Tag: bias

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Things 2026 Q3: One Year Game, AI identification errors, Gold

One Year Game

I’m really fascinated by the space of things that aren’t quite games, so I was excited to find this write up of a Japanese games festival called “Is this a game?”. From that description, one game stood out to me: Nilgiri’s “One Year Game”

  • Each player takes a box
  • The box contains instructions
  • The instructions tell the player to write down 3 quests that could be done over the course of the next year
  • These can be 1 point quests (which can be repeated 100 times over the year), 10 point quests (10 times) or a 100 point quest (which only scores once), for a total possible score of 300 points
  • You then put the box down and take a box somebody else left, and do those quests
  • You track your quest completion on a mini calendar in the box
  • Points for completing quests go to the person who wrote the quests
  • You meet back up a year later

(Caveat, this is my read of the rules from the above description, a Twitter thread, and Nilgiri’s write-up passed through Google translate, so almost certainly some nuance has been lost)

As a pure game, it looks broken: you just write down as your quests: “breathe, eat and sleep”, and you guarantee yourself 300 points; and of course you don’t do any quests yourself, to deny someone else getting the points; and then actually everyone else does the same, so you all have boring quests and score zero points. But there’s clearly more going on, and that’s the part I love.

First in pure game terms you might observe the following:

  • If the quests are too boring or inevitable, the player might just forget they are even ‘playing’ and not mark them on the calendar or bother to show up a year later, so you get no points. Slightly interesting quests might be strictly better…
  • No winning condition is defined!

Then we get into the really interesting human-behaviour bit:

  • It feels intrinsically good to be assigned a quest and then complete that quest, as long as it is at least a little bit challenging
  • In life there are sometimes things we would like to do, but other obligations or priorities stop us from doing them – but having that thing as a quest could change that!
  • Both of these then pass through a lens of reciprocity / golden-ruleism: what sort of quest would I want someone to set me? Maybe I should set that sort of quest…
  • Then on top of that you have human variability: some people want do be funny, some people like the idea of controlling someone’s actions a bit too much; some people just really want to make someone as happy as they can…

So I ran a version of the game myself, with two key differences:

  1. The original was among strangers at a games festival and they could optionally attend a party a year later to discover their scores; mine was at an annual event that tends to have the same people turn up so the debrief stage is built-in.
  2. I think the original gives the quest-setter freedom to pick any of the three quest types three times (e.g. they could pick three of the 100-point quests); I chose to restrict it to one quest of each type.

I now need to wait a year to see what happened, but from the quests I heard about, a whole delightful variety have been set, and it didn’t seem like anyone was “playing to win” (while assuming a win condition exists).

I made a printable Google doc of my version here if you want to run your own – Christmas / New Year is probably a convenient time to do this for some people! If you want to run it starting in a different month you can edit the start date in this Google sheet and the calendar will update, so you can paste that into the doc instead. As an organiser, you will need to make sure in the exchange process nobody gets their own quests, and that you track who got their quests from whom. Or rather, you might want to do that; it could still be quite interesting without those framing rules.

Podcast: Going Rogue

Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 and very quickly planned to release one Star Wars film every year starting in 2015. Then things got a bit complicated:

  • Rogue One (2016) had rumours of directorial difficulties and some significant trailer scenes that never appeared – although the film came out largely okay in the end…
  • Solo (2018) was originally being directed by Lord & Miller but they were quite quickly replaced with Ron Howard…
  • In the main saga, Episode IX was to be directed by Colin Trevorrow, but then with quite short notice he was replaced by JJ Abrams
  • Episode IX itself was quite notable for trying to please everybody and then disappointing pretty much everybody

Tansy Gardam’s podcast Going Rogue has no special access or secrets, but she takes a forensic approach to everything on the public record to try to reconstruct what happened on these films (and others). Most notable for me is her ability to dig out great details that were later revealed in interviews on various podcasts.

