Here it is (with names changed):
Andy is looking at Belinda. Belinda is looking at Charles. Andy is married but Charles is unmarried.
Q: Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?
a) Yes, b) No, c) Cannot be determined
I'll leave you to think about that for a while while I waffle on about the choir team meeting. Ah, no dodgy pub this time - Simon, Lindsay and I met at the Volunteer, a pub with shiny gold taps, mahogany panelling and pictures of old soldiers above a crackling fireplace. I pulled out the Big Book of Everything (Vol III), opened a fresh page to write on, and we were off.
Sometimes leadership requires a bit of hypothetical reasoning. We found ourselves planning which three of our five songs to perform in June and which three we would focus on for October this year. Evidently, one would appear in both, but which? The one that might be the most fun? The one that's most achievable? Perhaps the most difficult? In the end we plumped for Fly Me To The Moon, which I'm hoping will be straightforward. However, things get even more complicated working out which order to do the others in given the amount of time we've got - if we get on really well with Rolling in the Deep, maybe we should go on to Oklahoma! (I don't like Oklahoma! but we have a democratic process for these things and the team love a musical, it seems). Soon we were talking about Christmas, which always seems a bit laughable at this time of year. The puzzle gradually started coming together.
Sometimes however, you have to sort of work out the most likely route that events will take and plan for that. Once again I found myself stupefied by the thought that there are leaders of things out there who plan everything in a sort of dictatorial black and white, where everything is pinned down with military precision. I think the world is a bit more quantum than that.
Did you say c) Cannot be determined? Ouch. So did I at first. The answer's actually a) Yes but it's interesting to figure out why so I won't steal that pleasure. The article was suggesting that as a species we're particularly bad at this type of reasoning. The next one did my head in...
You're given four shapes: a black square, a white square, a black circle and a white circle. The experimenter tells you that they have picked two qualities: a colour (black or white) and a shape (square or circle). If a shape possesses exactly one of these qualities, it is classified as a THOG; if it possesses either none or both qualities it is a non-THOG.
The experimenter tells you that the black circle is a THOG. How would you classify the other shapes?
I've got my own theories about this kind of puzzle. Either you're the type of person whose brain clouds over somewhere in the second sentence and the whole thing looks like a pointless waste of your time with absolutely no practical value... or you won't be able to let it go until you've worked it out. I don't think you can be both of these things, which... I suppose makes all of us... sort of THOGs doesn't it?
We got to the end of the evening and I closed up the Big Book of Everything, ready to head back out for the cold walk home. I think we'll probably end up adapting and going with the flow over the next few months anyway, you know. That is, after all, what we normally do. I looked up at the stars, crisp and bright, brilliant white against the frozen blackness of the sky. I guess we'll start with Fly Me To The Moon. It's as good a place as any.
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