Guest post from Andrew Butters: Devil's in the details

Before we start, what are your thoughts on calling certain people Overzealous Grammar Reporting Enthusiasts instead of Grammar Na*is?  OGREs.  I think this works.  Hereinafter, that is how I will refer to them. With that out of the way, let’s get on with it.

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I read just about everything Gordon Bonnet writes.  I read his blog, Skeptophilia, daily (well, six days a week.  He takes Sundays off.  He was also kind enough to crosspost this for me today).  Occasionally, I’ll find a typo.  When I do, I shoot him a message pointing it out, and he thanks me and then fixes it (though sometimes he fixes it and then thanks me.  Potato potato).  My response is the same when he does the same for my writing here or on Facebook.

Tyops happen.  It's not an automatic sign that the writer was negligent.  It's not irrefutable proof that self-published authors are "lesser" when compared with traditionally published ones.  I’ve seen typos in Stephen King's books and from highly respected AP journalists.  Here’s a great example of a traditional publisher thinking that global search and replace was a good idea:

Readers who come across them vary.  Some ignore them and move on.  I typically ignore them, but if I were to find a shit-tonne, I'd stop reading and send the author or publisher a private message.  No need to make a scene.  That's me, though.  Some people latch onto them as if the fate of the literary world hangs in the balance (OGREs).  Take this example:

Now, I’m told that their book was reinstated after an outpouring of support from readers, but the fact that it happened should serve as a cautionary tale.  I scooped this screenshot from someone on Facebook, and one of the comments read (in part):

“You do your job poorly, there are consequences.  That’s how it works.  And no, if there is a typo in my book I AM telling Amazon because I want my money back.”
—Some OGRE on Facebook

It took all my willpower not to point out that Grammarly suggested not one but two corrections to his comment.  At any rate, I don't blame others for piping up if the typos are rampant.  The thing is, in my experience, books like that are rare.  I've read many books from established big names to first-time self-published authors and have yet to encounter one with enough errors to raise an eyebrow.  No, the plural of anecdote isn't data, but you get my point.  Sometimes shit happens.  Welcome to being human.  Unfortunately, not everyone sees it that way.

What follows is a true story.

I wrote Near Death By A Thousand Cuts over about a month, sometime in November 2022.  After writing, I let it sit for about a week.  Then, I started editing.  These were all personal anecdotes, so I didn't approach it like I would fiction.  The language was informal, and there was more swearing.

I made three passes of editing before sending it to my actual editor, who, in this case, happened to be Gordon (a great writer in his own right and a former teacher with an MA in linguistics).  I made the changes he recommended, adding a few more.

Then, I had seven beta readers go through it (reading critically, not just for fun), and THEY found errors.

Then, my mom (a former teacher) read it and found some stuff.

Then, I read the proofcopy and found more things.

Then, upon receiving what was supposed to be the final version to upload to KDP, I got a message from my layout designer.  SHE found a typo.

Like, holy shit.  Even after all the people and all the times this book was read, there was still a missing letter ("a" should have been "an").

Then, I recorded the audiobook, and guess what? I found MORE mistakes.

All that to say, editing is hard.

I have a good mind to send a link for Near Death to the OGRE from the quote above, with their high standards, and ask them to have a go at it.  I’d even refund them their money, forgoing my royalty and Amazon’s cut.

If you find a typo in my book Known Order Girls, I’ll mail you a bookplate (normally $5).  I extended this offer on Facebook, and someone took me up on it!  They were very kind, and I appreciate their eagle eyes catching something that made it through the editing gauntlet.

There will always be some asshole typo, waiting, lurking, biding its time, and making itself known only to that one reader who will fixate on it and leave a bad review as a result.

As Vonnegut probably wrote, "So ti goes."

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Lateral thinking

One of the biggest impediments to clear thinking is the fact that it's so hard for us to keep in mind that we could be wrong.

As journalist Kathryn Schulz put it:

I asked you how it felt to be wrong, and you had answers like humiliating, frustrating, embarrassing, devastating.  And those are great answers.  But they're answers to a different question.  Those are answers to the question, "How does it feel to find out you're wrong?"  But being wrong?  Being wrong doesn't feel like anything...  You remember those characters on Saturday morning cartoons, the Coyote and the Roadrunner?  The Coyote was always doing things like running off a cliff, and when he'd do that, he'd run along for a while, not seeing that he was already over the edge.  It was only when he noticed it that he'd start to fall.  That's what being wrong is like before you've realized it.  You're already wrong, you're already in trouble...  So I should amend what I said earlier.  Being wrong does feel like something.

