The puzzles, conclusions and an advise

The two puzzles that I gave here and here are identical to each other. The answers are as follows:

Puzzle 1:

You need to check two cards. Card A to verify if the numeral on the reverse of that card is an even number; and Card 3, to check if the alphabet behind the card is not an even number. Cards D and 6 can have any combination and that does not violate the rule.

Puzzle 2:

You need to check if the person aged 16 is not drinking beer and that the person who is drinking beer is at least 21.

Most of you got it right. Which might surprise psychologist Leda Cosmides. I took the puzzles from the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Here's the extract (after jumping over the puzzle parts)

Vervets [a kind of monkey] have been known to waltz into a thicket, ignoring a fresh trail of python tracks and act stunned when they actually come across the snake itself. This doesn't mean that ververts are stupid: they are very sophisticated when it comes to questions that have to do with other vervets. ... A vervet, in other words, is very good at processing certain kinds of ververtish information, but not so good at processing other kinds of information.

The same is true of humans. ... [A]s psychologist Leda Cosmides (who dreamt up this example) points out, it [puzzle 2] is exactly the same puzzle as the A, D, 3 and 6 puzzle. The difference is that it is framed in a way that makes it about people, instead of about numbers, and as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other that we are about the abstract world.

I am not so sure. If I have to go by answers given by you all, I would conclude that humans are equally good or equally bad at both abstract and the real world.

I would actually go further and advise all the psychologists in the world that perhaps it is not correct to conlcude or generalise based on laboratory experiments. The scientists who observe Vervets are doing the correct thing.They are observing the monkeys inthe natural habitat. Please do the same.Observe humans in their natural habitat and draw conclusions. Be sure to note the context too. A change in context may result in an altogether different conclusion.

Picture Courtesy: Steve Woods

Clever Children

The inquiring mind is one step removed from the inquisitive mind. Inquiry requires one to follow up. Apples must have fallen on many heads but Newton followed it up. (I know! I know! No apple fell on Newton's head. The story is probably apocryphal! But my point is made.)

I am sure you observe so many things every day and are intrigued with a few of them. But do you follow up?

You must have heard children speaking to themselves. Even if you do not have one yourself, you must have heard your niece or nephews talking to themselves. Have you tried to listen in? Sometimes? Did you figure out anything special? No? 

Sample this.

"Narratives from the crib" ... was critical in changing the views of many child experts. The project centered on a two-year old girl from New Haven called Emily, whose parents - both university professors - began to notice that before their daughter went to sleep at night she talked to herself. Curious, they put a small microcassette recorder in her crib and, several nights a week, for the next fifteen months, recorded both the conversations they had with Emily as they put her to bed and the conversations she had with herself before she fell asleep. The transcripts - 122 in all - were then analyzed by a group of linguists and psychologists led by Katherine Nelson of Harvard University. What they found was that Emily's conversations with herself were more advanced than her conversations with her parents. In fact, they were significantly advanced.

The above is an extract from The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.


Hmmm... I think I can draw a conclusion here.
I think children of that age take their parents to be dolts. Hence they simplify their speech so that we can understand them. 

Picture courtesy: Cynthia Turek

Infecting You With Happiness

A great way of making anything - anything - interesting is to see it from a different angle. The interpretation may not be correct; one may not agree with it; but you will not be able to ignore the view.

Consider this extract from The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell ...

In their brilliant 1994 book Emotional Contagion, the psychologists Elaine Hatfield and John Cacioppo and the historian Richard Rapson [argue that mimicry] is one of the means of by which we infect each other with emotions. In other words, if I smile and you see me and smile in response - even a microsmile that takes no more than several milliseconds - it's not just you imitating me or empathizing with me. It may also be a way that I can pass on my happiness to you. Emotion is contagious. In a way, this is perfectly intuitive. All of us have had our spirits picked up by being around somebody in a good mood. If you think about it closely, though, it's quite a radical notion. We normally think of the expressions on our face as the reflection of an inner state. I feel happy, so I smile. I feel sad, so I frown. Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.

There you go. You do not have to think original. All you need is to twist and turn existing ideas around and give it a heavy-sounding name, such as emotional contagion.

I know I am being a bit unfair here. I haven't read Emotional Contagion yet. Perhaps it really is a brilliant book.

PS: I just had a big guilt lifted off me. Many - actually most - of my posts quote the book I am reading at that point of time. Though I always refer the source there was a twinge of guilt somewhere. I just realized that most of the non-fiction authors do the same. They quote other authors to bolster their core ideas. I think it works somewhat like name-dropping.

Picture courtesy: Sigurd Decroos

Black Swan Tipping Over

It is fascinating to see how ideas germinate, take shape and blossom. But what is even more fascinating is how authors use each others ideas as stepping stones to push their own.

What follows is entirely speculation. I am not insinuating plagiarism here.

Malcolm Gladwell brought out his international best seller The Tipping Point in the year 2000. The book is about how trends reach a critical mass and tip over to become an avalanche. Simple example from the book, some young kids start wearing Hush Puppies and suddenly the near-dead brand is a rage.

Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT) is published in 2001. He follows it up with The Black Swan in 2007. The idea of black swan is introduced in Fooled By Randomness and formalised in The Black Swan. NNT rejects Normal Curve as the basis for describing all random activities. He claims and proves that Normal Curve can be used for describing events that are associated with tossing of coins and other similar random phenomena, such as, weight of randomly picked sample of human beings. Power law rules the social and financial world. Thus, events that tip over are basically black swans. NNT also makes the statistical concept, outlier, popular ... but only among those who have read the book.

In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell publishes a book called, guess what, Outliers.

It is as if the two authors draw energy from each other to expand their thesis. Unless they are the same author writing under pseudonyms, in one avatar the author establishes a formal basis of an idea and in another avatar he comes up with a popular version of the idea. (Yes! I have seen their photographs, they look different :-))

If I remember it correctly, NNT makes a one line mention of The Tipping Point in The Black Swan.

The approach and styles vary widely but they both talk of the same thing.

Picture courtesy: Nicole Shackelford