court Okay, but then you
kind of want 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
jelly beans. It just takes a little bit of work.
(18:44):
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 to every situation.
And one of the things you would need to learn
is how to judge the volume of the container to
(19:06):
start correct. 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 another thing you would probably do if you started
(19:28):
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,
they take typically take up about sixty four of the
(19:50):
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 round bouncy balls, right, Um,
you can say, well, those are spherical and they're taking
(20:11):
up about six of the jar. So all I have
to do is figure out the um the basically the
size of each of the 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. Sure, So this all sounds mind numbing. I've
(20:33):
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 spherical by the way, like if it's peanuts
or something like that, or ice cubes, not disgusting circus peanuts.
(20:56):
Oh man, the 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 I'm not gonna
like him now. Well, they hold up for you in
(21:17):
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 mean's method? Did you ask her? She
(21:37):
says she 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?
(22:00):
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. Yeah, right, But you can
train yourself to guess better. What's really up for for
(22:21):
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, you know, how how well they're actually
(22:43):
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 established this kind of field of inquiry in which
they were trying to get to the bottom of what
they called empathic accuracy, which is how accurately we can
(23:07):
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 at all for the sake of your own sanity
(23:28):
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 reason, 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,
so Bully for you, that to me is sanity. He's
(23:51):
like going, how are you really feeling that you can? Uh,
one can spend a lot of time doing that, so
so can I share a little bit about myself here?
I know it's weird, feels gross, but um. For a
very long time, Chuck, I thought that I was a
(24:14):
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. And in figuring this out,
(24:36):
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 I've been walking around wasting just
(24:59):
thinking about know what people really think or you know,
do people really like me? They probably don't, or do they?
Or what do 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
of your mind on any given moment. It's just great.
(25:20):
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
is well put man, You're you're a stoic sage. So
(25:42):
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 is probably the case. UM.
And then polarized thinking is another bucket, I guess since
(26:05):
we're bucketing 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 the elementary school. You can apply
this to anyone walking into a room and basically reading
(26:27):
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 I think polar is thinking is a type
of cognitive distortion. I think that's the umbrella term for
(26:49):
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 saying 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 lens of your
past history. Right, So, like if if you were raised
(27:12):
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. But because
of the history of how you grew up, that's what
(27:34):
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
humor they might even walk up and engage them and say,
what do you guys laughing at? Right? Huh? And if no, no, nothing,
(27:56):
never mind, then you may be onto something. Right. But
there was the some there's this blog post and man,
I wish I could remember what the site was. I
apologize sight, but it was basically like stopped 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,
even if the person who thinks that that they're laughing
(28:18):
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
derail your day. Yeah, and you and you have to
(28:40):
find it within yourself, Yeah, for 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 of every day necessarily. Yeah. Boy, people
(29:00):
with just too much confidence are 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 with
so much confidence totally lost on the other person. So
I have another theory that's not scientific at all. It's
(29:22):
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 gonna say it's absolutely true, but
I agree with you. Yeah, because who knows. It's just
(29:45):
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 that they're doing the
same thing to you, even when they're not. It's your own,
(30:06):
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, like judge, being judgmental, or being
(30:29):
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 when you when you realize that and you
(30:51):
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 so I cologists 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. And her advice, which is very
(31:14):
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's that same
shrink also pointed out that one of the big problems
(31:35):
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,
(31:55):
you're gonna basically walk around 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 are
going to 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 we we've
(32:41):
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 or
have been different theories over the years, like well, first
(33:03):
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 guess. I don't remember that, do you. Yeah, yeah,
if you guess 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
(33:25):
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 guess B,
and you're gonna be right one out of every five
(33:46):
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. Yeah. Um, but this guy wrote a
he actually did a little studying um, Paula pound Stone.
