How do we know anything? Why do we think we know something? What really makes us doing anything? Three cracking pub quiz questions reveal the cognitive challenges facing persuaders like advertisers, demagogues and climate activists.
This article, via three pub quiz puzzlers, examines how we acquire the ‘knowledge’ on which we supposedly base our rational decisions about everything from coffee to climate.
Q1: Do fish actually swim?
At a 2024 fundraising pub quiz for a local radio station in Frome, Somerset, the quizmaster threw in this simple Yes or No question.
The audience of around 200 included a few children but was mainly composed of relatively well-educated adults. Their motivations ranged from a bit of fun, to dead-eyed pursuit of the prize money, and wanting to support community broadcasting.
‘Do fish actually swim?’ was delivered with deliberate neutrality, but a clear emphasis on the third word.
It immediately prompted a surge of muttered debate pitched at a volume intended to be audible only to teammates, but so loud only the quizmaster could make themselves heard without bellowing.
Some teams, after conferring, shouted out clarifying questions to the quizmaster, like
- ‘How do you define ‘swim’?’
- ‘Do you include amphibious fish?’
- ‘Does the question include marine mammals, reptiles or amphibians?
The quizmaster declined to elaborate, pointing out that it was already a binary question that a chimp would get right 50% of the time, and that everything required to answer the question was included in those four words.
Simple though it was, this question provoked longer and more intense debate than any other that evening.
After repeated requests for extra time, the quizmaster issued a 10-second deadline, obliging teams to commit to Yes or No, or ‘we’d be here all night’.
Answer below.
Q2: O.T.T.F.F.S.S.… what comes next?
This is a better-known puzzle. Quizmasters might throw it in to make sure a decent number of teams could get at least one point without feeling patronised.
‘OTTFFSS – what comes next?’ sounds like a lateral thinking puzzle. It’s likely that at least one person on any team will have heard it before. A reasonable percentage of them might remember the answer, or have a vague recollection of the nature of the puzzle.
A really strict quizmaster might not even concede the next thing is necessarily a ‘letter’ – it could be a number, a punctuation mark, or some other written symbol – but we’ll give you that clue for free.
If you have no idea, answering any letter of the English alphabet would give yourself a chance. A smart teammate might suggest ‘E’, as it’s the most common letter in the English language.
Still struggling? Here’s a second, bigger clue. If you or one of your teammates knows the answer, you can complete the sequence infinitely.
If you remain stumped, or want to check, the answer is below.
Q3: Would sipping your drink make ice cubes in it clink at the same pitch, a higher pitch, or a lower pitch?
This one may need a bit more explaining.
When ice cubes in your drink touch the side of the glass, they clink at a certain pitch. If you were to take a sip, would the resulting noise sound the same, be higher, or lower?
In a pub quiz, it would be up to the pub quizmaster to rule on whether anyone drinking something with ice cubes would be cheating if they simply tried it.
A strict quizmaster might enforce a ‘brains only’ rule, disqualifying any team that attempted to use their ears, and encouraging other teams to report any such attempts.
A relaxed quizmaster at a ‘bit of fun’ quiz rather than a competitive event might actively encourage teams to listen to each other’s drinks as they sip. It would be entertaining.
A pragmatic quizmaster might permit experiment rather than cognition, confident that the pub would be far too noisy an environment to detect and mentally retain such a quiet sound.
If you have a drink with ice cubes to hand, or are prepared to go and make yourself a drink to discover the answer yourself, you’ll soon have discovered the answer all by yourself.
Congratulations! See below for details.
If, however, you don’t have an icy drink, can’t source one immediately, or can’t be bothered to go to all that trouble but still want to know the answer, it’s also below.
Who’d help get the right answers?
Before revealing the answers, which of the following team members would you choose to add to your team to help you answer correctly?
Let’s assume your team already covers the pub quiz bases, including:
- Ray the Rocker who knows all the music answers
- Taylor the Telly Addict, expert in celebrity gossip and movie stars
- Hadley the History Buff, go-to oracle for dates and events
- Chris the Crossword Nut, font of general knowledge and cracker of cryptic clues
But if you were a team member short, and you had the pick of three last-minute arrivals, would you pick Stevie, Si or Taylor?
Stevie the Statistician
Stevie admits not knowing about anything other than calculating odds. Stevie’s response to the three questions would be:
Q1: Dunno, but there’s a 50% chance of a correct answer if you write ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.
Q2: Dunno, but writing any letter of the alphabet down would give a 3.84615385% of being right. When someone suggests ‘E’ because it’s the most common letter, Stevie would revise the odds to 12.702% if weighted for letter frequency in printed English, or up to 1% lower in abbreviated text messaging.
Q3: Dunno, but ‘the same’, ‘higher pitch’, or ‘lower pitch’ would all give a 33.3.% chance of getting a point.