It feels like being right.

We cling desperately to the sense that we have it all figured out, that we're right about everything.  Oh, in theoretical terms we realize we're fallible; all of us can remember times we've been wrong.  But right here, right now?  It's like my college friend's quip, "I used to be conceited, but now I'm perfect."

The trouble with all this is that it blinds us to the errors that we do make, because if you don't keep at least trying to question your own answers, you won't see your own blunders.  It's why lateral thinking puzzles are so difficult, but so important; they force you to set aside the usual conventions of how puzzles are solved, and to question your own methods and intuitions at every step.  This was the subject of a study by Andrew Meyer (of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) and Shane Frederick (of Yale University) that appeared in the journal Cognition last week.  They looked at a standard lateral thinking puzzle, and tried to figure out how to get people to avoid falling into thinking their (usually incorrect) first intuition was right.

The puzzle was a simple computation problem:

A bat and a ball together cost $1.10.  The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.  How much does the ball cost?

The most common error is simply to subtract the two, and to come up with ten cents as the cost of the ball.  But a quick check of the answer should show this can't be right.  If the bat costs a dollar and the ball costs ten cents, then the bat costs ninety cents more than the ball, not a dollar more (as the problem states).  The correct answer is that the ball costs $0.05 and the bat costs $1.05 -- the sum is $1.10, and the difference is an even dollar.

Meyer and Frederick tried different strategies for improving people's success.  Bolding the words "more than the ball" in the problem, to call attention to the salient point, had almost no effect at all.  Then they tried three different levels of warnings:

1. Be careful!  Many people miss this problem.
2. Be careful!  Many people miss the following problem because they do not take the time to check their answer.
3. Be careful!  Many people miss the following problem because they read it too quickly and actually answer a different question than the one that was asked.

All of these improved success, but not by as much as you might think.  The number of people who got the correct answer went up by only about ten percent, no matter which warning was used.

Then the researchers decided to be about as blatant as you can get, and put in a bolded statement, "HINT: The answer is NOT ten cents!"  This had the best improvement rate of all, but amazingly, still didn't eliminate all of the wrong answers.  Some people were so certain their intuition was right that they stuck to their guns -- apparently assuming that the researchers were deliberately trying to mislead them!

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Nevit Dilmen, Question mark 1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

If you find this tendency a little unsettling... well, you should.  It's one thing to stick to a demonstrably wrong answer in some silly hypothetical bat-and-ball problem; it's another thing entirely to cling to incorrect intuition or erroneous understanding when it affects how you live, how you act, how you vote.

It's why learning how to suspend judgment is so critical.  To be able to hold a question in your mind and not immediately jump to what seems like the "obvious answer" is one of the most important things there is.  I used to assign lateral thinking puzzles to my Critical Thinking students every so often -- I told them, "Think of these as mental calisthenics.  They're a way to exercise your problem-solving ability and look at problems from angles you might not think of right away.  Don't rush to find an answer; keep considering them until you're sure you're on the right track."

So I thought I'd throw a few of the more entertaining puzzles at you.  None of them involve much in the way of math (nothing past adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing), but all of them take an insight that requires pushing aside your first impression of how problems are solved.  Enjoy!  (I'll include the answers at the end of tomorrow's post, if any of them stump you.)

1.  The census taker problem

A census taker goes to a man's house, and asks for the ages of the man's three daughters.

"The product of their ages is 36," the man says.

The census taker replies, "That's not enough information to figure it out."

The man says, "Okay, well, the sum of their ages is equal to the house number across the street."

The census taker looks out of the window at the house across the street, and says, "I'm sorry, that's still not enough information to figure it out."

The man says, "Okay... my oldest daughter has red hair."

The census taker says, "Thank you," and writes down the ages.

How old are the three daughters?

2. The St. Ives riddle

The St. Ives riddle is a famous puzzle that goes back to (at least) the seventeenth century:

As I was going to St. Ives,
I met a man with seven wives.
Each wife had seven kids,
Each kid had seven cats,
Each cat had seven kits.
Kits, cats, kids, and wives, how many were going to St. Ives?

3.  The bear

A man goes for a walk.  He walks a mile south, a mile east, and a mile north, and after that is back where he started.  At that point, he sees a large bear rambling around.  What color is the bear?

