WEBVTT - A Game of Telephone, Part 1 0:00:03.040 --> 0:00:06.840 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. 0:00:13.480 --> 0:00:16.080 Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name 0:00:16.120 --> 0:00:17.160 is Robert Lamb. 0:00:17.079 --> 0:00:20.239 And I am Joe McCormick, and today we wanted to 0:00:20.280 --> 0:00:24.080 begin a series on the show talking about the telephone game. 0:00:24.800 --> 0:00:27.560 Many of you probably already know the general contours of 0:00:27.600 --> 0:00:31.080 a telephone game, but just in case anybody escaped childhood 0:00:31.120 --> 0:00:35.440 without playing this, describe how it often goes. So you 0:00:35.560 --> 0:00:39.080 might gather all the players in the room and arrange 0:00:39.120 --> 0:00:41.519 them in a line or in a big circle. We 0:00:41.560 --> 0:00:43.800 always played it in a circle at my elementary school. 0:00:44.159 --> 0:00:44.479 Yeah. 0:00:44.760 --> 0:00:47.120 Oh, yeah, you played it in a circle too, Yeah. 0:00:47.240 --> 0:00:49.239 Yeah, And I was about to say, very much an 0:00:49.280 --> 0:00:52.960 elementary school sort of game. This would be where I 0:00:53.000 --> 0:00:53.960 remember playing it from. 0:00:54.640 --> 0:00:57.360 So you begin with a secret message. I think maybe 0:00:57.400 --> 0:00:59.840 often a teacher came up with the message, but I 0:00:59.840 --> 0:01:02.360 guess a kid could to The main thing is not 0:01:02.440 --> 0:01:05.160 everybody gets to hear it at the beginning. The message 0:01:05.240 --> 0:01:08.920 can be a varying lengths or genres. Usually it was 0:01:09.080 --> 0:01:12.840 like a phrase or a sentence length. And for the 0:01:12.880 --> 0:01:15.000 purpose of some of the experiments we're going to look 0:01:15.000 --> 0:01:17.760 at later in this episode, it tends to get longer. 0:01:17.800 --> 0:01:20.760 It's like a full narrative length, and that's where you 0:01:20.760 --> 0:01:25.040 can start really seeing interesting things about how messages change 0:01:25.280 --> 0:01:28.280 across generations of retelling. But for the purpose of the 0:01:28.360 --> 0:01:31.720 Kid's game, yeah, it's often like a sentence. So let's 0:01:31.720 --> 0:01:34.560 say the phrase for our example is this sentence he 0:01:34.720 --> 0:01:38.039 learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature 0:01:38.160 --> 0:01:41.120 and because of it, the greatest in the universe. So 0:01:41.480 --> 0:01:44.480 somebody takes that message, they whisper it into the ear 0:01:44.640 --> 0:01:47.520 of the first player in the line, and then that 0:01:47.600 --> 0:01:51.600 player turns and whispers it back from memory as best 0:01:51.640 --> 0:01:54.520 they can to the next player, and then on down 0:01:54.600 --> 0:01:58.600 the line it goes. So each player is hearing what 0:01:58.720 --> 0:02:03.120 the other players impression of the message was, and when 0:02:03.120 --> 0:02:05.720 it gets to the end, you reveal two things to 0:02:05.880 --> 0:02:09.360 the whole group, what the original message was and what 0:02:09.720 --> 0:02:14.160 final message emerged from the chain of players. Now, if 0:02:14.200 --> 0:02:17.639 you played this game with the man's a feeling creature message, 0:02:18.600 --> 0:02:20.239 and you played it with like a group of I 0:02:20.280 --> 0:02:22.960 don't know, twenty elementary school kids, I would imagine you'd 0:02:23.040 --> 0:02:26.760 end up with something radically different at the end than 0:02:26.919 --> 0:02:31.120 what you started with, maybe something about peeling potatoes. And 0:02:31.160 --> 0:02:33.880 then probably also, to be honest, if I remember how 0:02:33.880 --> 0:02:36.919 this went with kids, something about like it might end 0:02:36.919 --> 0:02:38.959 with the phrase and his head was made of poo 0:02:39.000 --> 0:02:39.880 poo or something. 