Distilling many fascinating hours of podcast into very brief summaries:

  • On Rogue One, Tony Gilroy did a substantial and incredibly late re-write after main photography was complete, which successfully brought the film together and established a new ‘grown-up’ tone for Star Wars that he later built on in Andor – but this came at the cost of Jyn’s agency as a character. Also director Gareth Edwards set aside an ‘indie hour’ on set to take the time to discover fascinating, unscripted shots; these turn out to be pretty useless for the film but absolutely great to include in a trailer.
  • I think a lot of people assumed Lord & Miller were replaced on Solo as they were going too broad with the humour, but it really seems that was not the case. The bigger problem was their extremely collaborative discovery-based approach to film-making, which is tremendously expensive and difficult to do on a live-action Star Wars film
  • For Episode IX Gardam quite convincingly shows that writers JJ Abrams and Chris Terrio left too many key decisions to be ‘discovered’ while making the film, meaning that some key beats (the parentage question; the details of the final confrontation) had not been finalised while other parts of the film were already shot – making them ultimately feel unmotivated and arbitrary.

At the most zoomed out level it appeared as if Disney embarked on a new Star Wars trilogy without a clear over-arching plan. But Gardam shows this isn’t entirely the case – scripts for VIII and IX were being written at the same time, and indeed VIII (Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi) was finished in very good time. The problem was that Trevorrow’s script for IX didn’t seem great, they pivoted to Abrams very late, and in general I suppose Disney’s creative leadership were very distracted trying to get Rogue One and Solo on track while this was happening.

As a side note, Gardam is great with the direct quotes, facts and inferences, but whenever she strays over into opinion she has some pretty wild takes – but that’s all part of the fun! I highly recommend the podcast if you’re at all interested in what happened in these films.

The trap of Survivorship Bias

Survivorship bias is where we draw conclusions from a set of entities without accounting for a selection process that shaped the set. I think it’s very close to Saliency Bias in which we pay attention to things that are more noticeable.

The classic example (and indeed the current illustration on the Wikipedia page for the topic) is the story of fighter aircraft returning from combat riddled with bullet holes everywhere but the cockpit and the engine. The naïve approach is to conclude that the cockpit and engine do not need any reinforcement in future aircraft designs. The selection bias is that planes shot in the cockpit or engine never made it back – so the correct conclusion is exactly reversed.

I suspect the same thing is at work with cats that present humans with small creatures they have killed. Cats were at least partly domesticated for their ability to hunt rodents that threatened human health and food supplies; a cat that brings its trophies to the human will be assumed to be doing a better job than one that just gets on with it, and so will more likely be selected by humans for breeding. (This process is quite similar to the Goodhart/Fisherian issue mentioned in the last things).

Other examples:

  • People hear vegans talking about being vegan. They assume all vegans talk about being vegan all the time. They do not account for the silent vegans. (Or the fact that vegans are frequently asked to explain themselves by non-vegans at meal times and so are pushed into talking about it).
  • People assume (often without even confirming) that they can correctly identify art made by AI. Certain styles certainly have become hallmarks of AI – dot-eyed rounded comic figures, overly rendered and brightly saturated smiling humans, excessively detailed yet generic fantasy scenes. But this can give us false confidence and lead us to make Type I (‘don’t think it’s AI, but it is’) errors. (Take a skim through this video to see what’s now possible with animation generation as an example)
  • A criminal was getting away with something, but then they pushed it even further and were caught – people then say “they always go too far!”, which of course ignores those who do not go that far, but is also blind to those who do go that far and still get away with it.
  • Major plane crashes have much more salience than car crashes as we hear about almost every single one. Some people thus become afraid that planes are dangerous. I made a simple estimate for how many major plane crashes would be equivalent to the annual number of car crash deaths; it’s about one major plane crash a day.

AI identification errors – Type I and Type II

Jumping off from the above, it’s one thing to make a Type I error when judging the source of text/image/video (‘don’t think it’s AI, but it is’), but what seems a lot more tragic is the rising trend of people making Type II errors (‘think it’s AI, but isn’t’). Even if you don’t mind the existence or use of AI art, the fact this error can arise is still pretty sad because it dilutes the respect an artist can get for their ideas and skills.

This really came into focus for me in July 2026 when it was reported that a 7-figure book deal fell through over questions of AI-use. Without knowing the true facts of the case, this still highlights how frightening the Type II error is here: you could now have an incredibly promising book deal fall apart just because of the suspicion of AI use. (Side-note, if I wanted to get a book published maybe it will help that I have decades of blog posts to point to as prior form; or maybe it won’t because AI can be trained on that).