4.  A curious sequence

What is the next number in this sequence: 8, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6...

5.  Classifying the letters

You can classify the letters in the English alphabet as follows:

Group 1: A, M, T, U, V, W, Y

Group 2: B, C, D, E, K

Group 3: H, I, O, X

Group 4: N, S, Z

Group 5: F, G, J, L, P, Q, R

What's the reason for grouping them this way?

6.  The light bulb puzzle

At the top of a ten-story building are three ordinary incandescent light bulbs screwed into electrical sockets.  On the first floor are three switches, one for each bulb, but you don't know which switch turns on which bulb, and you can't see the bulbs (or their light) from the place where the switches are located.  How can you determine which switch operates which bulb... and only take a single trip from the first floor up to the tenth?

Have fun!

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Oops, I did it again

The following is a direct transcript of how I got welcomed into a multi-person business-related Zoom call a couple of years ago:

Me: How are you today?

Meeting leader: I'm fine, how are you?

Me: Pretty good, how are you?

Meeting leader: ...

Me: *vows never to open his mouth in public again*

I think we can all relate to this sort of thing -- and the awful sensation of realizing, microseconds after it leaves our mouths, that what we just said was idiotic.  When my then fiancée, now wife, told a mutual friend that she was getting married -- after we'd been dating for two years -- the friend blurted out, "To who?"  Another friend ended a serious phone call with her boss by saying, "Love you, honey!"  Another -- and I witnessed this one -- was at a trailhead in a local park, preparing to go for a walk as two cyclists were mounting their bikes and putting on their helmets.  He said to them, "Enjoy your hike!"

The funniest one, though, was a friend who was in a restaurant, and the waitress asked what she'd like for dinner.  My friend said, "The half chicken bake, please."  The waitress said, "Which side?"  My friend frowned with puzzlement and said, "Um... I dunno... Left, I guess?"  There was a long pause, and the waitress, obviously trying not to guffaw, said, "No, ma'am, I mean, which side order would you like?"

I don't think my friend has been in that restaurant since.

This "oops" phenomenon probably shouldn't embarrass us as much as it does, because it's damn near ubiquitous.  The brilliant writer Jenny Lawson -- whose three wonderful books, Let's Pretend This Never Happened, Furiously Happy, and Broken (In the Best Possibly Way) should be on everyone's reading list -- posted on her Twitter (@TheBloggess -- follow her immediately if you don't already) a while back, "Airport cashier: 'Have a safe flight.'  Me: 'You too!'  I CAN NEVER COME HERE AGAIN.", and was immediately inundated by (literally) thousands of replies from followers who shared their own embarrassing, and hilarious, moments.  She devotes a whole chapter to these endearing blunders in her book Broken -- by the time I was done reading that chapter, my stomach hurt from laughing -- but here are three that struck me as particularly funny:

I walked up to a baby-holding stranger (thinking it was my sister) at my daughter's soccer game and said "Give me the baby."

A friend thanked me for coming to her husband's funeral.  My reply?  "Anytime."

A friend placed her order at drive thru.  She then heard, "Could you drive up to the speaker?  You're talking to the trash can."

Lawson responded, "How could you not love each and every member of this awkward tribe?"

This universal phenomenon -- particularly the moment of sudden realization that we've just said or done something ridiculous -- was the subject of a study at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center that came out last week, led by neurologist Ueli Rutishauser.  You'd think it'd be a difficult subject to study; how do you catch someone in one of those moments, and find out what's going on in the brain at the time?  But they got around this in a clever way, by studying patients who were epileptic and already had electrode implants to locate the focal point of their seizures, and had them perform a task that was set up to trigger people to make mistakes.  It's a famous one called the Stroop Test, after psychologist John Ridley Stroop who published a paper on it in 1935.  It's an array of names of colors, where each name is printed in a different color from the one named:

The task is to state the colors, not the names, as quickly as you can.

Most people find this really difficult to do, because we're generally taught to pay attention to what words say and ignore what color it's printed in.  "This creates conflict in the brain," Rutishauser said. "You have decades of training in reading, but now your goal is to suppress that habit of reading and say the color of the ink that the word is written in instead."  Most people, though, when they do make an error, realize it right away.  So this made it an ideal way to see what was happening in the brain in those sudden "oops" moments.