0:02:40.639 --> 0:02:42.960 Yeah. Yeah, Because an any group of school kids, you're 0:02:42.960 --> 0:02:45.840 gonna have some conscientious kids in there that are trying 0:02:45.880 --> 0:02:50.000 to contain and accurately reproduce the message. But you're also 0:02:50.040 --> 0:02:52.639 gonna have some distracted kids, and you're gonna have some troublemakers. 0:02:52.800 --> 0:02:55.080 But hey, hats off to the trouble makers because in 0:02:55.080 --> 0:02:59.880 this case, you know, introducing weirdness to the message on 0:03:00.080 --> 0:03:03.480 purpose is half of the game. So there are several 0:03:03.639 --> 0:03:06.600 different ways that I think changes to the message are 0:03:06.680 --> 0:03:10.600 usually introduced in this form of the game, you know, 0:03:10.600 --> 0:03:13.640 whispering ear to ear among school kids. Number one is 0:03:13.919 --> 0:03:17.520 errors of hearing or speaking, So you might mistake a 0:03:17.639 --> 0:03:20.120 word in the message for a sound like word like 0:03:20.240 --> 0:03:22.960 a man is a feeling creature might turn into something 0:03:22.960 --> 0:03:25.960 about peeling, and then that could be confusing, and then 0:03:25.960 --> 0:03:29.280 something about peeling potatoes. You know. On down the line, 0:03:29.360 --> 0:03:32.200 you could of course have errors of memory forgetting what 0:03:32.320 --> 0:03:35.720 the second half of the sentence is, or forgetting particular 0:03:35.800 --> 0:03:40.160 word choices you know, transforming a phrase into a kind 0:03:40.160 --> 0:03:42.800 of rough gist of the phrase instead of getting the 0:03:42.800 --> 0:03:46.680 words right. And then finally you just have deliberate changes. 0:03:47.440 --> 0:03:50.640 And concerning those deliberate changes, I think it's important to 0:03:50.680 --> 0:03:54.040 point out that ostensibly the purpose of the game is 0:03:54.080 --> 0:03:56.920 to see if you can preserve the message intact, but 0:03:57.400 --> 0:03:59.920 a lot of children playing lose sight of this skull 0:04:00.080 --> 0:04:03.600 and instead play with the goal of introducing the funniest 0:04:03.800 --> 0:04:09.720 or most entertaining variations on the original message. Because, after all, 0:04:09.800 --> 0:04:12.640 if you are playing in order to preserve the message 0:04:12.640 --> 0:04:16.039 as best you can, the sort of win condition the 0:04:16.080 --> 0:04:19.560 optimal outcome is also the most boring outcome. It's like, oh, wow, 0:04:19.600 --> 0:04:23.160 it stayed the same the whole way around, Okay, But 0:04:23.200 --> 0:04:27.880 the more catastrophic your failure, the more entertaining the game becomes. 0:04:28.680 --> 0:04:30.479 Yeah, And a lot of this comes back to the 0:04:30.480 --> 0:04:34.960 fact that children generally have a very unbalanced and honestly 0:04:35.000 --> 0:04:40.000 developing sense of humor. They don't realize that the true 0:04:40.080 --> 0:04:44.200 humor of the game comes out of an organic attempt 0:04:44.200 --> 0:04:48.200 to accurately reproduce the data, and that if you were 0:04:48.320 --> 0:04:51.839 to intentionally tweak it for entertainment's sake, you would have 0:04:51.880 --> 0:04:54.640 to do so with care, because if it drifts too far, 0:04:54.880 --> 0:05:00.120 if at the end it just becomes this spill of 0:05:00.120 --> 0:05:04.320 of childhood obscenities, then it's it's not funny, it's it's meaningless. 0:05:04.480 --> 0:05:06.359 But it's still probably going to end in laughter for 0:05:06.400 --> 0:05:08.600 these children. I mean, they're the audience after all. 0:05:09.000 --> 0:05:12.400 Yeah, I think genuine mistaken nonsense is the more deeply 0:05:12.480 --> 0:05:15.479 satisfying form of comedy than you know, attacking on his 0:05:15.560 --> 0:05:17.320 head was made of poo poo to the end of 0:05:17.320 --> 0:05:19.560 the sentence. But you know, when you're a kid, you 0:05:19.600 --> 0:05:20.239 can't really. 0:05:20.080 --> 0:05:20.920 Resist, right. 