I do find it quite useful to keep an eye on r/RealOrAI to continue to tune my AI-detection ability.

All the above is mostly just to give you the context for this comic:

Rotations of major bodies in the solar system

I’m very drawn to finding useful ways to look at things that help you understand them better. There’s usually no single “right” way, but having different views helps. For example, you can think of democracy as a way of harnessing the ‘wisdom of the crowd’, or a means of facilitating peaceful transfers of power, or more bleakly as a system for creating consent to be governed.

Anyway, it turns out that a great way to get your head around the spins and orientations of major bodies in the solar system is to put faces on them:

Music Video: Chet Faker – Gold

One of my favourite music videos is for Chet Faker’s Gold: a ‘single take’ of choreographed roller-skating at night that perfectly matches the rolling, wistful feel of the song, has a slightly mysterious air, and is just very impressive. It’s directed by Hiro Murai, choreographed by Ryan Heffington, and stars roller skaters Candice Heiden, April Corley, and Appelusa McGlynn. One caveat: it does seem to be shot for the ‘male gaze’, which is how it often goes in music videos:

I like to bring similar Things together in threes (like the effortful music videos from last time or mysterious music videos I posted in 2022), but when I realised I knew of nothing like Gold, that made me want to look into it more deeply. (Side note, let me know if you do know of any similar videos!)

I couldn’t find a “making of”, but there is this great interview with lead skater Heiden, (who is also a skate consultant and choreographer) talking through how the video came about, the execution, and a bit of choreography demonstration. Notably at 8:07 Heiden gives commentary over the opening part of the song, explaining where and how she’s putting in extra work to stay in the light while making it look like part of the choreography.

It’s always fun to know quite how hard it was to do a thing like this, and Heiden explains that they started shooting at 8.30pm on this small access road, driving and performing one way then turning around and doing the same going back – and apart from a short ‘lunch’ break in which Chet Faker filmed his cameo, they continued trying to get the perfect take(s) until dawn.

Based on the descriptions, I assume the location was Escondido Canyon Road (California) or nearby. Assuming it was filmed around 1st August (ahead of its 12th August 2014 release date), sunrise would have been at around 6am, making for about 9 hours of shooting to get the final takes. The shoot has been described as taking 14 hours, but I assume a bunch of that will have been getting the road swept and ready before shooting began. Either way, I’m now even more impressed than when I first watched it.

  • Transmission Ends
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Things July 2019: Bias, Co-operation, Location, Video Games

Extremely Generic Questions

In earlier iterations of Things I would often set readers a puzzle or ask a tricky question, with answers reviewed in the next edition. I’d like to start a new series of these that I’m calling Extremely Generic Questions: questions often asked, but not very specific or even necessarily well-defined. The puzzle is not only to try to find the best answer to a question, but also to understand why it is so often asked.

So, the first question: what is wrong with young people today?

Subconscious bias

If you want to make optimal decisions, and also just be a decent person, I think subconscious bias is a very important factor to be aware of. Many people believe their judgement of aptitude is not influenced by gender (or any other unrelated characteristic), but data suggests this is not be the case.

Anecdotally but compellingly, there’s the email signature swap story, in which a male and female colleague swap their email signatures for a week and observe radical differences in how clients interact with them. Pleasingly, you can read the accounts of this from each side.

Auditions for an orchestra have the advantage that they can be conducted in a thoroughly meritocratic manner without ever actually seeing the candidates. It turns out that blind orchestra auditions improved women’s chances of success by 50%.

Similarly, scientific proposals for time using the Hubble Space telescope tried going partially blind; the results again showed women benefited from a more meritocratic process.

As I am sometimes involved with hiring people for work, I tried a version of this by making sure names were removed from CV’s before I reviewed them. Of course, I don’t have any large scale data to compare results, but the feeling of trying to assess a nameless CV was alarmingly transformative! It became very clear that as soon as I saw a name, I would start to construct a mental image based on (irrelevant) associations I had with people similarly named, and would then build on that image as I read the rest of the CV. Without a name as a starting point, the process of evaluation immediately felt like harder work, but also a lot more objective. Based on this and the above findings, I highly recommend it.

