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Chapter 30 — Pre-Chapter Quiz:

Question 59: why don’t kings blend their beverages?

w.) it’s not a pretty “site”

*.) it’s dangerous

1.) that’s what peasants do

%.) life is already mixed enough as is

 

Question 60: what is this chapter a metaphor for?

/.) the iron grip liars have on our minds

i.) Split testing

#.) maslows law

p.) The way to remove liars from your life

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The first thing you should know, and about the simplest form of testing I can offer you, is to only test one variable at a time. If you don’t know what that means, allow me to explain with a metaphor. Imagine this. (Ohhh! Here we go again!) You’re the ruler of a kingdom, and you’ve caught word that someone wants you dead, and that their main weapon of choice is a deadly poison. You don’t know how quickly the poison works, and you don’t know where it may be hidden within your meals. Now imagine that you’re a ruthless leader, and so you’ve been forcing your slaves to eat and drink your food before you, as a way to test and see which, if any, pieces of your delicious meal have been poisoned. 

Okay. Now it’s time to imagine your tactics; let’s go with the average peasant's way first.  Let’s say there are two cups of liquid, but only one cup contains a deadly poison. If you poured both liquids into a single goblet, and had a man drink it, what would happen to him? 

.  .  .

"He’d die." 

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1+2=3

1 peasant + 2 goblets = 3 seconds left to live.

Very good! I'm glad you understand. Moving on! 

Good. Great. Congratulations. You killed an innocent man, Now tell me, which cup was it, that the poison originated in?

You don’t know, do you? 

That’s a problem. We know that at least some of our ideas, some of our stories are likely to be false. They’re likely to be “poisonous”. If that's the case, how do we resolve it? Well, simply put, we have test the liquid, one cup at a time.

1 slave + 1 Goblet = 2 possible outcomes. 

If he drinks it and lives? It was just your average wine. If he drinks it and dies? Well, there you have it folks. There’s your poison. The only way to identify which cup contains the poison within our medieval means is to have each cup drank, one at a time.

Now, let’s say that there are several cups, far more than two, because in all honesty, you should have far more stories to test than that. Also, let’s add an additional piece. We know that most of these cups are filled with poison. They’re filled with LIES!!!, but we should also consider that there are likely to be a few cups that contain a special elixir. It’s called “The Holy Truth”. (WOW! Really? We went there? Yes.) With this elixir you can turn almost any poisonous situation, the lead of your life, into gold (Because no one really likes lead poisoning). 

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The only way to complete this search is to give your slave (The situation you’re in, or the “jury”, depending on your metaphor) a small dose of each goblet over time. This way, hopefully, the peasant won’t die from a single cup, and, if you do find that special elixir, it won’t all be flushed away in the moment that it’s found. As an added bonus, the elixir can often be used to help heal the poison that has already been placed (by you, rather cruelfully) within the peasant’s stomach. 

Of course, if you find that a cup is poisoned, never feed it to anyone else ever again. 

(But If you were considering the idea of drinking the same poisonous beverage repeatedly, even after finding out that it IS poisonous... I don't think my common sense metaphors are gonna help you very much, my dear.)

That being said, in spite of all of our talk about drinking the beverages, there are also occasions where allowing the peasant to rest, if you have time, may help their body fight off the poison like a common cold. What I’m saying here is this, since the situation you’re in, and the ability for you to succeed in it, often depends on keeping everyone happy, including the fate that has placed you in this situation, sometimes letting everything and everyone rest, away from that stress of testing, is a good idea. Sometimes, you need to let your mind rest, and if you’re testing the truth in a relationship, letting your partner rest might be a good idea as well.

This is more of an art form than an exact science. When you’re first attempting to do this… 

Yeaaaaaaaaaahhhhh… the “peasant” will most likely die. Your relationship will end and the situation you’ve been trying to avoid, when testing, will most likely happen. Everything will go to shit, but over time, you’ll be able to do this with the tiniest of drops given from each goblet. You’ll barely need to “poison” at all. You’ll become so good at spotting the most subtle signs of poisoning, its symptoms, that no

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peasant will ever have to die again. A few, well-selected peasants, inmates on death row, for example, are the perfect type to test it on, because nobody loses any more than they already had to. You should start by practicing this in situations that are almost certainly going to end badly anyways, one’s that are already too far gone. In this way you can become a master at identifying “poisonous” assumptions, and the “mystical elixirs'' WITHOUT losing anything extra in the long run. This is my form of split-testing. A form of experimentation that businesses have been using for a LONG TIME.

