Good morning, John. One thing we do not talk a lot about here on vlog where there's this math, but I'm about to show you a very low-stakes math problem that you don't have to get right that did change the way that I see the social internet. With the last vestiges of my timetable still holding on, I initially realized that each of the numbers on the right was a multiple of the ones on the left. From there, I realized that there was a pattern. Nine times ten is ninety, eight times nine is seventy two, seven times eight is fifty-six, six times seven is forty-two. So, what is three? This math question went viral on Twitter because people were arguing about what three is. You may have even been snapping up to form an opinion yourself. A lot of people said it was twelve, a lot of people said it was eighteen. The twelve people and the eighteen people were arguing with each other and they were all very certain that they were right. Team eighteen pointed out that there was a sequence of numbers being multiplied. Ten, nine, eight, seven, and then the next number, six, would be six times three, which would be eighteen. Team twelve said that every number is being multiplied by itself plus one. Nine times ten, six times seven. And so three times four is twelve. Flatching people on Twitter argue about this was a little like having sand thrown into my eyes because of course there are two correct answers to this question and neither of them is twelve or eighteen. The two correct answers are either twelve or eighteen, not twelve or eighteen, but twelve or eighteen. Or the second correct answer is the question is wrong. But here's the thing. To me, the right answer is twelve. Because n times n plus one just seems more mathy to me than a sequence being multiplied by the numbers, but that's not right. In this situation, everyone who believes their answer is right is wrong. The only people who are right are the ones who know they don't know. Now with math problems, when they are unclear, you know that it's a poorly created math problem. But with almost every other kind of problem, you know that if it is unclear, that's actually a pretty good sign that it's a real problem. Like if it's clear how to solve it, it's probably not that big of a problem. But I learned something else very interesting from this confounding incorrect math problem, which I started to learn when I noticed that people were talking about this rather than every other math problem. There's nothing interesting about a math problem. Everyone agrees on. One of the very few reasons that math goes viral is when people fight. Like this mess of an equation that I see all the time, it might seem to a person like me that this would be an important math problem because it comes up a lot. But mathematicians don't think this problem is interesting. They wouldn't try to answer that question. They would ask for it to be rewritten. And so if vague questions that are easy to argue about mislead us into imagining the world incorrectly, I think it's important to ask why these questions are easy to argue about. And here's why. It's not just that people believe different things in this situation. It's that it is easy to believe different things. Looking at this problem, it is as easy to know that the answer is 12 as it is to know that the answer is 18. A question like that is bound to get some attention, whether it is about math or guns or immigration, and particularly, it will get a lot of questions from people who don't know that much about it because experts are aware that the problem is poorly phrased and badly done and so aren't really interfacing with it. But for the rest of us, these are situations where it's very easy to have one of several different opinions that are not the same answer. Questions like that due to the nature of humanity and its algorithms are going to do the ones we're most likely to see. And that's going to drive wedges and not just in the way that we usually think where it's like between two big political parties, but also within political parties, within communities, within people who broadly agree with each other on almost everything they just don't notice because those aren't the interesting things. When if the question was asked in a more complete way, we wouldn't find it interesting because we'd all agree. Vague questions that lead to the formation of simple opinions that are likely to conflict with the opinions of others are much more likely to create conflict and thus much more likely to go viral. And also, very often, the answers to those questions are invalid because the questions themselves are wrong. John, I will see you on Tuesday.