Today’s soundtrack: to get some reciprocity
Today at 7:02pm: teaching my last Hapkido class at the current location


You know when you see people in the street or on the subway and you can’t understand why they would act like that? Or sometimes your friend does something you find fucked-up but which they think is completely reasonable, or vice-versa?

Lately I’ve become fascinated by perception, and especially how it can fool you into thinking things. It’s also interesting (to me) when two people look at the same situation but describe it so, so differently.

When I was in London I bought this book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, and I just started reading it. It’s friggin’ awesome so far. It’s written in first-person, from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old kid who tries to solve a dog murder, but the kid is autistic and extremely observant so he notices the strangest shit.

Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome fascinate me--how can those motherfuckers be so smart? Adding ridiculous figures up in like a nano-second? I guess these conditions fascinate me because I myself am not very good at maths. (See we say “math” here in the ‘States but the Brits say “maths,” and the author’s a Brit so I’m copping it for this paragraph.)

Anyways I normally get confused by even the answers to those math problems where like, you have to walk over each bridge only once, or the ones where a train leaves Los Angeles traveling east at 50 miles an hour. But the kid in the book mentions this one fascinating one and I actually understood it.

This particular problem apparently fooled even professional mathematicians (that must be one hell of a career) but a genius woman named Marilyn vos Savant got it right. I’ll paraphrase the explanation of it here:

Let’s say you’re on a game show where the host shows you three doors. One door has a brand-new car behind it, the other two have goats behind ‘em. You’re trying to win the car, obviously.

So you pick one of the doors, but they don’t open it yet. Instead the host opens up one of the other doors and shows you there’s a goat behind it. Meaning the door you picked is either the other goat or the car.

Then the host gives you the option of sticking with the door you picked, or switching to the final, unopened door. What should you do?

The correct answer is, you should switch your choice. If you switch there’s a two-in-three chance you’ll get the car.

Why?

Most people think their chances are fifty-fifty--one of the unopened doors has a goat, the other has a car--so sticking or switching will make no difference. But those odds are wrong.

Here’s why. First of all, forget for a sec that the host opens one of the doors to show you a goat--that’s a red herring, meant to distract you. The first step of the problem is, you pick one of three doors. Two of them have goats, one has a car. That means there’s a two-in-three chance you’ve picked a goat, and only a one-in-three chance you’ve picked the car on the first try. So chances are you’ve picked a goat to begin with, which means switching to the other available door will get you the car.

Fascinating, no? It all has to do with perception.

Anyways I highly recommend the book. I rarely read fiction but this is one of the best I’ve cracked open so far.

I hope I’m not just recommending this book because it subconsciously made me feel smart. That’s like when you tell your friends “Yeah, that chick so-and-so is pretty cool,” but you only thought that because she talked to you at that one party and in fact you know nothing about her at all.