Keep Your Paradigm Straight, Part I

Choose your path:

Let me shift you into gear

A blind man gets on a crowded bus, and there are no seats available.

One man offers the blind man his seat. Was that a good thing for him to do?

If you answered yes, you are in desperate need of additional information: you see, the man who gave up his seat for the blind man was the driver of the bus.

Not a good thing for him to have done. Whoops.

As it turns out, you were in need of a paradigm shift, “a fundamental change in approach or underlying assumptions.”

Here’s another example, one maybe you’ve heard before:

A man leaves home on foot one evening, makes three left turns, and arrives back home to find two masked men waiting there. Who are they?

If you’re thinking about burglars or anything of the sort, the punchline below will administer you a proper paradigm shift.

[spoiler title=”Click for punchline and paradigm shift”]The catcher and the umpire.[/spoiler]

You see, you had a fundamental set of beliefs developing—on the fly, as you read the scenario—which then got flipped on its head the moment you saw the punchline.

In the following short story, “you” set out to study for a standardized test. Little do “you” know, “you” are in for a surprise… maybe even a bit of a paradigm shift.

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A little story about you

You sit down to study: “Hey Ma, I’ma go study.”

You crack open the book. Which book? The big red book. The big blue book. The big yellow book. The big orange book. The big green book. The big black book. Whichever big book it is, it’s filled with categorized practice materials allegedly optimized for your preparation for the Essay Tea* or Acey Tea*.
_{* Names of popular standardized tests have been changed to prevent the writer from receiving formal Cease and Desist letters from notoriously litigious standardized test makers.}

Here you are, staring down a “study guide,” named as such because it’s supposedly published for the sole purpose of “guiding your study” for some test you’re soon going to sit for.

Why are you sitting for such a test? Well, because, of course, you would like to graduate from your current secondary school, confidently matriculating at an institution of higher learning…

Surely you’re not just sitting for such a test because it’s what’s expected of you or whatever.

Perhaps it’s a small liberal arts college that your older sister attends. Perhaps it’s a school where your best friend has already been offered a full-ride scholarship. Or maybe it’s a university that you’ve dreamed about for years, whose memorabilia lines your shelves and whose t-shirts and hoodies fill your closet.

You finally stop daydreaming and decide that the best thing to do is to set a timer and complete a “full, timed section.” That way, you’ll re-create a vital component of the test day experience—you know, the additional stress of the racing clock. You think to yourself, Now it will be easy to stay focused on the task at hand.

You open to page one of the English section from ACT Practice Test 1. You freak out a bit because there are four answer choices, and Each one sounds pretty good. But let’s be honest, at this point, you’re questioning your own understanding of the word “good,” opting instead for more guarded assessments like I guess Each one sounds okay or whatever.

You want to find You try to find You strive to find the “best answer,” question after question. The endeavor seems sensible enough. After all, the DIRECTIONS of the test advised you to choose the best answer. Though it’s a weird thing to remember from your last test day, you remember it distinctly because the proctor at your last ACT testing center—when she read the ACT proctoring script off her iPhone, through a facemask—she advised you to read the DIRECTIONS within your allotted time. When you did so (like a fool, you poor sap), the DIRECTIONS said to “choose the alternative you consider best”

You tried for the next 45 minutes to test 300 (75×4) answer choices.

Unfortunately for you—and thanks to the robust legal teams at the respective standardized testing headquarters—such a thing as a “best answer” just simply doesn’t exist.

It’s time to flip your logic engine.

It’s time to shift your paradigm.

It’s time you quit the wild goose chase for the best answer.

Instead, you need to believe in the fact that there are three (or more) wrong answers per question. And even the answer that is “right” is not the best thing they could have done.