Thinking, Fast And Slow

After many years of seeing it recommended, I finally read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, which covers a lot of the biases I’ve been fascinated by for so long from essentially the very coal-face of that research.

I found it fascinating throughout and can see why so many recommended it, although I didn’t always agree with the interpretations. Given that I’m just some guy who studied maths/physics and read a few things, and the author is a Nobel prize winner with decades in the field, I have to recognise that my position on this is likely tenuous, but at least as far as maths go I feel I can comment.

Here’s my brief highlights.

Probability Problems
There is a strange and fuzzy line between not understanding what a question means, and not getting the answer right. I could ask people what 3 χ 4 is, and if they think it’s 12, that doesn’t mean they’re mysteriously misguided, it more likely means they just don’t know chi-notation*.  In many of the studies, participants were shown to give incorrect answers to statements involving probability, but one could just as well argue that participants didn’t really understand the statement and so were guessing. To be fair, the book goes on to show how phrasing probability questions differently (to my mind, more clearly) helps people reach more accurate results.

This is what I talked about in Things 122 on the topic of the Linda Problem / Conjunction Fallacy.

Forecasting and regression to the mean
I have to do quite a bit of forecasting at work, and I was surprised I had never come across this excellent rubric for anticipating a certain amount of regression to the mean.

Briefly: if you evaluate, say, fifty people on a task that involves some luck as well as skill, like accurately throwing something, then the people who did the very best (or the very worst) on their first attempt are unlikely to do as well (or badly) on a second attempt; their results were probably mostly flukes, and they will tend to ‘regress to the mean’.

If I am evaluating 12 different marketing campaigns and trying to forecast how well they do in future, the same kind of rule applies. The one that did very best was at least partially ‘lucky’, so will not necessarily be the best in future.

The rubric is as follows:
a) If the measure you want to predict has zero correlation with their future values (which you can figure out by viewing historical data), then you should predict that regardless of how they did, they will all perform averagely in future.

b) If the measure you want to predict perfectly correlates with the future, so whatever is the best now will be the best in future, then obviously you should predict that.

c) If the correlation between the present and the future is x%, then you should forecast any present deviation from average performance will decrease by (1-x)%!

That’s the terse version, you can read more about it here.

Evaluation of experiences
How much you liked or disliked an experience would intuitively be based on how long it was, and how much you were liking or disliking it at the time. Something that was unpleasant for 10 minutes should surely be ranked as worse than something that was unpleasant for only 5 minutes.

In practice, this isn’t how we evaluate things at all. We very highly weight our peak enjoyment (or discomfort), and how happy (or unhappy) we were at the very end of the experience, and a little bit the beginning; the absolute duration plays only a small part.

This probably means you should take fewer, shorter holidays, but it also depends on how you weight the importance of what Kahneman calls the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self”, which is quite a tricky philosophical problem.

Life is like an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, except different

As a student I was very interested in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and the iterated version, in which one must choose to Co-operate with (C) or Defect against (D) another player making the same choice, knowing that you will come out best (and they worst) if you D while they C, but you will both do terribly if you both choose D.

One critical element: you can’t communicate with the other player. In the iterated version, the choice of C and D is effectively the method by which you communicate.

Meanwhile in real life, most of the time, the thing most likely to help you is another human, and the thing most likely to do you harm is also another human, which means interacting with other humans is a pretty crucial business. In particular it’s good to be able to figure out – and influence – who is likely to co-operate (C) with you and who is likely to try to take advantage of (D) you.

I studied maths and physics as a student, but struggled to understand human behaviour. By studying subjects where exam answers were simply right or wrong, and doing quite well at those, I (and I suspect many others in the same situation) thought that I must be quite clever, and the reason I can’t understand human behaviour is because other people are just acting irrationally.

Now, it is true that people act irrationally a lot of the time (see the last Things), but that also includes me, and a lot of the things I couldn’t understand eventually made more sense when I realised that life was like an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, except that rounds aren’t discrete or simultaneous and there are multiple and varying pay-off matrices in play all the time.

