Episode 6: The Experiment

Episode 6 – The Experiment > Everyday experiments > Everyday experiments

• So what they do as one of the homework assignments is you create a single batch of batter for the cakes, and you cook it at different temperatures, and at different times, and so you can see exactly the right temperature to be able to cook the cake to get that oozing center.
• What they’re doing in their course is similar to what we are doing in ours: we’re trying to get people to apply the scientific method experimentation not just in the kitchen but everywhere in their lives, so a few of the examples that we have from science that we can apply to cooking is exactly as they are: experimentation.
• So if you have a recipe, so if you have this cookie recipe, for example, to create the best shortbread, and you tweak a whole bunch of things at the same time-so you adjust the recipe, the amount of time that you whip the thing, butter, sugar, or something-and you get this amazing cookie in the end, you won’t know which of those things actually did it, which of those things were actually effective.
• If you’re trying to figure out which of these things work like that, you have to do what Michael and Pia did in their course: you have to systematically, formally adjust one thing-temperature-and see what happens as a result of doing that one thing.
• Once you create this amazing cookie and you’ve figured out what it was that you needed to tweak to get it there, tell other people.
• Tell other people because people don’t do this very often.
• People don’t manipulate recipes to see what it is that’s effective.
• They just kind of blindly follow what other people have done before them.
• You could, of course you could, blindly follow what people say, any authority about this.
• That’s really important: to find things out for firsthand.
• People have the idea that you need to cook a steak, really cook it at a high temperature, and only flip it once, for example, to get the outside nice and caramelized and the inside raw.
• I don’t think it’s enough to say that people are silly, or people are slaves to authority, or that they’re gullible, or they’ll believe anything, because we’ve seen that that doesn’t quite work.
• We provided a bunch of examples where we see structure; we see signal; we see things that aren’t actually necessarily there.
• If you look at a pattern of noise, you see faces in the noise; or in oak, you see the wood paneling and you can kind of see faces looking.
• I mean, it’s because we do that, because we’re so good at that, at seeing faces that aren’t actually there, that we are so impressive in other domains For example, we talked about the availability heuristic, and we rely on the ease of processing to give us some indication about the size of the category.
• With representativeness, we rely on similarity and familiarity to be able to pigeonhole people in particular ways.
• So why do we believe these strange things in the absence of data or evidence to the contrary? Yes.
• If there was a single answer to it, we could easily teach that to people in school, and then it would be gone, but a whole bunch of things conspire to it.
• It’s hard to get that job accomplished perfectly, so people look out there for patterns and they’re often going to see things that really aren’t there.
• If you go on the Internet and type in “Illusions,” you’ll see all sorts of them: people spotting faces in clouds, or faces in a cinnamon bun, or what have you.
• It’s just like, “There’s a bunch of blue ones over there and a bunch of green ones over there.” We sort of see order where there isn’t any.
• We organize things into certain clusters that are really the kind of clusters that you’d see by chance.
• Take, for example, the pretty common belief that things happen in threes-you know, natural disasters, so if two of them have happened in close proximity, people will sometimes tell you, “Oh my god, I wonder what the third one is going to be,” or homicides, or a fatality on the park, fatalities on the park of famous people.
• If you look at all of those things, they don’t tend to cluster in threes at all, and so why do people believe those kinds of things? There’s a belief in the sports world and something called the “Sports Illustrated” jinx.
• You get your picture on the cover of “Sports Illustrated,” uh oh, that’s a terrible thing.
• If you’re looking at this as one observation, this little chunk of the world, you can see whether it’s sufficiently weird, whether it’s sufficiently lumpy or fishy to be able to say that something systematic is happening, something non-random is going on.