Exploiting Assumptions

Exploiting Assumptions

If you become too dependent on a particular equilibrium to perform well, you make yourself vulnerable to being thrown off by changing circumstances. Being able to function in a wider range of conditions makes you more versatile and flexible. It’s also useful to have homeostatic processes in place to enable you to get back to what you find optimal after any sort of disruption. In competitive situations, those who flounder when they’re thrown off their equilibrium by something unexpected without having the mechanisms to reorient often suffer. Sometimes you can transcend your abilities by thinking about what an opponent expects or considers normal. You can also achieve more by rethinking what the equilibrium is in your field.

Take the case of card tricks. When an audience watches a magician perform a trick, they start with certain assumptions and expectations. The same is true for professional magicians watching other magicians perform a trick. Their equilibrium consists of a set of assumptions that enables them to identify how a trick works by watching it or to reverse-engineer it from the end point. Professional magic includes all sorts of conventions and assumptions. One unspoken assumption is that a magician performing a particular named trick does it the same way every time, using the same technique. To figure out how the trick works, you need to identify that technique.

One American magician, Ralph Hull, managed to invent a card trick no one—not even the smartest expert magicians—could fathom by rethinking the equilibrium of card magic. He called it “The Tuned Deck.” Hull would show the audience a pack of cards, claiming he could sense the location of any card in the deck by detecting minute vibrations. He would then allow an audience member to pick a card, look at it, then put it back into the pack. Hull moved the cards around, shuffling them one way and another, then pulled out the correct card. Its unique vibrations revealed its location, or so he said.

No one managed to figure out how he did the trick, despite expert magicians watching him perform it again and again. Only at the end of his life did Hull reveal the secret: The Tuned Deck didn’t have one, single secret. Hull would use a mixture of different techniques, moving between them depending on whether an audience seemed to be twigging what he was doing. If a professional magician were watching, he might use a few different consecutive methods until he threw them off the scent. The real trick was that Hull shifted away from the equilibrium assumption that a trick with a name had to be done the same way every time.