0:05:21.200 --> 0:05:23.840 So I was thinking about, you know, my memories of 0:05:24.240 --> 0:05:26.760 playing this game, and we did play this game at 0:05:26.760 --> 0:05:29.640 my elementary school, and I was kind of wondering why 0:05:29.720 --> 0:05:34.360 we played it as children. I assume it was to 0:05:34.400 --> 0:05:37.840 teach us not to believe everything we hear, to give 0:05:37.880 --> 0:05:42.760 a kind of stern example about the pernicious power of rumors. 0:05:42.960 --> 0:05:47.279 But in my experience, kids always quickly figure out that 0:05:47.320 --> 0:05:49.080 the real point of the game is, like we said, 0:05:49.120 --> 0:05:51.960 to change the message on purpose, to be more entertaining, 0:05:52.360 --> 0:05:56.040 or usually to be you know, more nonsensical or more scatological. 0:05:56.640 --> 0:05:59.800 The game works very differently if everyone isn't committed to 0:05:59.800 --> 0:06:03.400 trying to preserve the message intact. But then again, I 0:06:03.440 --> 0:06:07.599 guess you could say that even with people throwing scatological 0:06:07.640 --> 0:06:10.880 nonsense in the Gears just for fun, it still sort 0:06:10.920 --> 0:06:14.719 of works as a lesson about the real world fallibility 0:06:14.920 --> 0:06:19.560 of word of mouth transmission chains, because you know, the 0:06:19.640 --> 0:06:22.640 same thing happens there really in a less obvious and 0:06:22.720 --> 0:06:26.800 less immediate form. But when people retell a story or 0:06:26.839 --> 0:06:31.000 a rumor about their classmates, they also will often introduce 0:06:31.160 --> 0:06:34.240 details in order to make it more entertaining in their 0:06:34.360 --> 0:06:35.479 view on the retelling. 0:06:36.000 --> 0:06:39.000 Yeah, yeah, I have to say that I don't remember 0:06:39.040 --> 0:06:43.000 any kind of lessons attached to being made to play 0:06:43.000 --> 0:06:45.440 this game in like elementary school or what have you. 0:06:45.600 --> 0:06:47.080 It's just kind of like, this is what we're doing. 0:06:47.120 --> 0:06:49.479 We're about to kill some time with a fun game, 0:06:50.040 --> 0:06:53.000 and you know, and then the game, of course, just 0:06:53.080 --> 0:06:57.000 descends into nonsense and childhood laughter. And then at some 0:06:57.080 --> 0:07:01.200 point the adults that are hearing this out realize that 0:07:01.240 --> 0:07:02.800 it's gone too far and we need to get these 0:07:02.880 --> 0:07:07.920 kids involved in something else. But but yeah, as we'll 0:07:07.960 --> 0:07:10.320 be discussing on the show here, like there are a 0:07:10.360 --> 0:07:12.880 lot of different ways you can you can crack this nut, 0:07:12.880 --> 0:07:14.640 a lot of different ways you can think about it. 0:07:14.880 --> 0:07:17.880 And I'll say, the other thing that comes to mind 0:07:18.360 --> 0:07:21.280 is that I can't help but make this connection between 0:07:21.320 --> 0:07:27.600 this game and humor based on intentionally mishearing something. M m. 0:07:27.960 --> 0:07:28.880 Yeah. 0:07:28.920 --> 0:07:31.280 This was really big in my family, to the point 0:07:31.280 --> 0:07:33.760 that I think it was a bit overdone and got 0:07:33.760 --> 0:07:36.960 a little annoying at times. And I don't know if 0:07:37.000 --> 0:07:39.840 that was us or if that for all I know, 0:07:39.880 --> 0:07:42.440 maybe it was fueled by everyone having played the Telephone 0:07:42.480 --> 0:07:45.040 game in school, Like maybe it teaches you that, hey, 0:07:45.080 --> 0:07:49.680 if you slightly mishear something, it becomes more fun and 0:07:49.840 --> 0:07:52.320 you can just sort of revel in that, you know, 0:07:52.440 --> 0:07:55.440 and why save the world when you can save the squirrel? Ha. 0:07:55.640 --> 0:08:00.320 It's instantly funny, but it easily gets out of hand 0:08:00.360 --> 0:08:02.280 if you just keep going back to that. Well. 0:08:02.800 --> 0:08:05.119 Well, it's a common genre of joke on Mystery Science 0:08:05.160 --> 0:08:08.080 Theater three thousand to take a kind of mumbled, hard 0:08:08.080 --> 0:08:09.760 to hear a line and say, wait a minute, what 0:08:09.760 --> 0:08:11.480 did he say about cheese? 