 Hey folks, it's the 4th of July, man, how fast did that creep up on us? And on today's show, we've got another corresponding segment for my good friend George Frankly. We'll hopefully be back next week with full host recordings, but for this week, we're talking marbles, UFOs, and data contamination. Enjoy the show. Hello there, I'm George Frankly, and I'd like to talk about how even the best and brightest people can make truly stupid decisions and terrible predictions and what we can learn from them. This is Dare to Be Stupid. This time on Dare to Be Stupid, the Information Disease, or the Flying Saucer and the Marble Jar. June 24th, 1947, one absolute hell of a Tuesday if you're a certain kind of weirdo that cares. Spoilers, I'm that weirdo. June 24th, 1947 was the first day of the age of the Flying Saucer. A civilian pilot flying over Mount Rainier reported the first well-documented sighting of what became known as a Flying Saucer. Neckos of his sighting have influenced decades of other incidents and the entire breadth of our pop culture. The common term, UFO, wouldn't be coined for another five years during subsequent Air Force investigations. Here in the summer of 1947, the Flying Saucer was entering the mainstream. Now, that much of history is an undeniable fact. Unfortunately, that fact is butting heads with a more important fact. The fact that our witness, the pilot Kenneth Arnold, never said he saw a Flying Saucer at all. The entire concept of the Flying Saucer was introduced to our collective consciousness not by sightings or experiences, but by a mistake. But let's shelf that whole boring UFO conspiracy thing for now. Let's talk about something with a bit more thrill to it. Jelly beans. It's a very, very old game and I'm sure we've all participated in it at least once or twice. A huge jar is filled with jelly beans or marbles or pennies or something like that and a contest is made out of it. Guess the number of widgets? Actually, let's stick with marbles. It fits my depression-era street urchin aesthetic. Guess the number of marbles and the closest answer wins a prize, classic county fair and school fundraiser fodder. This little game, and maybe a stretch to call it a game, this little game can generate some amazing statistics or the exact same game can generate terrible statistics. You see, if 500 people go up to a jar of, say, 500 marbles, make a guess and then throw their guess in the ballot box, a brilliant thing starts to happen. Many will guess high, many will guess low, but a bit of a bell curve will start to form. Highs and lows will cancel each other out, outliers will get outweighed, and in the end, the mean average of all the guesses will prove shockingly close to the real thing. Those 500 people will, as a hive mind, come up with something close to 500 marbles. But if you had taken the same 500 people, the same jar of the same 500 marbles, and instead you had them all make their guesses on a dollar store clipboard tethered to the jar by a piece of string, you would get an average number that was wildly wrong. Why? In that second example, the number inevitably skews off in seemingly random directions. Rather than a comfortable few deviations away from your target of 500 marbles, it would soar higher or plummet lower by wide margins, all because you bought cheap office supplies, or as you may have already guessed, because you tainted the data pool during collection. Blind ballots in a box create a genuinely random, fairly normalized distribution. Every guess comes from a place of total independence, but a person who sees every guess that came before theirs is given an unavoidable burden. They've seen which way the wind is blowing, they've seen what everyone else thinks is a reasonable guess, and that's going to affect their own. It takes an exorbitant ego and a cavalcade of confidence to never once think, maybe all these other people know something I don't. The survival center of our brain is wired to notice movements of the herd. Our contemporaries are fleeing from something we don't want to be left behind, and if they're focused on something, on one range of numbers, we don't want to be the lone outlier. This is, or is not, what author James Surowecky refers to as the Wisdom of Crowds. In his book of the same name, he describes how large groups of people can develop highly accurate consensus when they make simultaneous, independent decisions in good faith. Under the opposite conditions, where decision-making is staggered and can be influenced by other decisions, you get the opposite result. This sort of crowdthink, where decisions are moving downstream instead of being spontaneous and independent, is called an information cascade. The first few decision-makers set the pace and, in effect, create a chain reaction on every decision that comes afterwards. Information cascades can completely override the thoughts of the people downstream, even defying what's right in front of their eyes. The final person to approach that marble jar could have deduced a count of exactly 500 marbles long before her turn at the board, but when she sees that the last 100 contestants all guessed 300 something, her own mind will turn on her. 500 must be too high. It feels too high. Her guess is weighed down by new information, literally an anchor bias. With anchor bias, there's suddenly a heavy pull dragging your independent thoughts down towards an infectious new frame of reference. My point is, there's a hell of a lot of fancy science names for the telephone game. It's all a fun little carnival game thought experiment that just kind of threatens the entire concept of honesty. Human