Do these answers suggest that Stevie the Statistician would not only be useless, but could rapidly get quite annoying?
If so, is this because Stevie’s statistics-based approach is:
- Inherently unhelpful in any context?
- Useless in a pub quiz context?
- Only useful as a tie-breaker?
- Meaningless without any other evidence to factor in?
Si the Psychologist
Si’s professional expertise is unlikely to come up in any pub quiz question per se, but insights into human nature might help score more points. Si’s answers would be:
Q1: Dunno, but the quizmaster seems to be using the pub quiz context to make us second-guess the obvious answer. Don’t be fooled by the double-bluff, however, and answer ‘Yes, fish swim’.
Q2: Dunno, but this time the quizmaster is probably doing the opposite, and trying to lull us into the ‘clever’ guess of the most common English letter. So write down the least common letter, Q.
Q3: Dunno, but the quizmaster’s question sounds like a ‘false framing’ trick to induce us into over-thinking. The level of the liquid makes no difference to the noise the ice cubes make. Answer ‘the same pitch’.
Would Si the Psychologist be a helpful team member? If pub quizzes are designed to be tricky, for multiple choice questions it might make more sense to focus on the quizmaster’s intentions:
- Can someone with informed insight into quizmaster psychology confer a significant advantage over teams who are taking the questions at face value?
- Does second-guessing people who are already second-guessing you, cancel out any advantage?
Taylor the Trickster
Taylor says they never went to university, but graduated with honours from the School of Hard Knocks.
Taylor can duck, dive, think outside the box, and come up with innovative strategies no one else would even think of.
Taylor’s answers would be:
Q1: Dunno, but after a strategic trip to the toilet, via a circuitous route permitting eavesdropping on all the other tables, 4 of the other 9 tables have decided to answer ‘No’, and 5 have answered ‘Yes’.
Q2: Dunno, but another circuitous trip to the bar reveals that 2 of the other tables have written down ‘E’, and the 7 others have all written down different letters.
Q3: Dunno, but a tour of the room ‘looking for a friend’ reveals 7 of the other tables have answered ‘Lower pitch’, 2 ‘Higher pitch’, and no one thinks it’s ‘Same pitch’.
Taylor’s trickery has defeated your rival teams’ attempts to whisper their debates and cover up their answer sheets, but will Taylor’s approach be of any use?
- Does knowing exactly what your competition thinks confer any advantage?
- Correct answers are based on verifiable fact, not opinion polls. Does this make Taylor’s tricks, however ingenious, pointless?
A1: The fish swimming debate
At the local radio fundraiser, this was the evening’s most eagerly-anticipated answer.
After the teams had swapped answer sheets to mark each other’s scores, but before revealing the answer, the quizmaster asked for a show of hands.
Taylor would have been right. Around two thirds of the teams had gone for ‘Yes’, with the remaining third opting for ‘No’.
More murmuring, prompting a couple of teams to grab their answer sheets back from their neighbouring tables to change their answers. Further debate about whether this should be allowed.
Before it came to blows, the quizmaster revealed the answer, as follows:
‘Of course it’s ‘Yes’, you absolute muppets. They’re bloody fish!’.
A2: Next letter after OTTFFSS
The answer is ‘E’.
The reason is that the first seven letters in this sequence are the initial letters of the English spelling of the numbers, starting from 1 (One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven).
The next in the sequence would be E for Eight, then N for Nine, T for Ten, E for Eleven etc..
A3: The clinking ice-cube conundrum
The less liquid, the higher the pitch at which the ice-cubes clink.
The reason is that the resonating medium creating the loudest clinking sound is the liquid, not the air above it.
The shorter the distance between the bottom of the glass and the top of the liquid, the shorter the wavelength, the higher the frequency and hence the higher the pitch of the clink.
Lessons for climate activists
Beyond three new factoids and the chance to impress teammates should they come up next time you find yourself in a quiz, what do these three pub quiz questions tell us?
Specifically, what lessons do they hold for climate activists seeking to influence ordinary people to change their behaviour to take emissions-reducing action?
The lessons below are unrelated to facts, evidence and data. That’s the job of science, so we know that alone doesn’t work.
We’ve known the theory of The Greenhouse Effect for a couple of centuries, the reality for at least 50 years, and as each day passes, future problems are becoming current crises. Real-world floods, fires and droughts are following the predictions made by climate scientists’ models with depressing frequency and increasing intensity.
The activist lessons below are not about the hard science, verifiable data or modeling tipping points.
Hard though hard science is, it turns out to be the easy bit when it comes to inducing humans to take action to arrest the worst impacts of our fossil fuel addiction.
Knowing is not acting
When asked by opinion pollsters, 89% of us ‘know’ enough about human-induced climate change to say we want our governments to do something more to address it.
