The Functionality of the Black Iron Prison

[Faust]

Sure: think of a random number. One digit. You may change your mind from the very first number to come to mind — once.

I'll come back to this.



With one bit of information that your friend definitely had, I can do a pretty convincing job just playing the odds. This is one of those things that gives you an absurd amount of information because it ties into the social fabric you grew up in.

Rough age. Call it the five year span in which your birthday falls. That's all it takes for me to dig up your childhood memories (mostly fake — focus on stuff most kids have happen and lean on the fuzziness of childhood memories to do the dirty work) and tell you a nightmare you had as a kid you didn't know you remembered vividly. (You probably didn't have that nightmare, but one a lot like it, and the imagery is probably pretty strong for you.)

It also gives me enough information to figure out what you consider a random word, because it will be similar phonologically to unusual words you heard growing up.

If you also give me your favorite movie and favorite book, I can spin a frankly creepy account of who you are as a person out of nothing. This part is the same exact approach taken for horoscopes, but hits harder because it uses narrative touchstones that you identify with personally in some way.

With the city you grew up in and your career, I can speak in broad strokes about your life story and hit them dead on. All it takes is extrapolating from the culture you grew up in and the life path you followed and making them meet in the middle.

Seriously. This is easy stuff. You can decode  anyone in this sort of way, not because they are predictable but because humans are bundles of heuristics and stupidity. They necessarily follow certain patterns. Social pressure narrows things even further. You will never pick out the meal they had three days after their 13th birthday, but you can figure out what their ideas of "random" are and get a good idea of what their life path was like.

Fun fact: this works really well in crowds because you can play statistics against them. Eyeball the average age group, describe a very common story for someone in that age group, and pick someone out of the crowd and say "You!" They'll say no, then you say a childhood friend of theirs perhaps, and OH GOODNESS YOU'RE RIGHT.



Right. So, that number. It was 7. But you probably changed your mind immediately after you picked that, and decided on 3 or 9 instead.

This is not hard to do. This will usually be the case for any human you talk to. I encourage you to try it.

There's a list of these isn't there...

[Faust]

think of a colour and a tool

Red hammer

Think of a shape

Triangle, sometimes star

[altered]

I have a phone interview in ten but you can lead people to think of exactly what you want them to with leading build up. I'll post example soon

[altered]

I have a phone interview in ten but you can lead people to think of exactly what you want them to with leading build up. I'll post example soon

Alright, let's take your Tool example. By Tool alone you're already biasing people to a small list. Getting more explicit (smashing tool) would be too obvious. But you can give a list of examples, for instance, and the last one on that list will influence the choice made. (Similar but not identical: if you want them to say wrench, say drill, screwdriver, pliers.)

But that's a weak influence. In the above, hammer is also quite likely. More construction inclined people might consider nail gun. But you can do better with words that have associations. This is a kind of magic trick, and works best in that venue. But if you can have a valid reason to be doing an unrelated thing while you talk, you can perform the trick.

Say I'm shuffling cards. I talk about how I'm doing it, I cut the deck, I bring up that spades began as swords and flash a spade card to drive it home, reshuffle, cut again, running commentary, talk about the symbolism of swords, the stabbing, and — oh, think of an object in your home.

Knife? Knife.

This works on all sorts of levels. The trick is learning what works on YOU, then extrapolating it to others. Pay attention the next time a marketing campaign convinces you to buy something, and you'll have a new tool to con people.

[chaotic neutral observer]

It is EASY to do this stuff. It's so easy you don't even need to TRY. You absolutely can do it by accident.

Once I watched a documentary about a teenage girl who supposedly had the ability to diagnose people's illnesses just by looking at them.  She could identify problems that would normally only be detectable via x-ray, or such.

Her abilities worked when she was allowed to talk with the subject.  However, when dealing with subjects who were instructed not to talk to her or answer her questions, her accuracy dropped precipitously.  This would appear to be a clear case of cold reading (the subjects she was talking to knew what was wrong with them).

But here's the funny bit.  After interacting with the "non-cooperative" subjects, she appeared to be genuinely confused and distressed.  I got the  impression that she really believed she had these abilities.  I think she hadn't just convinced everyone else, she had convinced herself.

[altered]

It’s my experience that very few con artists of the magical sort are intentionally conning people. They buy their own bullshit, wholesale.

The ones who do not are the exception, not the rule. After all: it’s more convincing if not even you know you’re talking nonsense. The unintentional bullshitters are more successful.

ETA:

By the way, Faust, your choices of Red and Triangle say more about you playing Control recently than humans in general. “Think of a random shape/color/abstract concept” is very volatile, and you can get different answers by PUTTING DIFFERENT OBJECTS ON YOUR DESK.

Objects are a bit more stable, words and letters are dependent on formative memories more than anything else, and numbers are nigh universally the same choices.

[chaotic neutral observer]

As far as the astral projection test...yeah, that was cold reading.  She clearly failed the actual test (reading the name).

A better test would be:

"I'm going to walk into the kitchen, write a single-digit number on a piece of paper, and stick it to the refrigerator with a magnet.  Then I'll come back here, and ask you to read the number.  We will repeat this three times."

And to keep things interesting, I'd take a six-sided die with me, and roll to determine what number to write each time.

Note that this test seems much easier, because it constrains what the subject is looking for; there are no vague impressions to sort through.

