 In the last episode, we spoke about the intuitive scientist, so in our everyday, essentially we have the same job as scientists. As the Mythbusters said, we're trying to figure things out, to make predictions about the world. And I don't think there's anything particularly special about the scientific method or the experimental process that's off limits to non-scientists. It's really just a matter of thinking critically. I think you're exactly right. Now, when we're dealing with these sorts of everyday issues, we've talked about it since episode two, in dealing with complex and ambiguous events, and trying to use simplified models to navigate that complexity and ambiguity. And one way of doing this, I think, is looking at this idea of stable, by-stable images or ambiguous figures. Now, if we take the necker cube, this can be interpreted in one of two ways. You can look at the necker cube and see the front face as either being on the lower left, or the front face as being in the upper right. So these are the two ways of seeing a necker cube, and you can't see them both at the same time, obviously. You can see it one way or another, which is why it's by-stable. There are several examples of these. Another one is called the duck rabbit illusion. Now, you can either see this figure as a duck or a rabbit. So the two little bits are either ears or it's the duck's bill. Another figure is called the old woman or young woman, depending on how you're looking at it. So it's either an old woman kind of looking forward or looking down, or a young woman who's looking back. And again, that one takes a little bit more effort to see exactly what they are. The more recent one, this one's been going around the internet a lot. It's called the spinning dancer, and I suspect a lot of people have seen this one. And it's often accompanied by a statement about personality. Like, people who are right-brained see her spinning clockwise. People who are left-brained see her spinning anti-clockwise, which, whatever that means, I don't know what left-brained versus right-brained people act as. It's complete nonsense. In fact, most people see her spinning clockwise. But it takes a little bit of effort for people who are watching this to spend a bit of time looking at the spinning dancer and see if they can get her to reverse. But that's just another example of an ambiguous figure. Now, each of these examples in the bi-stable sort of illusions or figures, there's only two ways of seeing it. It's either counter-clockwise or clockwise. It's either a duck, it's a rabbit, it's either a young woman or an old woman. But these are kind of toy problems. These aren't the sort of problems that we encounter every day. Now, if you take a more realistic figure, for example, and say a picture of your mother or of your partner, if you're looking at this two-dimensional photograph of your mother or partner, depending on who's looking at it, you encounter very different experiences. You interpret them in very different ways. You have a lifetime of experience looking at a photograph of your mother. When you're looking at that photo, your heart rate might increase, they're highly familiar, you might have a few memories that come to mind. Very different from a complete stranger who's looking at that particular face. They might judge it as being attractive or not, or make a judgment about hair color, any number of things. But these are all just figures, images, photographs. But if we take even a little bit more abstract in looking at these types of things, take an abstract concept like promotion. Imagine that you've just been promoted at work. Now, that idea of promotion also depends entirely on your experience, it can be interpreted in any number of ways. You have increased responsibility at work. It also means that you're going to have to put in longer hours. The way that you look at that promotion is going to be very different from how your partner looks at that promotion, or your boss looks at that promotion, or your colleagues look at that promotion. That interpretation, or in predicting whether to promote somebody, that's a completely different sort of frame depending on who's looking at it, who's doing the interpretation. And these are the sort of problems that we're dealing with every day. And these are the same problems that scientists have to navigate, particularly psychologists, cognitive psychologists, when trying to predict people's behavior in the future. And that's that complexity, that ambiguity, is something that we have to deal with and try to simplify as a result, which is a point that keeps coming up again and again. Yeah, yeah. The late physicist Richard Feynman talks about this in a series called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Now, you're talking about predicting human behavior, but let's say we're trying to predict where something will land when we drop it. So if we have a perfect sphere in a vacuum, in this perfect environment, we have some reasonably good mathematical models about predicting where exactly that sphere will land. Now, if you scale that up just a little bit and predict where a feather will land if I drop it on the floor, think about the factors that are interacting with that feather that will determine where it lands. You've got wind resistance, friction, gravity, the surface area. There are factors in the environment that will determine where that thing will land. And that complexity balloons out when we just increase it a little bit. Now, scale up from predicting where that feather will land to predicting what this bag of cells will do tomorrow, to predicting human behavior. The complexity explodes. There are millions, billions, trillions of different factors that will determine what we will do. And we're trying to predict that behavior in the future. So how do we do that? Well, what scientists do is try and reduce that complexity and ambiguity. They try to isolate the variables that they think will be important that will make good predictions. And that's what we have to do in our everyday lives as well. Now, think about you've got 30 minutes in a job interview. You're trying to interview somebody to decide whether to give them a job or not. Now, as we said, I think in episode three, there are lots of ways the complexity there makes it such that the interviews are not very predictive of their future behavior. But if you constrain that complexity a little bit by doing a structured interview, that will help you make better predictions in the future. Ask them all the same sort of question exactly in there. Exactly. You're reducing the ways that... You're reducing the number of variables that can have an effect and so therefore hopefully increasing your ability to predict that behavior in the future. It's the same for whether you're trying to figure out how well you'll do in a final exam. You can look at your past behavior and see... Don't rely on that feeling of learning as we spoke about in episode five. Rely on your previous behavior and this sort of objective evidence that you have. And I think that will help you make better predictions about human behavior. That's right. And we're going to talk about that even more next. So we're going to talk about this idea of multiple predictors. All of these interacting, complex factors that we're trying to constrain, trying to overcome and predicting future behavior, future sorts of events. And that kind of leads to things like magical thinking, superstition as we'll see next.