For example, I noticed people asked “How are you?” but didn’t actually want to know, which seemed irrational. This was laid bare for me in a dentist’s waiting room when one elderly person entered and recognised another, and the following exchange took place:

A: Oh, hello there! How are you?
B: I’m fine, how are you?
A: I’m fine thanks. So [short pause] how are you then?
B: Well, I’ve been having this awful pain in my side, so I went to the doctor last week …

Similarly, as a marketing grad I was sent out with a cameraman to stop people on the street and get their opinions on climate change for a vox pop montage. I would walk up to people and ask them right away, and nobody stopped to answer. The cameraman, who had done this before, told me I should ask them how they were first. This seemed ridiculous, as a person approaching you with a microphone and film camera obviously doesn’t care how you are, they just want to film you saying something. But I tried asking anyway, and suddenly just about everyone was then happy to give their opinion on climate change for the camera.

I realised the whole “How are you” bit is like a tiny move in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma in which you are really communicating “I will co-operate with you”, and the other person can demonstrate a reciprocal intention by asking you the same thing back. This then sets the scene for further and deeper co-operation.

Moves aren’t just made in speech either. I thought buttoned shirts were ridiculous in comparison with t-shirts: uncomfortable, more time-consuming to put on and remove, and harder to clean. Why would anyone choose to wear one? But it turns out clothing is a widely understood opening move in our co-operation dialogues. We learn that we can estimate by someone’s clothes how likely they are to co-operate with or benefit us in certain ways; uniforms do this in an overt way, but even a slight deviation from your company’s dress code sends a signal.

Cat and girl covered this, of course.

More generally, these kinds of behaviours make a society cohesive – by doing what everyone else does, you tacitly signal that you are a good co-operator in your society. At the same time it can make society conservative, as anyone deviating from locally normal behaviour (even for rational reasons) might be read as less co-operative, and so they will encounter more friction.

Location Encoding

What3Words (W3W) assigns each 3m x 3m square on Earth a three word designation (e.g. Each.Useful.Shark). This makes it fantastic for real-world treasure hunts, so long as the participants can use the mobile app, and I’ve made a couple of events that leveraged it to (I thought) rather fun effect.

However, Richard brought to my attention that among people interested in the general problem of addressing, W3W is viewed very negatively. Why is that?

Reading up on the subject (this post was particularly useful), it seems like W3W lacks some attributes a truly general Location Encoding system should really have. But what really annoys people who understand this area well is that W3W tends to put out PR that claims to be strong in the areas it is weak. In brief:

  • W3W is a private company (probably hoping to be acquired by another one). Location/address is something that works best when it’s a standard, and having a private company own a standard leads to conflicts of interest. (See the Microsoft ‘Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish’ strategy for an example of how private companies fight public standards).
  • W3W is not a good solution for emergency situations (calling an ambulance to your location; calling a Fire Engine to a location you see on fire).
  • W3W is not error tolerant and has no hierarchy (e.g. one mis-spelt/mis-remembered character has very little chance of being corrected, in contrast with traditional addresses, where post accurately addressed apart from saying “Brighton” instead of “Hove” still successfully gets to Hove with the word Brighton angrily crossed out and corrected).

Still, I do think W3W has some value, and it would be unreasonable to discard it entirely because it can’t do everything – indeed, no address system can meet all the requirements we might ask of it.

Google Maps’ location-sharing functionality covers many options, and has the benefit of being already available in many people’s pockets, but I recently had a situation where both intuitive addressing and Google failed: meeting at the “Joe’s Café in Soho” does not specify a unique location, and the inaccuracy of GPS meant a shared Google location didn’t resolve the matter either. W3W is actually pretty excellent for this sort of spontaneous meeting. All things considered though, the best thing about it really does seem to be the opportunities for Treasure Hunts.

Video Games

I’ve played some games since the last Things, some of which I recommend, and some of which I don’t!

Baba Is You (Steam, Humble store, itch.io, Switch)

The mostly instantly-gettable trailer seems to be in this tweet:

https://twitter.com/NotableReleases/status/1106254438841401344

For Things readers partial to self-referentiality and all things meta (and I know there are a bunch of you), this is certainly worth a look. As the above video shows, the game is played by pushing things around, including words that define the rules of the game.