A really-real astral projection / remote viewer type would almost certainly get 100%.  The actual chances of getting all three numbers would be 1 in 216.

[Faust]

By the way, Faust, your choices of Red and Triangle say more about you playing Control recently than humans in general. "Think of a random shape/color/abstract concept" is very volatile, and you can get different answers by PUTTING DIFFERENT OBJECTS ON YOUR DESK.

that makes sense and is terrifying

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

Sure: think of a random number. One digit. You may change your mind from the very first number to come to mind — once.

I'll come back to this.



With one bit of information that your friend definitely had, I can do a pretty convincing job just playing the odds. This is one of those things that gives you an absurd amount of information because it ties into the social fabric you grew up in.

Rough age. Call it the five year span in which your birthday falls. That's all it takes for me to dig up your childhood memories (mostly fake — focus on stuff most kids have happen and lean on the fuzziness of childhood memories to do the dirty work) and tell you a nightmare you had as a kid you didn't know you remembered vividly. (You probably didn't have that nightmare, but one a lot like it, and the imagery is probably pretty strong for you.)

It also gives me enough information to figure out what you consider a random word, because it will be similar phonologically to unusual words you heard growing up.

If you also give me your favorite movie and favorite book, I can spin a frankly creepy account of who you are as a person out of nothing. This part is the same exact approach taken for horoscopes, but hits harder because it uses narrative touchstones that you identify with personally in some way.

With the city you grew up in and your career, I can speak in broad strokes about your life story and hit them dead on. All it takes is extrapolating from the culture you grew up in and the life path you followed and making them meet in the middle.

Seriously. This is easy stuff. You can decode  anyone in this sort of way, not because they are predictable but because humans are bundles of heuristics and stupidity. They necessarily follow certain patterns. Social pressure narrows things even further. You will never pick out the meal they had three days after their 13th birthday, but you can figure out what their ideas of "random" are and get a good idea of what their life path was like.

Fun fact: this works really well in crowds because you can play statistics against them. Eyeball the average age group, describe a very common story for someone in that age group, and pick someone out of the crowd and say "You!" They'll say no, then you say a childhood friend of theirs perhaps, and OH GOODNESS YOU'RE RIGHT.



Right. So, that number. It was 7. But you probably changed your mind immediately after you picked that, and decided on 3 or 9 instead.

This is not hard to do. This will usually be the case for any human you talk to. I encourage you to try it.

Actually, the first number that entered my head was actually three, but I was hardly reading because my response was going to be less complicated: not your test, my test. You pass my test. Haven't you been keeping up with how all of this works? I set the rules.

I'll set the exact same rules for you that I did for her. I'll go into my kitchen, I'll write something down, and I'll stick it on the fridge. And you tell me what that thing is.

[altered]

Anyone else see the big gaping flaw in this?

Besides the obvious one that I'm not going to attempt to mystify it by pretending at visions and shit, which makes it less likely that any mistakes will be excused.

[Doktor Howl]

Anyone else see the big gaping flaw in this?

Besides the obvious one that I'm not going to attempt to mystify it by pretending at visions and shit, which makes it less likely that any mistakes will be excused.

This is where you fucked up.

Everyone loves a miracle worker.  Nobody wants to see under the vinyl.

[Hagtard Celine Dion Mustard]

Anyone else see the big gaping flaw in this?

That you didn't take my challenge? That the desperation to dismiss my experience is dripping like beads of sweat from everything you've posted?

By all means, offer some worthy criticism. Nothing you've said so far has applied, as far as I can tell.

[altered]

Of course! But there's an even bigger flaw that means that even if I'm right — in fact, ESPECIALLY if I'm right — I will "fail".

This is a game you can play only before you explain the rules. Even if I played the mystical witch lady here, I already explained the statistics of it. Which means the word would be chosen with them in mind. You don't get to play this game after everyone understands the rules.

That's not to say it's impossible. For instance, he chose a two syllable word. Six or seven letters long. Written in lower case, it would have at most one descender. And he had to squash the last letter in, because he ran out of space.

But because I won't play the witch lady, if any single piece of that is wrong the whole thing gets tossed, where she spoke in far vaguer terms and got a full success handed to her. (Also, if you ignore the statistical likelihood's part, that description of the chosen word being even half right would be "crazy". I'm betting it's almost entirely correct.)

[Doktor Howl]

By the way, Faust, your choices of Red and Triangle say more about you playing Control recently than humans in general. "Think of a random shape/color/abstract concept" is very volatile, and you can get different answers by PUTTING DIFFERENT OBJECTS ON YOUR DESK.

that makes sense and is terrifying

I am totally not catching the gist of this.

[altered]

By the way, Faust, your choices of Red and Triangle say more about you playing Control recently than humans in general. "Think of a random shape/color/abstract concept" is very volatile, and you can get different answers by PUTTING DIFFERENT OBJECTS ON YOUR DESK.

that makes sense and is terrifying

I am totally not catching the gist of this.

Basically, "pick a random color/shape/abstract concept" is more influenced by environment and current mental obsessions than anything else. To the point that if you put a green cube on your desk prominently, most people will say green and square.

Faust has been playing a game where a pyramid and the color red are extremely important visual themes. It's more likely that's why he said red and triangle than it is that most people would say those things.