(34:07):
That 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
(34:30):
tests and he has four what he calls four ways
to 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
(34:50):
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 or all of the above
are correct of the time. Him. 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,
(35:14):
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 you there's some
techniques you can choose to to to increase the likelihood
that your guests will be right. Right, So all the
(35:35):
above 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
(35:57):
any multiple choice test, right, 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,
(36:18):
and the the test writers probably not going to go
to the trouble of 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. Really, did you remember scantron sheets? Yeah?
(36:40):
Did you ever? Were you ever so recklessly wild that
you like, made 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 get into
(37:01):
the details, but I made a big snake and it
was bad. And I 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's still really stands out
(37:23):
in my mind. Is what a jerk move that was
on my part. I'm not only surprised, though, Chuck, I'm
a little delighted. Good a outed myself. Um alright, So
one of the other pieces of advice from Dr pound Stone, Doctor,
I don't think he's no doctor. He did write a book, though,
it's called Rock Breaks Scissors colon. Why does everything you
(37:46):
have to have a colon? Now it makes it smarter?
Rock Breaks Scissors Colin a practical guide outguessing and outwitting
almost everybody. One of his other ones is to look
at the surrounding answers because he's found 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
(38:09):
the answer behind it, then it's probably not one of
those two. So if you've you've just whittled down your
options yep. Advice No, not not bad at all. What else? 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
(38:30):
rid of that. And then conversely, if there's anything if
there are two answers 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.
(38:51):
Get rid of those two. You're down to two. You
got a chance of getting at right. Yeah, I thought
the example they used in here was pretty fascinating because
they didn't even use the question sen or give the
question on this s a T practice test. They just
give the answer for A, B, C, D haphazard, uh
is too radical, inherent is to controversial, improvises to startling,
(39:14):
methodical is the revolutionary derivative is to gradual. And if
you just look at 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. Right, radical, controversial, startling, revolutionary,
gradual doesn't makes sense, right, So that makes I mean,
(39:34):
that's really a good piece of advice. And then if
you look on the left hand side for A and C,
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
(40:01):
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
(40:23):
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 on
(40:44):
my 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 call him on motherboard from vice yep um.
They have a German outfit called appropriately Motherboard Germany. And
(41:08):
they ran 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
(41:28):
they got together with some researchers at the University of
hang Zoo in China, and um, they got three hundred
and sixties students to pair up and play three hundred
rounds each of rock paper scissors. Uh. And then they
tracked that please please let us stop, and they said, no,
(41:51):
this is communist China. Do it again again. Uh. So
they charted all those out and then summarized it 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 says, there's the October
surprise where somebody just pulls something out of nowhere. Well,
(42:14):
so I mean a kid dynamite, right, 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 Motherboard article talks about UM,
(42:36):
there's this other guy who came up with, um, a
whole different variation of it. That's like five 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, yeah right, but
so so okay, there's a few things. And this this
(42:57):
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.
Within a game of rock paper scissors. Starting with that,
men tend to open a game with rock. Of course
they do. Yeah, that's such a man thing, rock smash,
(43:21):
you know, right, So if you're if your opponent as
a man, um and there's a pretty good chance they're
going to come out with rock the first time, go paper. Yeah,
although they do say statistically the opening uh scissors is
the one that will win you the most games. But
I guess that's if you're not playing a man. I
(43:43):
guess they kind of counteract themselves or contradict themselves statistically.
More women play rock paper scissors, I guess is that true.
Here's what 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 here's one that I thought was
kind of funny. Basically, this is like the Babe Ruth move,
say what you're going to pick before the game, Like,
(44:06):
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 rocky. It's like that the Princess Bride. And
what part was that with the man sitting at the
place talking about the poison drink? Oh yeah, yeah, remember
(44:28):
like trying to get the other guy to drink the
poison drink? I wish Yeah, he was awesome. Uh inconceivable?
What is another strategy? Um to counter attacks? So if
you played scissors and your opponent plays rock on the
first move, uh, and they win, obviously the chance that
(44:49):
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, And you can also mirror um
your opponent. Right, So if you just one around, play
(45:11):
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 with and if you
one don't do that, and that'll frustrate them to that's
the rock paper scissors version of why you're hitting yourself.