What Rutishauser et al. found is that there are two arrays of neurons that kick in when we make a mistake, a process called "performance monitoring."  The first is the domain-general network, which identifies that we've made a mistake.  Then, the domain-specific network pinpoints what exactly the mistake was.  This, of course, takes time, which is why we usually become aware of what we've just done a moment after it's too late to stop it.

"When we observed the activity of neurons in this brain area, it surprised us that most of them only become active after a decision or an action was completed," said study first author Zhongzheng Fu.  "This indicates that this brain area plays a role in evaluating decisions after the fact, rather than while making them."

Which is kind of unfortunate, because however we rationalize those kinds of blunders as being commonplace, it's hard not to feel like crawling into a hole afterward.  But I guess that, given the fact that it's hardwired into our brains, there's not much hope of changing it.

So we should just embrace embarrassing situations as being part of the human condition.  We're weird, funny, awkward beasts, fumbling along as best we can, and just about everyone can relate to the ridiculous things we say and do sometimes.

But I still don't think I'd be able to persuade my friend to eat dinner at the restaurant where she ordered the left half of a chicken.

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Tweets and backfires

Let me ask you a hypothetical question.

You're over on Twitter, and you post a link making a political claim of some sort.  Shortly thereafter, you get responses demonstrating that the claim your link made is completely false.  Would you...

1. ... delete the tweet, apologize, and be more careful about what you post in the future?
2. ... shrug, say "Meh, whatever," and continue posting at the same frequency/with the same degree of care?
3. ... flip off the computer and afterward be more likely to post inflammatory and/or false claims?

I know this sounds like a setup, and it is, but seriously; why wouldn't everyone select answer #1?  As I discussed in a post just a few days ago, we all make mistakes, and we all hate the feeling of finding out we're in error.  So given that most animal species learn to avoid choices that lead to experiencing pain, why is the answer actually more commonly #3?

I'm not just making a wild claim up myself in order to have a topic to blog about.  The fact that most people increase their rate of promulgating disinformation after they've been caught at it is the subject of a paper that was presented last week at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems called, "Perverse Downstream Consequences of Debunking: Being Corrected by Another User for Posting False Political News Increases Subsequent Sharing of Low Quality, Partisan, and Toxic Content in a Twitter Field Experiment."  The title could pretty much function as the abstract; in an analysis of two thousand Twitter users who post political tweets, the researchers looked at likelihood of posting false information after having errors pointed out online, and found, amazingly enough, a positive correlation.

"We find causal evidence that being corrected decreases the quality, and increases the partisan slant and language toxicity, of the users’ subsequent retweets," the authors write.  "This suggests that being publicly corrected by another user shifts one's attention away from accuracy -- presenting an important challenge for social correction approaches."

"Challenge" isn't the right word; it's more like "tendency that's so frustrating it makes anyone sensible want to punch a wall."  The researchers, Mohsen Mosleh (of the University of Exeter) and Cameron Martel, Dean Eckles, and David Rand (of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), have identified the twenty-first century iteration of the backfire effect -- a well-studied phenomenon showing that being proven wrong makes you double down on whatever your claim was.  But here, it apparently makes you not only double down on that claim, but on every other unfounded opinion you have.

In what universe does being proven wrong make you more confident?

I swear, sometimes I don't understand human psychology at all.  Yeah, I guess you could explain it by saying that someone who has a dearly-held belief questioned is more motivated in subsequent behavior by the insecurity they're experiencing than by any commitment to the truth, but it still makes no sense to me.  The times I've been caught out in an error, either here at Skeptophilia or elsewhere, were profoundly humbling and (on occasion) outright humiliating, and the result was (1) I apologized for my error, and (2) I was a hell of a lot more careful what I posted thereafter.

What I didn't do was to say "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead."

This does pose a quandary.  Faced with a false claim on social media, do we contradict it?  I don't have the energy to go after every piece of fake news I see; I usually limit myself to posts that are explicitly racist, sexist, or homophobic, because I can't in good conscience let that kind of bullshit go unchallenged.  But what if the outcome is said racist, sexist, or homophobe being more likely to post such claims in the future?

Not exactly the result I'm looking for, right there.

So that's our discouraging piece of research for today.  I honestly don't know what to do about a tendency that is so fundamentally irrational.  Despite all of our science and technology, a lot of our behavior still seems to be caveman-level.  "Ogg say bad thing about me.  Me bash Ogg with big rock."

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Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]