0:08:11.800 --> 0:08:13.679 Yeah? I mean it's a great way to just tweak 0:08:13.720 --> 0:08:17.360 something a little bit, create something that's minimally counterintuitive, something 0:08:17.400 --> 0:08:21.720 that has just the right level of absurd. Again, assuming 0:08:21.800 --> 0:08:26.120 a child is not doing this just willy nilly, just 0:08:26.440 --> 0:08:28.600 drive things a little bit off the road into the 0:08:28.640 --> 0:08:32.560 realm of humor. Yeah, it's an easy way to get there. 0:08:32.800 --> 0:08:35.400 For other variations on the basic idea of the game, 0:08:35.440 --> 0:08:39.040 I was looking around and I came across one thing 0:08:39.080 --> 0:08:41.680 I'd never played or even heard of before. But there 0:08:41.760 --> 0:08:45.600 is apparently a variation called apologies for the name of this, 0:08:45.679 --> 0:08:47.480 I don't know where this comes from, but it is 0:08:47.520 --> 0:08:51.719 called Eat Poop You Cat. And it's the same as 0:08:51.720 --> 0:08:53.959 the telephone game, except you play it on a piece 0:08:53.960 --> 0:08:59.199 of paper, and at each stage of transmission you alternate 0:08:59.280 --> 0:09:02.800 back and forth between text and drawing, which I think 0:09:02.840 --> 0:09:06.120 is a fantastic idea. So you start with a text message, 0:09:06.160 --> 0:09:08.640 the first person has to represent that as a picture, 0:09:09.080 --> 0:09:11.480 and then the next person has to translate that picture 0:09:11.520 --> 0:09:14.120 into text, and then back to a picture, then back 0:09:14.160 --> 0:09:16.400 to text, and so on and so I think in 0:09:16.520 --> 0:09:20.240 that format, especially because at the end you have a 0:09:20.240 --> 0:09:23.680 written document of each stage of transmission that everybody can 0:09:23.720 --> 0:09:26.839 inspect and enjoy it, that sounds like a much more 0:09:26.920 --> 0:09:28.520 satisfying version of the game. 0:09:28.800 --> 0:09:32.080 Yeah, I agree, terrible title that makes it a little 0:09:32.160 --> 0:09:35.920 difficult to research online. But yeah, I'd not heard of 0:09:35.960 --> 0:09:38.920 this one. Yeah, same concepts of going back and forth 0:09:38.960 --> 0:09:42.120 between drawings and written sentences rather than depending on a 0:09:42.200 --> 0:09:45.240 chain of whispers. Not sure about its origins, but I 0:09:45.240 --> 0:09:49.160 did notice that it's listed on board game Geeks due 0:09:49.200 --> 0:09:51.560 to its popularity as a party game, but not because 0:09:51.600 --> 0:09:54.240 it's like a typical board game or card game or 0:09:54.240 --> 0:09:56.160 something of that nature. It's just like a party game 0:09:56.160 --> 0:09:59.120 of parlor game, and it seems to be popular, though 0:09:59.160 --> 0:10:01.240 I'd never heard of it before. Now there are a 0:10:01.280 --> 0:10:05.480 lot of additional alternate names for the Telephone Game. In fact, 0:10:05.480 --> 0:10:08.640 some of you might have gone into this episode wondering, well, 0:10:08.679 --> 0:10:10.640 what is the telephone game? What are they talking about? 0:10:11.640 --> 0:10:14.559 A lot of the names for what we're talking about 0:10:14.559 --> 0:10:17.720 here do and seem to involve the technological metaphor of 0:10:17.760 --> 0:10:20.680 the telephone, though at this point I guess it's increasingly 0:10:20.760 --> 0:10:25.600 an outdated metaphor an outdated reference. We might need to 0:10:25.640 --> 0:10:28.959 explain what a telephone is, because we're not talking about 0:10:29.200 --> 0:10:33.400 a tiny pocket computer. We're talking about ultimately allusions to 0:10:33.480 --> 0:10:36.200 like mid twentieth century telephones. 