In practice it’s even more mind-boggling than I expected, but not actually as much fun as I had hoped.

Celeste (Steam, itch.io, Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Pico-8 prototype)
If you want a platform game with puzzle elements and enjoy dying repeatedly while you slowly get better at doing difficult things, this is extremely the thing for you. The soundtrack is quite lovely too.

My save file, 44 hours, 10,000+ deaths, is a review in itself (implicit spoilers split-by-level version is here):

Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time (Steam, Switch, PS4, Xbox One)
Looks exactly like what it is: a rather nice local co-op shooter in which you and some friends control characters running around a ship manning the helm/gun/shield/panic-button and rescuing animals in space.

Thomas Was Alone (Direct for Mac or PC, iOS, Android, Steam)
A kind of “self-aware” puzzle-platformer that everyone was going on about a few years ago; I finally tried it and found it dull and not at all as funny as it seemed to think it was, with frustratingly vague platforming physics.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch and Wii U only)
An open world epic about saving the world which I tried – and failed – to enjoy for about 12 hours before giving up. Almost everything about it felt like a chore and I couldn’t understand how it gained such universal acclaim.

After a weirdly long time adventuring in my underwear, I finally found someone who would sell me clothes.

To pick one example, a complaint I had heard from some was that weapons could only be used a certain amount of time before they fell apart and had to be replaced. I thought this was just misguided resentment of a feature clearly designed to add strategy to battles, but then I spent the first hour of the game picking up and discarding 37 differently ineffectual sticks (you can only hold a few at a time) and fought about 5 monsters. It felt like I spent substantially more time managing my ineffectual stick inventory than having battles, and so the whole weapons feature then felt like busywork.

Loading screen tip: read loading screen tips. By definition, this is useful to nobody.

Perhaps the worst part is I still feel like I “should” give it more of a chance, or at least get more entertainment for my money, when rationally I know there must be more games out there like Celeste which were an order of magnitude more fun for a fraction of the price.

Horizon Zero Dawn (PS4 only)
Snakes on a Plane is a great title for a film because it perfectly sells the premise. Horizon Zero Dawn is a terrible name in that regard, but the promotional art sells the premise perfectly:

Tribal humans hunting robot dinosaurs! Which immediately looks like something I want to try, and also very quickly raises the question of just how such a scenario could even come about. It turns out the game is exactly about those two things: hunting robot dinosaurs while figuring out how this happened!

It certainly stands on the shoulders of giants in terms of the use of ‘Open World’ game conventions, but it adds a few interesting ideas and does just about everything you would hope to extremely well.

*I made up “chi-notation”, because I couldn’t think of a clearer example, it seemed funny, and illustrates the point just as well.

– Transmission finally ends

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Things 133: Overreacting, audio history of sampling, internet vs time, meta-meta-analysis

Comics – Overreacting

Jemma Salume has an excellent series of comics about overreacting to things (and also learning to cook, and dating). They’re compact and hyperbolic, which is how I like my comics, and also how I like my toy universe model geometries, hahaha.

Music – Raiding the 20th Century
This remains my favourite mix, and with the ten-year anniversary upon us I was surprised to realise I had never put it in Things.

In 2004, DJ Food (aka Strictly Kev) made a 40-minute mix for XFM chronicling the history of ‘cut-up’ (essentially sample-based) music which he called ‘Raiding the 20th Century’. Shortly afterwards he read Paul Morley’s book ‘Words and Music’ which did much the same thing and covered much of the same material. Paul Morley also coined the phrase ‘Raiding the 20th Century’ twenty years earlier. Taking note of this big flashing fate-arrow, they got together, recorded Paul reading key parts of the book, and created a new hour-long mix of the material.

The mp3 is available over on archive.org, the track listing is here, and you can go ahead and listen to it right here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GO5W6FRZPM

It’s about 20 minutes before the ‘history’ really starts, and while Morley’s commentary then explains and introduces many of the tracks and samples, many more are used without comment. Over the years, as I learn more about music history, more and more of them are making sense, which is very satisfying. As one of the samples used states: “every time you listen to this recording, something will happen.”

