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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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? 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 about that, Chuck, right? Mm hmmm. Alright, So Chuck, you 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 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, 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, 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. 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 with guessing, and especially guessing incorrectly, is that, um, we tend to forget that we're guessing at stuff. We take our own guesses as as fact, and since they can be so horribly wrong. Um, if you if you're guessing that other people are judging you even when they're not, Uh, you're gonna basically walk around 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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? 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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