0:10:37.000 --> 0:10:40.120 One of the early sources that I was reading about 0:10:40.160 --> 0:10:42.400 a version of this game, which I'll get into later 0:10:42.400 --> 0:10:45.480 in this episode, referred to it as a variation on 0:10:45.559 --> 0:10:48.960 the quote Russian scandal. I've never heard of that name. 0:10:49.480 --> 0:10:51.760 Yeah, I'll come back to that in just a minute. 0:10:52.040 --> 0:10:54.640 There are still other names that invoke snail mail, just 0:10:54.679 --> 0:10:59.480 traditional mail, gossip, or listening. Though there is one major 0:11:00.400 --> 0:11:02.720 name for this alternate name for it that's worth mentioning 0:11:02.720 --> 0:11:05.040 because it actually is the primary name for this game 0:11:05.120 --> 0:11:07.679 in many areas. In fact, if you look up the 0:11:07.679 --> 0:11:10.560 Telephone Game, say just a quick Google search or something, 0:11:10.800 --> 0:11:13.800 you will find that, say that the Wikipedia article, for example, 0:11:14.080 --> 0:11:16.120 is not about the Telephone game. That is not the 0:11:16.120 --> 0:11:18.640 title of the entry. The title of the entry is 0:11:18.720 --> 0:11:21.959 Chinese Whispers. Now I have to admit that, yeah, I'd 0:11:22.000 --> 0:11:24.320 never heard of Chinese Whispers. I'd only heard of the 0:11:24.320 --> 0:11:27.120 Telephone Game and a bit. And I was a bit 0:11:27.160 --> 0:11:29.520 surprised and a bit worried when I saw that in 0:11:29.679 --> 0:11:32.720 the United Kingdom, in Australia and in New Zealand, this 0:11:32.880 --> 0:11:34.920 is the primary name for it. And I was afraid 0:11:34.920 --> 0:11:37.280 that there is going to be something at least xenophobic 0:11:37.520 --> 0:11:40.760 in the tradition here, and it's interesting that it's not 0:11:41.000 --> 0:11:43.880 an antiquated name for the game in these regions as well. 0:11:43.920 --> 0:11:46.640 For instance, there are plenty of academic papers that I 0:11:46.720 --> 0:11:50.520 ran across from twenty twenty three even that use this terminology, 0:11:51.080 --> 0:11:55.240 where it's sometimes dealt with directly as a concept, like 0:11:55.280 --> 0:11:57.080 some of the papers will be referring to in a bit, 0:11:57.240 --> 0:11:59.600 and other times it's used as a metaphor for something 0:11:59.800 --> 0:12:02.160 or just a snappy title. Now what does this mean? 0:12:02.200 --> 0:12:04.600 Where does it come from? Well, the primary explanations I've 0:12:04.640 --> 0:12:07.360 run across focused on the idea of it being a 0:12:07.400 --> 0:12:10.959 mashup of whispers themselves being difficult to understand. Again, that's 0:12:11.000 --> 0:12:14.920 how the game kind of works, and this idea of 0:12:15.280 --> 0:12:20.840 the Chinese language being from a Western standpoint, arguably difficult 0:12:20.920 --> 0:12:24.520 a difficult language to learn. However, I've also seen sources 0:12:24.559 --> 0:12:28.280 acknowledge that this could at least be misinterpreted as referring 0:12:28.320 --> 0:12:31.360 to Chinese as a language that is pure confusion or 0:12:31.400 --> 0:12:33.959 something along those lines, and of course this would be 0:12:34.080 --> 0:12:37.280 very xenophobic way of approaching things. There also seems to 0:12:37.280 --> 0:12:40.319 be some level of influence from the idea of Cold 0:12:40.360 --> 0:12:43.679 Wars and espionage here, which again is particularly fair, as 0:12:43.720 --> 0:12:47.760 Junte Huang points out in Chinese Whispers published in Verge 0:12:47.920 --> 0:12:52.000 Studies in Global Asians from spring twenty fifteen, the term 0:12:52.040 --> 0:12:55.880 became popular mid twentieth century, and other Cold War influenced 0:12:55.920 --> 0:13:00.160 and unnecessarily nationalistic names for the game include Russian scan hand, 0:13:00.640 --> 0:13:05.120 Russian gossip, and Russian telephone Now. Interestingly, author also points 0:13:05.160 --> 0:13:09.240 to a pair of thought experiments linked or possibly linked 0:13:09.320 --> 0:13:12.200 to the telephone game that I think are probably worth 0:13:12.280 --> 0:13:16.280 mentioning here. One stems from American scientist Warren Weaver, who 0:13:16.280 --> 0:13:19.240 lived eighteen ninety fourth through nineteen seventy eight, who apparently, 0:13:19.240 --> 0:13:23.079 in a nineteen forty seven letter to MIT's Norbert Weiner, 0:13:23.480 --> 0:13:27.600 commented on a translation problem and communication problem, writing quote, 0:13:27.679 --> 0:13:29.439 it is very tempting to say that a book written 0:13:29.440 --> 0:13:31.880 in Chinese is simply a book written in English which 0:13:32.000 --> 0:13:35.560 was coded into the Chinese code. Of course, this is 0:13:35.600 --> 0:13:40.000 not exactly how it works. You know, we've discussed linguistic 0:13:40.040 --> 0:13:44.319 differences on the show before in translations, but I think 0:13:44.360 --> 0:13:46.960 that's part of what Weaver was getting at here. 0:13:47.200 --> 0:13:50.959 I mean, there's not sort of a universal meaning key 0:13:51.080 --> 0:13:54.240 where all languages can just be endlessly coded in and 0:13:54.280 --> 0:13:56.880 out of each other, that a language, a message in 0:13:56.920 --> 0:14:01.120 a language brings its own peculiarities, and any translation is 0:14:01.160 --> 0:14:02.400 always an approximation. 0:14:02.920 --> 0:14:07.680 Yeah, and I think this is perhaps more visible to 0:14:08.040 --> 0:14:12.160 people today with access to various online translation tools, like 0:14:12.200 --> 0:14:14.120 you don't have to toy around with those much to 0:14:14.240 --> 0:14:18.760 realize that you lose something and in fact not unrelated 0:14:18.800 --> 0:14:21.000 to the telephone game. I remember pretty early on when 0:14:21.040 --> 0:14:24.080 these translation tools began to become available in for some 0:14:24.280 --> 0:14:27.120 language translations, one thing you could do is you could 0:14:27.120 --> 0:14:28.880 take a phrase like say I don't know a line 0:14:28.880 --> 0:14:33.440 from Shakespeare translated into say Spanish or German, and then 0:14:33.480 --> 0:14:36.080 translate it back into English. Now do you get your 0:14:36.160 --> 0:14:39.640 perfect example back again? Does it give you exactly what 0:14:39.680 --> 0:14:42.320 you put in? No, you end up losing something in 0:14:42.400 --> 0:14:46.200 the translation and retranslation, and you can have some sort 0:14:46.240 --> 0:14:48.640 of telephone game esque fun that way. 0:14:49.080 --> 0:14:51.560 Whenever online translation first became a thing, I don't know 0:14:51.560 --> 0:14:55.720 if that was Babbelfish or babbel dot com or whatever 0:14:55.760 --> 0:14:59.240 it was, we thought it was absolutely hilarious to run 0:14:59.280 --> 0:15:04.280 Metallica lyrics. They're about ten layers of translation and what 0:15:04.440 --> 0:15:05.400 came out was solid. 0:15:05.720 --> 0:15:07.680 That does that still hold up you think, or have 0:15:07.960 --> 0:15:10.840 the translation tools improved or changed over time. I don't know. 0:15:10.880 --> 0:15:12.800 I was actually just trying to do it now and 0:15:12.840 --> 0:15:14.800 something wouldn't work, and I mean it was like it 0:15:14.840 --> 0:15:18.080 was too close in the end. Maybe there's some AI 0:15:18.200 --> 0:15:20.040 detection of like, oh, it looks like you're trying to 0:15:20.040 --> 0:15:22.880 translate Metallica lyrics. Let's shape that a little bit closer 0:15:22.920 --> 0:15:24.080 to the original. 