This means the problem isn’t ‘knowledge’, in the pub-quiz sense of the word. The problem is bridging the gap between knowing the problem, and taking action to fix it.
Here’s the main lesson. Much as we flatter ourselves that we act rationally, our actions aren’t primarily driven by facts, evidence and data.
This knowledge of this human flaw itself is nothing new.
If at your next pub quiz you’re asked ‘What are the three key means of persuasion Aristotle categorized in his treatise The Art of Rhetoric?, and you’ve read Three Old Ways To Help Fossil Fuel Addicts Kick Their Habit, Plus A New One, you’ll earn your team full marks.
The more pressing question is the one Aristotle discussed, involving persuasion and rhetoric. Aristotle reckoned humans can be persuaded by Logos (the argument itself), but are far more likely to be persuaded by Ethos (the character and status of the speaker) or by Pathos (the emotional state of the hearer).
Stevie the Statistician covers Logos. Si the Psychologist is all over Ethos. Taylor the Trickster is a master of Pathos.
Effective Activists need all three on the team, plus many more, if they aspire to nudge anyone into actually taking emissions-reducing action, rather than saying they intend to, or that someone else should do it.
What stops us acting
Our three pub quiz questions encapsulate climate activists’ challenge.
The real world rarely works like a pub quiz, with its Right and Wrong answers. The thought processes we go through in answering pub quiz questions, however, are very realistic.
First, most people aspire to be Right.
The kind of people who revel in giving Wrong answers tend not to attend pub quizzes, but we all want to be right about certain questions, even if they don’t involve knowing the length of the Equator or the diameter of a golf hole.
We all like to know stuff, and all feel some urge to correct the ignorant. Whether in a pub quiz, a conversation with an old friend or a stranger on a bus, all other things being equal, we all:
- Would rather win a a zero-sum game against rivals than lose
- Want to enlighten others
- Like being proven right
- Gain satisfaction from persuading others to agree with us
Even the most mild-mannered, inclusive, and deferential among us evolved from the survivors of evolution. Like it or not, we’re descended from a tiny number of victors in battle for survival, fought by nature red in tooth and claw. We’re natural ‘winners’.
So how to bridge the gap between our impulse to be Right, and taking action that will stop us losing everything by committing species suicide?
If we’re so motivated to win/be right, what’s making us choose the Wrong answer (complacency, blaming others, wilful ignorance, despair, self-flagellation or some other form of inaction), over the Right one (weaning ourselves off fossil fuels)?
With this in mind, let’s revisit those three pub quiz questions.
Fish swimming: fear of looking stupid
This is only a brilliant pub quiz question because it’s being asked in a pub quiz.
It’s hard to imagine any other context in which we’d give the matter of whether fish swim a second’s thought, or a second thought.
Tell a four-year-old that fish don’t swim, and they’d laugh at your stupidity. So what made 40% of adults turn stupid when answering the same question in a pub quiz?
It’s because the context of the question and the way it was framed, put us on our guard. It made us wary of being tricked, and fearful of looking stupid.
The psychology behind this is complex and contingent, but all too familiar.
It’s why, when the Internet has granted more people more access to more knowledge than at any time in human history, Flat Earthers, Anti-Vaxxers and Climate Deniers can not only thrive, but feel smarter than all the other fools.
OTTFFSS?: KISS (keep it simple, stupid)
There’s one cohort of humans who find the OTTFFSS? question relatively easy: small children as they’re learning the ‘Three R’s’ of reading, writing and ‘rithmatic.
A reception class kid may not know the capital of Moldova or how many Number Ones the Beatles had, but they’re occupying the narrow window when the answer to this question is easily accessible.
When your mind is uncluttered by lists of the world’s capitals or chart history, your field of vision is much clearer for this question. Also, you’re yet to normalize the Three Rs to the point where you no longer think of numbers in terms of letters.
But for anyone being taught basic literacy and numeracy, the initial letters of each integer are, briefly, at the front of your mind. If you’re learning to count while laboriously spelling out simple words, you’re sufficiently ignorant to know the answer.
This is counter-intuitive, but true. The more we know, the less obvious certain truths can appear, and the more seductive complex solutions can become.
How else to explain our enthusiastic embrace of hi-tech, ‘silver bullet’ solutions to climate change, like geo-engineering, nuclear fusion, small nuclear reactors, carbon capture, when we know that stopping burning fossil fuels and planting trees would work just fine?
Ask a small child how to stop a bath overflowing, and they’ll turn off the tap, pull the plug out, or both. It takes an adult to think of the option of learning to live with a wet bathroom floor.
Never trusting experts is unwise, but so is listening to the wrong experts.
Clinking ice cubes: the limits of a little learning
Try posing the ice-cube clink question to a range of friends, and you might notice something odd.