Links – Time and the Internet
As we build up an ever larger historical archive of material online, the date something was originally published becomes more important, and something we’ll need to become more aware of (assuming we avoid internet decay).

I like the approach of the BBC, which appears to maintain the CMS that articles originally appeared in (for example, this report from September 11th 2001, or the Mammal-of-the-month November 2002). That’s still not quite enough to avoid the confusion that may arise from incautious Googling for events that recur. Also, try to work out when this was written.

Anyway, if you would prefer a cogent discussion of the topic rather than a selection of semi-random BBC links, then I highly recommend Joanne McNeil’s piece on the subject here, in which she says things much more precisely than I have been, like this:

“Digital content appears with minimal visual language distinguishing yesterday from tomorrow and today. Now habits have emerged in which we communicate with the past and even mistake it for the present.”

(Also, see this Cat and Girl comic).

Video – Brett Domino
Looking through previous editions of Things, I was surprised to find I’d never featured Brett Domino, who does a range of silly-but-clever, bad-but-good things with music. I think the most impressive is his medley of the top 10 pop songs at the time he hit 10,000 Twitter followers, which culminates in a surprisingly effective montage finale:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgYOiWt3qpo

Link – Scientific truth, researcher bias, and parapsychology
In a meta-analysis, the results of many similar experiments are analysed together in order to gain statistical power and shed more light on subtle phenomena. For example, if it’s a very small effect, some experiments won’t yield any results, perhaps causing us to question the experiments that do find an effect; by considering all these experiments together, we can better assess if we’re seeing Type I or Type II errors. Also, if you suspect the result may only come about due to sloppy methodology, you can see if there is a correlation between how ‘rigorous’ a study is and the size of any effect that it finds – if more rigorous studies come up with smaller effects, that’s quite suggestive.

Years ago I read about a meta-analysis of research into psychic abilities, and the results were not clear-cut one way or the other, despite taking a comprehensive overview of the relevant studies. I thought that was very interesting, because it suggested that either psychic abilities were real, or the scientific method wasn’t as infalliable as I had thought (or both).

Many more studies have been performed since, and this problem does not seem to go away. A strong clue seems to be the experimenter’s bias effect: a researcher who believes that an experiment will yield a certain outcome is more likely to end up getting that outcome, even if they are not intentionally manipulating the experiment to that end.

Of course, experimenter’s bias is quite a tricky and small effect to prove, so what you need to do is a meta-analysis across the various studies into it. But when different people conduct this meta-analysis, they reach different conclusions: some find the experimenter’s bias effect exists, and some find it doesn’t!

If you’ve been following closely to this point, you can guess the logical next step: we need a meta-meta-analysis of the experimenter’s bias meta-analyses, to see if meta-experimenters that believe the experimenter’s bias effect exists were more likely to find exactly that result in their meta-analysis! Brilliantly, and also alarmingly, this meta-meta-analysis was conducted and concluded that, yes, that’s exactly what happens: there is indeed a meta-experimenter’s bias effect. So the question now is… does the experimenter’s bias effect actually exist?

I found all this out from a brilliant essay by Scott Alexander, which includes all the juicy references and finishes with an amusingly modified Star Wars quote, so is pretty much perfect.

Puzzle – Sequel Naming
For some media, major new updates are numbered: movies (Iron Man 3), TV series (Game of Thrones Season 4), video games (Call of Duty 4) are obvious, but it’s also dominant in operating systems (Windows 8), Consoles/phones (Playstation 4, Samsung Galaxy S4) and even classical music (Bach’s Cantata No. 140),

Other things don’t seem to work that way, notably books (A Clash of Kings, rather than A Game of Thrones 2) and albums (Björk – Post, rather than Debut 2), but also theatrical productions (admittedly much rarer, but it’s Love Never Dies, rather than Phantom of the Opera 2)

(Of course, sometimes people mix their strategies with hilarious results: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2, BT Infinity 2, Xbox “One”)

The contrast is most stark in TV series versus books. So the question is this: why do we have Game of Thrones Season 2 on TV, but A Clash of Kings in book form?

Tim Mannveille tweets as @metatim, and previously worried about old things disappearing from the internet