0:15:25.360 --> 0:15:28.400 All right. Now. Another example that this author brings up 0:15:29.360 --> 0:15:32.760 is that is this idea that was presented by philosopher 0:15:32.840 --> 0:15:36.960 John Cyril born in nineteen thirty two, the concept of 0:15:37.000 --> 0:15:40.120 the Chinese room. Some of you may be familiar with this. 0:15:40.920 --> 0:15:43.440 The Chinese room, in this thought experiment, is a cell 0:15:43.480 --> 0:15:47.040 that contains quote baskets of Chinese characters in a rule book, 0:15:47.280 --> 0:15:51.320 correlating those symbols to symbols on Chinese texts, texts that 0:15:51.360 --> 0:15:54.480 are going to be passed to a single human occupant 0:15:54.520 --> 0:15:56.960 of the room, like by you know, sliding them under 0:15:57.000 --> 0:15:59.960 the door. The single human occupant of this Chinese room 0:16:00.120 --> 0:16:04.480 does not know Chinese, but again these texts are passed 0:16:04.520 --> 0:16:06.920 under the door to them. They take these texts, they 0:16:06.920 --> 0:16:09.160 compare the symbols to the rule book, and then they 0:16:09.200 --> 0:16:12.200 get the response symbols out to build a response, a 0:16:12.240 --> 0:16:15.280 string of responses that are then passed back under the door. 0:16:15.560 --> 0:16:18.200 I would say, with the Chinese room thought experiment, the 0:16:18.960 --> 0:16:22.160 particular use of Chinese as a language as is not 0:16:22.280 --> 0:16:25.080 important to the experiment. It could be any language unknown 0:16:25.160 --> 0:16:26.520 to the person in the room. 0:16:26.840 --> 0:16:30.080 Right right, And so Huang sums it up by saying quote. 0:16:30.360 --> 0:16:35.160 Although his Chinese interlocutories outside the room consider these strings 0:16:35.160 --> 0:16:38.640 to be clever responses to their inquiries, the prisoner actually 0:16:38.720 --> 0:16:41.400 has no idea of the meaning of the texts he 0:16:41.480 --> 0:16:45.720 has produced. The scenario proves Cerah argued that a machine 0:16:45.760 --> 0:16:48.520 cannot think, just as the prisoner does not know the 0:16:48.600 --> 0:16:51.800 meaning of the Chinese texts. So it's meant as a 0:16:51.840 --> 0:16:55.360 means of refuting the idea of say strong ai that 0:16:55.880 --> 0:16:57.160 reproduces human thought. 0:16:57.600 --> 0:16:59.880 Now, we could spend a whole series of episodes debating 0:16:59.880 --> 0:17:03.400 the validity of the Chinese room thought experiment, and in 0:17:03.440 --> 0:17:07.480 fact it has come up on the show before. But yeah, basically, 0:17:07.560 --> 0:17:10.560 I think Cerle is trying to assert that there's something 0:17:10.600 --> 0:17:12.719 that goes on when a human is thinking that we 0:17:12.800 --> 0:17:17.000 call understanding meaning. When a human manipulates symbols, they have 0:17:17.119 --> 0:17:23.040 some deeper recognition of what those symbols mean that has 0:17:23.440 --> 0:17:27.679 validity to the whole of existence. Whereas in this experiment, 0:17:27.880 --> 0:17:32.320 this is what he considered a machine that can you know, 0:17:32.440 --> 0:17:34.720 like a like a chat GPT type machine, one that 0:17:34.760 --> 0:17:38.119 can manipulate text and then spit out text that seems 0:17:38.119 --> 0:17:40.920 to make sense. He says, ultimately it is a machine 0:17:41.160 --> 0:17:45.879 manipulating symbols without actually understanding them. There's a ton of 0:17:45.920 --> 0:17:48.480 back and forth between philosophers about like what it actually 0:17:48.480 --> 0:17:52.600 means to understand, whether a human could truly be said 0:17:52.600 --> 0:17:56.359 to understand, whether what we're doing is fundamentally different or not. 0:17:56.720 --> 0:18:00.320 Again, though for our purposes, Chinese language is not really 0:18:00.359 --> 0:18:02.359 part of the whole scenario and really won't be something 0:18:02.600 --> 0:18:05.440 we're dwelling on moving forward. But if you are interested 0:18:05.560 --> 0:18:10.560 in the topic of Chinese language and technology, there's a 0:18:10.560 --> 0:18:13.600 great book that came out several years ago, The Chinese Typewriter, 0:18:13.680 --> 0:18:16.520 a History by Thomas S. Mulaney. We had him on 0:18:16.560 --> 0:18:19.119 the show interviewed him about the book and the topic, 0:18:19.240 --> 0:18:21.560 So go back and find that in the archives if 0:18:21.600 --> 