Much like if you poured only one goblet into the peasants stomach at a time, if you test one assumption at a time, you can tell if the assumption works, or doesn’t work within the context you're testing it in. If, however, the assumption has no effect, it’s like feeding the peasant water, which is fine. It's just not a step closer towards understanding any newly uncovered truths.

Test the Whats first, then HOW they're connected, and then test the stories as a whole, and DO NOT reach a set verdict until you have tested all the possible connections, and found the true story. Even when you think that you’ve found the story, if you still have more connections left untested, keep going until your whole list of connections runs out. This may save your ideas, your plans, and even your life, on occasion.

One final thing to keep in mind is that, to know if the peasant is getting sicker, or healthier, you need to know what they look like on an average day. It's the ability to see change that allows for you to know that an effect is being made, through your testing. In the case of science, we call these average days, "baselines" or "control groups". If you can see a change with how an item exists on its own, from how it exists when you gave it a goblet, then you can assume that whatever test you gave it is the source of those newly observed changes.

A baseline is established by using the exact same peasant, and watching him everyday that he's healthy for a set period of time, and only after that, giving him the goblets to drink. This way, we'll know if he's

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looking better or worse than normal because we actually know what "normal" is for him, as we've been watching his “normal self” for weeks now. If your tested stories start to differ from how they normally are when you're not interfering, it may be because of the “poisons” or “elixirs” you've given them. Study every What that the situation has at first, and then How they operate without you. Then you can see if things change when you change the variables. If HOW you treat them changes HOW they act, you should observe whether that is to the benefit, or dismay, of your hypothesis. Does the change prove your story right, or wrong? This is what scientists do when they are using a baseline.

Control groups are different. For a control group, you take a large list of peasants that are considered "similar" to the one you're going to be giving goblets to, and then use them as a reference for what's "normal" instead. This is often a method used when you don't have enough prep-time or patience to watch over the peasant before you start testing. It's a good substitute because, since they aren't actually the same peasant, they can be healthy during the entire testing, even when your test subject isn't healthy, and so they can be a clear point to compare your slave to when he drinks either poison or elixir. The key, is to either have them be diverse enough to create a fair assessment of what a "normal peasant" looks like on average, or specific enough, through the right traits, that you know they're a good reference for your peasant, in particular.

The first type of group, the diverse group, is used to create a sort of "universal statistic" based on its diversity. It's based on the assumption that if everyone, even those that are most different from each other, follow the same rules, then your peasant most likely follows those rules as well. So, if all sorts of people, even from very different walks of life, smile when they're healthy (along with other symptoms), then if your peasant shares those same symptoms, he must be healthy, too.

The assumption behind using a "highly specific", and "similar" group to your peasant, goes like this.

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Consider this thought process: If you know what 100 healthy bakers look like, then you'll probably know what your baking peasant should look like if he was healthy, too. So, if he doesn't look like all of the others when he drinks from the goblet, the assumption is that he must be feeling unwell. After all, a baker, is a baker, is a baker, right?

This is why science fails when it comes to WHOs. Science is designed to uncover universal truths, NOT individual ones. It's about finding the truths that attach to us all, as one, in one shared entity (called reality). It's not designed to uncover the truths about you, specifically, as an individual. The rules, and the measurements, that apply to us all are not necessarily the same as the rules, and measurements, that apply to us as individuals, in ourselves. And so, to a degree, science is... strangely prejudiced, in its universal equality. It's prejudice in that it stereotypes us all into a shared group, such as "the real" or "the human", but it forgets to establish us as individuals, outside of the confines of these sterotypical placeholders. Science forgets, that while we are all human, you are you, and I am me. How can we learn to love each other in spite of our differences, if we've been ignoring those differences since day one? You can't counteract hatred by adding ignorance. Love, is not about forgetting your differences, but about reconciling with them. Psychology is interesting, in that it looks at the universal features to our minds, and yet, in practice, such as psychotherapy, it is often taught that you must treat each patient as an individual.

And how do they tell you to do that? Through a universal set of rules for how to approach them as individuals of course!

Because that's not counterintuitive at all...

Either that, or simply trust you to... "be human".

Don't be a scientist with your WHOs. Be a philosopher with them, but remember that here, with our stories, we're really just talking about Whats.

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What facts.

What connections.

What stories. 

What relationships

What trust or distrust

So science can be used here. Science is used with many Whats. Just know that it doesn't always work, such as with WHOs, and remember to use this chapter wisely, and at the right times.

 What would you prefer? One man or 100?

Because there are few things as pitiful to be seen, as the man who blindly tries to hammer in “nails”, because he forgot he’s using screws.