at 247 I hypothesized correctly, but not before

1.5, 3.14159, 2.000exp-378

His black swan is radioactive.

I suspect some cherry picking, in who got included in the final clip.

the rule is antifragile.

He is so set on the importance of looking for evidence and asking questions that do NOT fit your expectation. He then does this test, fully expecting people will try to ask questions confirming if their own rule fits rather than looking for what does not. He flat out says multiple times how floored he is by how the people interviewed kept trying to reinforce their own guess instead of disproving their own guess. Truth is, plenty of the people in the shown interviews very quickly made guesses that did NOT fit with the first, second or third pattern they tried to guess at, so they clearly WERE trying to disprove their own guess. I really see a self important trip here where the guy interviewing is falling even MORE into the trope he is so eager to see in everyone else.

His wording is chosen carefully ... "rule" instead of "pattern", etc. but still the way that he poses the initial setup and his sample sequence are very leading. Not at all surprised at the initial attempts he gets.

I would have said "16 32 64" first, and "3 9 27" next. Those both would be leading me further down the trap of thinking in terms of a sequence/pattern rather than just a 'rule'. In computer science it is actually important to test how an algorithm reacts to being fed just bizarre, off the wall inputs -- but you're going to test "sane" stuff first. Human nature.

It would have been cool if he'd gone on to explain statistical significance and the idea of refuting the null hypothesis etc.

Fucking monkey brains seeing patterns in everything. Can't be too hard on it though, it got us this far afterall, but dammit monkey I'm trying to do science now.

THIS

It got us this far -- which is a corner that we've painted ourselves into. Really awesome place to be if you don't give a shit and just want to eat shit fuck and make money. Good enough for some, but a nightmare world for others.

My new favorite phrase of the day "Dammit monkey, I'm trying to do science now"!

I don't think it's really that bad to come to the correct answer in 10, even 15 minutes to what is essentially a vague guessing game?

Numbers in ascending order isn't really a Black Swan scenario, this isn't something people couldn't fathom existing, it's just an arbitrary rule he decided on in a system all the people were familiar with, numbers.

All it really showed was people are slow to activate their critical thinking skills when randomly stopped in the street, once they get warmed up with a few throw-away guesses, there reasoning becomes more complex.

I don't see anything unusual about that, especially since half the problem was actually just deceptive word play.

I'd had it with 1-1-1

Definitely... it's like he had some result in mind, and then only showed the data which supported that result.

There is no way that so many people in a row didn't get this.

reminded me of...
http://videosift.com/video/Ending-Womens-Suffrage
Critical thinking is seemingly in decline.

For me the setup automatically removed the obvious answers. If someone is testing me and it seems the answer would seem obvious to most people then that's a red flag that the obvious answer is probably wrong. and I need to think about the question carefully.

two four eight....so my first guess was
one four eight...he would have said "fits my rule" and I would have guessed his rule was the number of letters for each number increases by one....and he would have said "not my rule".

My second guess was correct as I listened to 10 rapid guesses in a row that seem to only have two things in common...they were all in ascending order and they were double the previous number. He said the doubling was not his rule so that left one answer....ascending order.