• theparadox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    I recall there was some show (maybe something from Darren Brown?) or maybe it was just an actual, legit experiment… but anyway, in it people were locked in a room and given some situation where they would benefit or win if a counter they could see hit a certain number within a given period of time. They weren’t told how to make the counter go up though.

    It turned out the counter went up randomly but the people were trying all sorts of repetitive actions trying to recreate what they were doing previously to “make” the counter go up before. I think this was also done, but with an actual “secret” cause in Taskmaster, the TV show.

    • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      There was a job interview once where the candidate was presented with a form that had 3 entry fields. They started as like [2, 4, 8]. The candidate was tasked with figuring out what made the form submit and what generated an error.

      People would build all sorts of bizarre hypothesis and fail to test them. Good candidates would have an idea, then try to invalidate it.

      It was for a QA role, where the ideal candidate would have good debugging skills instead of running with the first thing that came to mind.

      Edit: oh, it was basically this guy: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quick-puzzle-to-test-your-problem-solving.html

  • PyroNeurosis@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    I dunno, for such things as necessary and uncontrollable as rain to ancient cultures, there is also the stress of ‘what if it doesn’t rain?’.

    People (me) hate being helpless, especially during crises or crunch points, so giving people busy work to quiet their anxiety during this period is socially a necessary step. I recall being trained to do the same thing for emergencies: give people small discrete tasks to keep them occupied and out of the way.

      • rah@hilariouschaos.comEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        it’s a blog post

        The publishing format makes no difference. Making arbitrary statements with nothing to back them up is bad. It’s what religions do, ironically.