(45:36):
If 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 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,
(45:59):
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 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
(46:19):
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 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
(46:41):
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 do next. Right, So you would say, um, well,
I know most times when I grab an apple, I
take a bye it out of it because I'm usually hungry.
(47:01):
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
that's triggered that that um that that sets that off right.
That gives you that the basis the foundation for making
(47:22):
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
with a short list of possibilities of what the person
is going to do with that apple, and it includes
(47:44):
rubbating 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 neat freak?
If so, they're probably going to put that apple away
in a cupboard, which who does that except for neat freaks?
And you may be right at at your guess, right, well,
(48:07):
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. And what some research found was that the
ultimately what we're doing here is called theory of mind
(48:29):
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 for granted that we can attribute mental states
to other people. But that's that's a pretty significant thing.
(48:49):
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 and do the same thing. They can attribute
mental states like thoughts and feelings and emotions to other
apes UM. And that's that shows like a higher form
(49:11):
of reasoning. That was basically the gist of it. That
makes sense, And they found that true in chimpanzees, bonobo's
and orangutangs. H. That's pretty neat, it is, and one
of them so sa UM. Sasha Barren Cohen, his cousin
Simon Barren Cohen is one of the leaders in UM
(49:32):
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 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
(49:55):
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 false beliefs to
other people. This is like an early part of human development.
And apparently apes are good 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
(50:16):
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 hungry for three musketeers.
She knows it was last on the table. Where is
she going to look for the three Musketeers? And people
(50:38):
with um with theory of mine, 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 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,
(51:02):
a 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 do
a theory of mine. Interesting, isn't it. And it has
to do with guessing. It all has to do with guessing. Man,
(51:23):
you got anything else? Well, just that Tommy should uh
not be so uh touchy? Well, yeah, and like share
the three Musketeers, Yeah, you go around. Do you know
why 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
(51:47):
they just went with chocolate after a while and kept
the name because why not. Yeah. Interesting, Well, that's it
about 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,
(52:08):
on the birth of their firstborn child. Yeah, how about that.
Congratulations you guys. Good looking baby too. Yeah? Is they're
not all good looking? No, No, it's true, especially 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 what you do?
(52:30):
It is they are pretty New York. It's awesome. But congratulations.
It's one congratulations Bars. Okay, well, since we said congratulations Bars,
it's time for listener mail. Yeah, this one was a
little long, but it's about registering to vote in Texas.
You got an email for Monica and her story goes
as such, Uh, two thousand thirteen to move from Alabama
(52:53):
to Texas. Had 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 filled out in advance. It
took my Alabama driver's license, my lease, my birth certificate,
and because I'm divorced, my divorce decree stipulating my legal
name change. You'd probably think that would be else you needed,
(53:14):
right right, no. No. Once I got there, I was
told that the lease was not sufficient to 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 day waiting in
line waiting UH for my power and gas bill to
come in order to add the other documents. A couple
of weeks later, with all of the documents in hand,
(53:34):
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. This was a name change that was ordered
by a court in Alabama and explicitly spelled out in
a notarized document that the clerk was disputing its validity.
When I asked what the problem was, he said, well,
(53:55):
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 a judge, a shootout. What's
that called a shot? 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
(54:17):
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.
That correct. His reply was, well, when you put it
that way, it sounds silly, but yes, though. I demanded
to speak with a supervisor. Clark got the supervisor, who
looked over everything and asked why I didn't just go
(54:39):
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 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. The supervisor said, okay,
(55:03):
gave my stuff to another clerk who simply smiled to
enter 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
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
(55:24):
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,
uh and welcome to Texas too. By the way, Yeah Um.
If you want to get in touch with this and
(55:46):
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
Ran on Facebook or at Facebook dot com slash Stuff
you Should Know. You can send us an email the
Stuff podcast at how Stuff Works dot com and has
(56:07):
always joined us at at home on the web. Stuff
you Should Know dot Com. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio, app,
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