More Luck

 Well it happened again. Today there were about 10 guesses, and I think we guessed around 70% right. The answer was not always Y, unfortunately. This is again, less impressive than it sounds, because, often times the question had been narrowed down to two answer choices, and I could easily be forgetting times when we guessed wrong. Still, we got way better than the expected value of 25% right. We did this by assuming that the answer would not be Y, and also by exploiting regularities in the phrasings of questions. The questions are designed so that there is a parallelism between questions. For instance if W says that A > D, X might be that A < D, thus allowing people to guess before X is even read. Another thing that happened was when there we knew that there were only 3 possible things in a category, the question asked for which of the following is not in the category, and they were all in a row, thus making the answer Z. A final thing that happened was when concepts that come in pairs that always had one come before the other allowing an easy guess of W or X.

Once again, the same emotions, the same misremembering, the same results.

The last letter of lucky is Y

 Today I made a stunning discovery, one that destroyed my prior understanding of the cosmos. I was in this buzzer based multiple choice competition. This competition had a reputation, which said that the answer was often Y. Well I took that to heart, every meeting since, I had guessed Y, sometimes even before the question was read. Today, I went overboard on guessing Y. I might have guessed Y five times, and those five times in a row I guessed it right. Furthermore, everyone who guessed Y but me, guessed it wrong. I spiced things up, by copy pasting wikipedia articles about the letter Y into chat. By the end, people were questioning the nature of reality. 

I got lucky. But I was willing to make guesses, because I knew guessing it wrong would still bring me social credit, just for continuing the legend of the person who always blindly guesses Y.

It actually wasn't that lucky, my streak is not that impressive, I only guessed Y five times in a row, which has a 1 in 4^5 chance of happening only 1 in 1024. It wasn't even as if those five questions were in a row, and sometimes the question had been read. Each logical leap, each misremembering of what had happened, so small in the moment, a small change in probabilities, compounded and compounded with all the others to create a story of luck that had never happened, and onwards to stranger hypotheses still. 

But, the story sounds better, and among the people in the competition, that story was what had actually happened. It was, in the grander narrative of 2020, the year of the black swan, just another sign that reality has been fraying on its edges.

And I had bought the story at times. In this hyper state, I felt as if I could continue guessing Y forever, I believed that we lived in a simulation. I needed to remind myself of all the ways I was misremembering events, that I had hyped up the mundane. 

But I did learn about old SAT guessing strategies (always guess C, which is the third choice, just like Y), about experiments where 75% people would choose 3 when prompted to pick a point on a number line extending from 1 to 4. I understood how it feels to believe in the paranormal, the feeling of gesturing at the miracles of gods, aliens, and things stranger still. We came out of this believing in the god of the Y, and that belief in Y, not Y itself, is the true story here.