This episode of Up and Atom is brought to you by SkillShare.
Have you ever been in this situation? Where you've been staring at the options
of a multiple-choice question for so long they kind of all blur into one? You
probably just make a wild guess like B or C, but definitely not A that would
just be crazy. But there is a better way and it involves game theory. If you've
never heard of game theory before it's basically the study of how to get the
best outcome in situations which involve other people.
It focuses mainly on strategies, cooperation, and conflict. As you can
imagine there are quite a lot of situations which involve these things, so
game theory has become an entire field of study on its own, and it's so
fascinating and deep that there's no way we're gonna cover it all in this one
video. But we will cover the very first rule which is: anticipate the other
player. This might seem obvious but there are a lot of scenarios where it may not
occur to you like a multiple-choice test. We're going to answer two questions from
the math section of the SAT s using only this one rule and by the end of the
video you should have a pretty good idea of the power of game theory.
You've just sat down to take a test and you get stumped by the very first
question. Don't panic. In fact let's do this without even reading the question.
These are your options:
So in order to anticipate the other player the first step would be to figure
out who the other player is. Any guesses? Well the person who wrote the test!
What's their primary objective? What do they want? It's usually pretty simple,
they want students who understand the problem to get it right and those who
don't to get it wrong. So you just need to choose the option which best fits
their objective. e) is the odd one out being the only non fraction so let's
start there. The test maker wants those who understand the problem to get it
right and those who don't you get it wrong, so wrong answers can't be too
obviously wrong because then it would be too easy. For example if camel or juice
were options alongside all the other answers it it'd be pretty obvious they
were wrong, so if the right answer were a whole number like two it doesn't make it
very challenging if all the other options are fractions. So we can rule out
e). Now if we look at D and B both of them can be further reduced. I don't know many
test makers that would reward bad math etiquette like that, do you? So we can
rule them out too. Now there's just a) and C) left. Both these options make good
answers but I'd put my money on a) five over three. Why? Two reasons. The first is
that D) 75 over 45 is just the unsimplified version of a) five over
three, so if the question we're asking you to solve a fraction students who
forget to simplify would choose D) getting it wrong. So if the test maker
want students who remember to simplify to get it right and students who forget
to get it wrong, a) is the perfect answer. The second reason is that all of the
other options are top-heavy fractions, meaning that the numerator is larger
than the denominator. Even two is a top-heavy fraction if you think about it.
So if 7 over 15 is the correct answer it doesn't really match the test
makers objective because all the other answers are
so different that none of them make good competitors. So we'll choose a) five over
three, and yes, that was the right answer. Moving on. You get stumped by the next
question - it's just not your day. Again we're going to figure this out without
looking at the question. These are your options. Feel free to pause the screen
and try for yourself. Now having tried a number of these questions something I
noticed is that the answer usually isn't the biggest or the smallest number. This
makes sense if you imagine it were you writing the test. If the answer is 10 you
usually wouldn't make 10 the biggest or smallest option. You're much more likely
to try and muddle it up somewhere in the middle to make it harder and not so obvious.
This isn't always the case of course. Some test makers are aware of this skew
to the middle and may intentionally make the answer an extreme, so there is that
to look out for, but in most of the questions I tried it was somewhere in
the middle. So immediately we can rule out a) and B). Now let's take a look at C).
What do you think? I don't think it's the answer. Why? Well apart from the fact the
majority of the options are greater than 100%, most percentages you're exposed to
in school and in life are between one and a hundred, so it's
pretty unlikely that you would make the mistake of thinking a percentage was
over a hundred unless you had a pretty good reason. So we can rule out C) 75%. Now
both D) and E) would make good answers but if I had to choose I'd go with E) a
hundred and forty percent. Why I lean that way is because of option A) forty percent.
If one hundred and forty percent is the right answer
forty percent makes a perfect wrong answer as people who aren't confident
with percentages might hesitate to go for the hundred and forty and play it
safe with forty getting it wrong. So we are pretty certain the answer is e) one
hundred and forty percent, and yes, it was. So there you have it, how game theory can
help you fraud your way through school. Did that sentence make sense? What's
interesting about this strategy is that when you look at a test you think that
the only information that can help you is in your brain or in the
test, but it's not! Where there are other people involved there are incentives, objectives, and
ways to interpret them in your favor. Obviously I'm not suggesting that you
rely on this technique for your next test!
You should still like learn the things. But just see this is the kind of last
resort. Something to try when you feel like you're already screwed. Speaking of
learning things! This episode of Up and Atom was made possible by SkillShare.
SkillShare is an online learning community with a lot of different
classes for different things, and here are just a few that I think you guys
might be interested in. There are classes on decision science: how to make good
decisions, machine learning, computer science, the
science of happiness. There's also a lot more than just science stuff and
actually one of the ones I'm most excited about is this one on how to draw
cute animals. So you might be seeing a lot of cute animals in my future
videos. So you can see there's a wide variety of topics to help you with
things like work - hobbies - guilty pleasures. So
Skillshare is offering a special offer to my viewers which is you guys where you
can try it out for two months totally free! To sign up go to sk l dot s h slash
up and atom it's a pretty awkward URL so i'm just gonna leave a link in the
description. So you just need to click that link to sign up and then you can
start learning how to be happy. Oh and a huge thank you to thomas frankly for
appearing in my youtube video you play a confused student very well and just one
last message for my regular viewers where the hell have I been right so a
few months ago I announced that I wanted to attend a filmmaking course in New
York so I could learn how to make better videos and thanks to my patrons Here I
am I've been here for six weeks hence the absence of making videos I'm gonna
be back making videos regularly at the beginning of July I miss you guys a lot
like seriously so much thanks to everyone who's been emailing me and
commenting I promise I will get back to you all don't forget about me
so yeah I haven't left I'm just taking a break so I can be better when I return
say I feel like I've been choking for a billion years I'm just gonna summarize
this episode now game theory is awesome skills share
awesome Thomas frankly is awesome and you guys are awesome by