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The Most Common Cognitive Bias
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The Most Common Cognitive Bias

The Three Number Sequence

In this section, the speaker presents a three number sequence and challenges the audience to figure out the rule that governs it.

Proposing Numbers

  • The speaker presents the three numbers: 2, 4, 8.
  • The audience proposes 16, 32, and 64 which all follow the rule.
  • The audience proposes 3, 6, and 12 which also follows the rule.
  • One member of the audience realizes they are still multiplying by two but it is not the rule.

Finding the Rule

  • The speaker encourages strategic thinking to get information about what follows or does not follow their rule.
  • The speaker proposes a set of numbers that do not fit their rule: 2,4,7.
  • Surprisingly, these numbers follow their rule.
  • Another member of the audience asks if anything proposed will always be right but this is not true.
  • After several more attempts from different members of the audience with varying degrees of success in following or breaking the rule presented by them or guessed by others; one member finally guesses correctly that any set of numbers in ascending order follows their rule.

Lessons Learned

In this section, the speaker reflects on what was learned from this exercise.

Black Swan Metaphor

  • The speaker introduces Nassim Taleb's book "The Black Swan" as inspiration for this exercise.
  • A black swan is a metaphor for something unknown and unexpected.
  • People used to believe that all swans were white until black swans were discovered in Australia.
  • The point is that you can never prove a theory true.

Confirmation Bias

  • The speaker notes that everyone they spoke to came up with a rule early on and only proposed numbers that fit with their rule.
  • The speaker was looking for the audience to propose a set of numbers that did not follow their rule and did not follow the audience's guessed rule.
  • Instead of trying to confirm what you believe, it is better to try and get "no" answers as they are more informative than "yes" answers.

The Importance of the Scientific Method

In this section, the speaker discusses the importance of using the scientific method to arrive at truth.

Using the Scientific Method

  • The scientific method involves setting out to disprove theories.
  • Only when we can't disprove a theory do we say it must be getting at something really true about our reality.
  • Trying as hard as you can to disprove something is necessary to get at the truth and not fool yourself.
Video description

Can you figure out the rule? Did you see the exponents pattern? http://youtu.be/AVB8vRC6HIY Why do you make people look stupid? http://bit.ly/12Fmlpl How do you investigate hypotheses? Do you seek to confirm your theory - looking for white swans? Or do you try to find black swans? I was startled at how hard it was for people to investigate number sets that didn't follow their hypotheses, even when their method wasn't getting them anywhere. In the video I say "when people came to Australia..." by which I meant, "when Europeans who believed all swans were white came to Australia..." I did not mean any offence to Indigenous Australians who were already in Australia at that time. Please accept my apologies for the poor phrasing if you were offended by it. This video was inspired by The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb and filmed by my mum. Thanks mum! Partly my motivation came from responses to my Facebook videos - social media marketers saying 'Facebook ads have worked for me so there can't be fake likes.' Just because you have only seen white swans, doesn't mean there are no black ones. And in fact marketers are only looking for white swans. They think it was invalid of me to make the fake Virtual Cat page: 'well of course if it's a low quality page you're going to get low quality likes.' But my point is this is black swan bait, something they would never make because their theory is confident in the exclusive existence of white swans.