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
