Here’s a question for you: How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?

Most people have no problem in answering “Two.” Of course, Moses didn’t take any animals into the ark—Noah did.

Your brain is good at filling in gaps in information. Yu cn prbly red ths sntce evn tho it mssng al srts of lttrs. However, sometimes your brain is too good and leads you astray.

In most of our day-to-day activities this “automatic processing” allows us to be much more efficient than if we had to stop and reflect on everything. Of course, sometimes we need to reflect on a problem—possibly because it’s counterintuitive or novel.

Research suggests that complicating things can improve our ability to understand them. The idea is that we are forced to slow down and consciously reason about the information being presented to us. For example, research at the University of Michigan has shown that using a difficult-to-read font makes it more likely that readers will spot the mistake in the Moses Illusion question.

Researchers at Princeton conducted a “real-life” experiment in an Ohio high school. Children given materials in a disfluent font scored higher in classroom assessments than those in a control group.

There seems to an obsession with simplification and clarity these days. Maybe that is contributing to the infantilization of society…dumbing us down. When confronted with difficult, novel problems consider the value of a little obfuscation.

Andrew Tait recently presented confrontation analysis to an audience of Latin American politicians at the “Liderazgo y Gobernanza” (Leadership and Government) conference hosted by George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management in Washington, DC.

For those of you who don’t take decision-making quite as seriously as we do, you can now turn to Apple’s Siri.

Ask Siri to

Roll the dice

and she’ll roll two dice for you, reporting

Rolling… it’s two and six.

Or, if you prefer a coin toss, ask her to

Flip a coin

to which she might respond

It’s tails.

Good luck.

A recent paper from Korea University Business School suggests that thinking too specifically when trying to predict an outcome makes you less likely to get it right.

Researchers compared predictions made about the overall outcome (win/draw/lose) of sporting events with predictions made about the actual scoreline. Scoreline predictions are also overall outcome predictions—e.g. if the score is Manchester United 3, Arsenal 1, then that is a win for Manchester United. Hence, scoreline predictions are a “more detailed” approach to predicting the overall outcome.

Analysis of 19 billion commercial bets suggested that people do worse when they attempt to predict the scoreline. These findings were confirmed in laboratory experiments.

The paper offers the insight that, in studying the minutiae, we may miss factors that have a much greater impact—i.e. we miss the forest for the trees.

So, less thinking = better results. Great.

The Global Data on Events Location and Tone (GDELT) project is attempting to document all the important political events in recorded history.

It currently contains data on over 250 million events, stretching back to 1979—and the intention is to extend that all the way to 1800.

Events are geotagged to city level and contain information on the type of confrontation, the parties involved and the action that occurred. The types of confrontation recorded are:

• material conflict
• material cooperation
• verbal conflict
• verbal cooperation

Events like bombings and riots are currently captured, drawing on traditional news sources, and the intention is to expand coverage to include, for example, financial events.

Founder Kalev Leetaru says

The goal of the project is to create a free and open global resource for the quantitative study and mapping of global conflict and cooperation and thus the data is being made available completely free and open for any use.