Magic Tricks Revealed: Test Your Rationality

I don't think that the point with the plate example is that they should have guessed that the teacher cheated, but rather that if "convection" or whatever doesn't actually predict what you saw, then it's better to say "I don't know" than to try and guess the password.

The real issue in the context of the plate seems to be a general heuristic that people aren't trying to deceive us.

Not surprisingly then, a key element of most magic tricks is misdirection, or outright lying. There was a discussion about this on LW a while back, but I can't find it. Someone mentioned how if you just boldly lie about key elements of the setup, people will form expectations that you can then easily surprise. The commenter then found that this skill at lying (and noticing how trusting people are) bled into the rest of his life, which led me to suggest people should be extra careful around magicians even when they're not on stage!

If you have some basic understanding of how physics works, then the heating of the plate's wrong side should strike you as extremely inplausible - a lot more so than hypotheses about deliberate manipulation of experiment settings. A physical theory should be some kind of quantitative guide about updating probablities, and being such it should be able to give you very low probabilites for a class of hypotheses. The teacher's trick drew attention to the fact that the students markedly did not use physics to generate quantitative answers. So, per my reading, the focal point of the experiment wasn't suspending trust in people.

Still, "the teacher turned the plate around" should come up in the grand list of possible solutions, but it shouldn't be privileged, and it should be weighed against the prior probability of "the teacher will deceive us".

There's a difference between "considering deception and then dismissing it as unlikely" and "not even considering deception at all".

If those teacher's students were absolutely not expecting a lie, then another out-of-the-box question based on physics they should understand wouldn't trick them. The trust has been broken. On the other hand, if the problem is their inability to be creative enough, they won’t become creative just because they learned not to trust the teacher.

My high school physics teacher in high school who liked tricking us. Demonstrating his point about reflections off of light/dark surfaces, he covered up the laser pointer while shining it at a black binder. He put a compass next to a magnet to throw us off. These tricks were rare enough that we didn’t expect them every time, but we also knew not to blindly trust his setup. Still, there were plenty of people who fell for them every time.

And then came the torque wheel, a gyroscope bicycle wheel almost exactly like the one in this video. My first reaction, based on physics I did understand (and that wasn’t it at that time) was, “That’s impossible!” Then the teacher then told us it wasn’t a trick. He wouldn’t lie, but my reaction was still, “That’s impossible!” If I remember correctly, my hypothesis involved a hinge at the end of a solid string. Eventually, the teacher just had me hold the wheel and spun it… and the friggin’ thing moved on its own!!! I even checked that the axis or the rim didn’t contain any magicary before I was able to admit that, “Huh, I guess it is possible.”

A couple years later after that, another physics teacher inadvertently placed a compass on top of the table with a classroom computer inside of it. And then he had us learn N/S/E/W by pointing. I was the only moron in a 200-person class pointing to the “wrong” North.

Countries where people trust more are generally more prosperous and while there are correlation v. causation issues here there's surrounding evidence which suggests that there really is a causal link from high trust to more prosperity.

My intuition (and only my intuition, I haven't been able to research this effectively) suggests that the causal link is in the other direction. That is, in more prosperous countries/regions there is higher trust, since fewer people (in general) need to push limits to be able to live comfortably, so there is less crime.

"Creativity" implies generation. And yet, does the proper definition of it emphasize generation? Scott Adams has said that creativity is the ability to purge compelling, half functional ideas from one's mind, basically holding off on proposing solutions.

The strength of intelligence, and humanity, is improvising where hard-coded adaptations would be inferior.

I'm not willing to say that the problem in such a case was the absence of a specific, narrow heuristic rather than a lack of creativity. Creativity is getting by when narrow heuristics fail, and not cutting corners by assuming too much.

However unlikely it is in a specific case that the specific usually-valid heuristic "they are not trying to deceive you" fails, this was not a one-off case because there are a great number of usually-valid heuristics, each of which will rarely fail, but at least one of which will fail somewhat often, such that somewhat often a person with low creativity will fail.

I'm interested in your reaction to this trick. (about 4:10 to 6:10)

Bwahahahahahaha! I'll admit I kinda freaked out at first.