memory is squishy, spongy, and very malleable, and in both directions. Data storage, from magnetic tape to blockchains, all tends to be linear. It goes from one entry into the next. The human brain is absolutely not. We can rewrite details from our most ancient memories without even realizing we were thinking about them. We can watch something happen right in front of our eyes and then remember it completely differently minutes later. We write and rewrite memory, forwards and in reverse constantly. This is why human eyewitnesses actually make for terrible evidence. Investigators don't just separate witnesses to prevent collusion, it's to prevent contamination. Allowing multiple people to share and compare their memories leads to the homogenization of those memories. Even if they are honest people trying their best, reality is sturdy, but perception is fragile. So marbles, marbles and flying saucers. Why flying saucers? Rather, why did newspapers report that Kenneth Arnold saw flying saucers? What he saw and what he described to air controllers and to the press was a formation of strange boomerang-shaped objects. Later on he would call them crescent or even chevron-shaped. And a crescent, believe it or not, is not a saucer. It's literally not even half of a saucer. It's a crescent, what gives? You see, Arnold went on to describe their bobbing high-speed movements like, quote, a saucer skipping on water. And the first reporter to hit the headlines shortened that to flying saucer. Not having any photographs, artists ended up illustrating that headline very accordingly. And then history happened, information cascaded. That phrase became part of the zeitgeist. More and more often afterwards, people witnessed flying saucers. So are all of these subsequent sightings frauds? Well, I can't say. But what I can say is that when you look at sightings by typical consumers of popular culture and then sightings by outsiders with different influences, they report very different things. Betty Hill, the first modern alien abduction from a flying saucer story in 1961, happened to be a huge science fiction enthusiast who'd seen her fair share of saucers in the media. Travis Walton, abducted by a flying disc in 1975, was also plenty familiar with the concept. But years before Arnold saw his boomerangs, Air Force pilots of World War II saw plenty of UFOs and they weren't saucers. Nicknamed fool fighters, these objects were sighted numerous times but were described as flying spheres or balls of light. Even spectators in the 18th and 19th centuries saw UFOs, but back then those were commonly spheres or long, quote, cigar shapes. There are even genuine 150-year-old photographs out there of cylindrical mystery airships. Cylindrical, never saucers. So yes, enthusiastic people started seeing saucers after the information cascade reached them. But what about outsiders, the uninfected or just unenthusiastic people? Airline pilots, military officers, and members of law enforcement are all famously reluctant to report strange sightings for fear of their jobs. But when they do, they report things like spheres, pill or capsule shapes, or often dark triangles in the sky, but rarely ever saucers. Maybe the single best case of this occurred in Socorro, New Mexico, 1964. Police officer Lonnie Zamora took a detour to investigate some kind of fireball that came roaring down outside of town. When he approached an overlook, he saw an oval-shaped object on landing legs in a dry creek bed far below him. Two smallish figures in strange clothes were attending to it. He got back in his car to make his way down closer but then heard the roar again. The oval object rose up on a pillar of fire and disappeared into the sky. By all accounts, Lonnie Zamora had no particular awareness of UFO phenomena. He didn't even seem to understand the massive public interest that was swelling up around his sighting. He was very matter-of-fact about what he saw, reported it, and then asked to be left alone. Air Force investigators would end up finding imprints, burnt sands, and other traces of something that very clearly blasted off from the sands outside of Socorro. Independent of the information cascade, Lonnie Zamora very credibly saw something goddamn weird that day and it still wasn't a flying saucer. Contagious or contaminated information ties anchors and places shortcuts inside our minds. When our brain sees something vague and blurry and weird, it instantly digs to our lifetime archive of shapes and words to fill in the blanks. And sometimes you can't help what it finds. If you didn't know that everybody else had guessed 200 marbles, maybe you would have counted 500 in the jar right away. If Kenneth Arnold had been familiar with swept-wing jet fighters, which the Air Force revealed only three months after his incident, those flying propeller-less boomerangs he saw might have seemed a bit more mundane. And poor Lonnie Zamora had no way of knowing that just out there in the New Mexico Desert, NASA was developing and testing the first lunar modules for the Apollo program. Some days we get to see what we really see and other days we just catch the disease. In the end, we're all doing the best we can with the information we've been given. Thanks for listening. As always, I'd like to remind you that nearly all of my illustrious job titles come with the prefix armchair. If you're an expert and you're hearing me get something wrong, I'd like to hear from you. Thanks for that illuminating look. If you have any feedback for George, send me an email at Adam at speakingofbitcoin.show and I'll make sure he gets it. And until next time, thanks for listening.