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From: Jasper
Date: 5/1/03
Time: 2:38:14 PM
Remote Name: 68.73.56.144
Jean,
Stick with me for a minute…
When I was taking the multiple choice tests to get into clay modeling school in 1964 I ran into a big problem with the very first question. It was something like, “How much is one plus one?
A) One B) Two C) Three D) Four E) Five
I saw instantly that all of the answers could be correct. If you add one chemical to another you might get one big explosion. If you add one brick to another you would get two bricks but if you add a one-pound brick to a two-pound brick you would get three pounds of bricks. With a little imagination you can see how one and one could equal four or five.
In short, the question was much harder to answer than it appeared to be at first glance because you had to assume facts not in evidence to come up with “the” correct answer: The question should have specified One WHAT plus one WHAT equals WHAT?
I finally came up with “B” because if the answer had been “A” or “C” then “D” or “E” would have told me. If “D” or “E” had been “All of the above” or “None of the above” respectively instead of “4” and “5” I would have picked “D.” If “D” had been “4” and “E” had been “All of the above” If “E” had been “None of the above” I would have gone straight to “B.” “D” and “E” as written equaled “None of the above” because there were only five options.
Only one person in two thousand has the kind of difficulty finding the answer to a question like this that I did. When most people see the question, “what is one plus one?” They AUTOMATICALLY think “two.” When they see “two” as one of the options they IMMEDIATELY select it and go on to the next question – which makes it increasingly difficult to answer questions as the test progresses. For me the test gets progressively easier because patterns begin to develop that tell me what the correct answer has to be.
One of the things that struck me with the “mountain of evidence” against O.J. was how similar it was to the multiple-choice questions you find in the kind of test I just described. You get so many obvious answers up front that the validity of the questions might escape you. Instead of asking how the blood evidence on Bundy came to be identified as O.J.’s, most people ask, “How did O.J. leave his blood on Bundy?” or “How could the cops have planted it on Bundy and Rockingham?” It doesn’t stop there. It goes on and on as if the killer and the lead detective working together knew the trick to getting intelligent people to skip the basic problem-solving steps and go straight to the wrong answers. In Murder in Brentwood, Mark Fuhrman showed me that he knew the trick. --Jasper