The more ‘musical’ your friends are, the more likely they are are:
- To think the pitch will be lower
- To be confident in their wrong answer
When asked to explain, they’re likely to have mistaken the column of air above the liquid as the resonating medium, rather than the liquid.
This is true of wind instruments, where pitch correlates to the length of the resonating tube (think of a trombone going lower the longer the tube). It just happens to be a ‘category error’, because most of the ice cube is in the water, not in the air.
Their musical knowledge, in this case, was an impediment to understanding.
Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism (1711) is bung-full of quotable pearls of wisdom.
- Centuries later, a US Institutes of Medicine’s report on patient safety is titled ‘To Err Is Human’, without the need to finish the Pope quote ‘to forgive, divine’.
- Elvis Presley fans may be unaware ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’ is another quote from Pope’s An Essay on Criticism.
Both zingers have their applications to climate activism, but for pub quiz purposes another top gobbet is even better, ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’.
We often slightly misquote this insight as ‘a little knowledge…’, but this Pope-slap still resonates because it nails this tendency, having learned the basics of arithmetic, to make 2+2=5.
The Swedish physician and brilliant public speaker Hans Rosling demonstrated how this human cognitive trait can lure us into unconscious bias.
His infamous chimpanzee test was essentially a pub quiz in a lecture hall. Rosling proved, over and over again, how chimps throwing darts at a multiple choice paper based on UNDP statistics would consistently outscore university graduates. The more expert the audience members thought themselves, the greater their humiliation.
The chimpanzees, of course, were as indifferent to their victory as carbon dioxide molecules are to who released them, when and why. Chimps gonna chimp. CO2 gonna CO2. It’s in their nature.
It’s in human nature to seek justifications that maintain our hero status in our own narratives.
If we want things to be true, we find ways of making them true.
These are the thought processes that help retard attempts at carbon drawdown, evident whenever people say:
- Climate change is a hoax
- Sun spots, not human activity, are raising temperatures
- There’s no point in us reducing emissions so long as [country X] doesn’t.
- I’m doing my bit to save the planet by recycling/using reusable bags/litter-picking
Such self-delusion, whether conscious or unconscious, drives all forms of inaction: outright climate denial, climate despair and ineffective climate activism.
Some of the reasons behind these inaction excuses could constitute correct pub quiz answers. Many not, but that’s not the lesson here.
Right or Wrong answers are irrelevant if:
- the pub quiz is asking the wrong questions
- you’re not asking the question ‘why am I in this pub?’
What makes us act
It’s really, really difficult to persuade, or even trick, anyone into doing anything they perceive might come at the slightest cost to them.
This changes in an emergency. We’ll go outside if their house is on fire. Most of us will even stay at home and wear masks if we’re afraid or dying, or killing vulnerable people.
But those actions are only provoked by emergencies we feel are immediate in time, and local in space.
Trickery is much harder work, no matter how much thought you put into Transparent Trojan Horseplay. It helps if you can convince the action is of immediate benefit to them, as well as to future generations, and distant strangers, but that’s no guarantee.
Of every thousand people who read this article, how many do you think actually went to the fridge, made themselves an ice drink, out of curiosity to answer Question 3 for themselves? A cold drink would do them no harm, and they’d have the satisfaction of having worked out the answer for themselves, but…can you really be bothered?
If you think only a handful, if any, out of a thousand readers might be persuaded to take that action, you’re in the right ballpark. Welcome to the world of effective climate activism.
Welcome too to the limits of ‘raising awareness’ to induce the public to even click, like, share, sign an online petition, or any other action that comes at negligible personal cost and has negligible real-world impact.
Pub quiz-style knowledge, while important, is nowhere near enough.
What pub am I in?
The problem is that we live in a world full of different pubs, each with multiple quizmasters, all of whom have their own agendas, prejudices, and biases, conscious and unconscious.
Some act in good faith. Some are bad actors deliberately spreading misinformation, but all their questions are designed to produce ‘correct’ answers that make both quizzer and quizzed feel better about themselves.
Some pub quizzes are based on facts, reason, evidence, logic, science, experts, charts, datasets, research papers, and other verifiable sources.
But there are also way more quizmasters bombarding us with similar questions in our daily life: at work, online, at school, in church.
Their answer sheets are based on faith, belief, trust, reputation, relatability, resonance, tribal affiliations and other human drivers more powerful than reason.
We should be aware what pubs we attend, what quizzes we participate in, who our teammates are, and the prizes on offer.
If the prize involves anything other than taking action to shorten the path to a sustainable future, why not:
- walk away
- find one that does
- encourage everyone else to do the same
**
The See Through ecosystem’s Goal is Speeding Up Carbon Drawdown by Helping the Inactive Become Active.
Its global collective of pro bono contributors would make a hell of a pub quiz team, when they’re not trying to think of ways to nudge Unwilling Inactivists into taking emissions-reducing action.