0:18:33.119 that's what you're interested in. But coming back to the 0:18:33.119 --> 0:18:37.399 telephone game, aka Chinese Whispers. Yeah, I'm going to keep 0:18:37.400 --> 0:18:39.760 calling it the telephone game. I have seen some sources 0:18:39.800 --> 0:18:43.160 online that steer people away from referring to it as 0:18:43.200 --> 0:18:46.960 something like Chinese Whispers or Russian gossip, or whatever the 0:18:47.000 --> 0:18:47.480 case may be. 0:18:47.800 --> 0:18:50.120 Yeah, I've only ever known it as the telephone game. 0:18:50.280 --> 0:18:52.840 I think that's what basically everybody in the US at 0:18:52.880 --> 0:18:53.560 least calls it. 0:18:53.760 --> 0:18:56.040 A more accurate name, though, especially for children, might be 0:18:56.119 --> 0:18:57.000 Goofy Whispers. 0:18:57.040 --> 0:18:59.280 I think now, I think you could argue about what 0:18:59.400 --> 0:19:02.600 is actually learned or revealed from the version of the 0:19:02.600 --> 0:19:05.239 game we described at the beginning by having kids sit 0:19:05.280 --> 0:19:07.280 in a circle and whisper a message in each other's 0:19:07.320 --> 0:19:11.680 ears around the chain. But variations on the telephone game 0:19:12.080 --> 0:19:16.800 have actually been used in scientific research in psychology studies 0:19:16.840 --> 0:19:20.439 going back over one hundred years at this point, and 0:19:20.560 --> 0:19:24.960 have been very influential. So there are variations on telephone 0:19:24.960 --> 0:19:30.240 game experiments that have sometimes been called serial reproduction experiments 0:19:30.440 --> 0:19:37.800 or transmission chain experiments. Serial reproduction is very influential in 0:19:37.840 --> 0:19:40.640 the history of psychology for understanding a number of different 0:19:40.680 --> 0:19:48.600 phenomena communication, cultural transmission, and memory. Serial reproduction experiments were 0:19:48.760 --> 0:19:53.040 famously crucial to the work of the British psychologist Frederick 0:19:53.119 --> 0:19:56.919 Charles Bartlett, often written as FC Bartlett, who was a 0:19:57.000 --> 0:20:03.679 professor at Cambridge University. Bartlett discussed serial reproduction experiments in 0:20:03.760 --> 0:20:07.920 his very important nineteen thirty two book Remembering, a Study 0:20:07.920 --> 0:20:11.680 in Experimental and Social Psychology that was all about phenomena 0:20:11.800 --> 0:20:16.240 of memory. So serial reproduction was one of two major 0:20:16.280 --> 0:20:20.320 techniques that Bartlett studied. The other was called repeated reproduction. 0:20:20.400 --> 0:20:23.960 And the difference was, like this repeated reproduction, you would 0:20:24.000 --> 0:20:28.040 ask a single person to try to remember an original 0:20:28.119 --> 0:20:31.840 piece of information and reproduce it over and over at 0:20:31.880 --> 0:20:35.000 different intervals of time. So rob I might give you 0:20:35.080 --> 0:20:38.000 a story like a text to read that's a folk 0:20:38.040 --> 0:20:41.919 tale or a newspaper article, or a description of an event, 0:20:42.400 --> 0:20:44.800 or a passage from a book, anything. I'd ask you 0:20:44.840 --> 0:20:47.760 to read it several times, and then I would ask 0:20:47.800 --> 0:20:51.480 you to write it down from memory five minutes later, 0:20:51.680 --> 0:20:54.280 or an hour later, a week later, a year later, 0:20:54.400 --> 0:20:57.840 two years later, and see how well you could remember it. 0:20:57.880 --> 0:21:01.520 But also, maybe most importantly, what are the patterns of 0:21:01.720 --> 0:21:04.280 changes that you observe when you do this with lots 0:21:04.280 --> 0:21:06.679 of people. That to me is a very interesting question, 0:21:07.000 --> 0:21:10.879 are there consistent differences? What tends to change when a 0:21:10.920 --> 0:21:15.560 memory fades over time? Serial reproduction is a very similar experiment, 0:21:15.880 --> 0:21:19.720 except you add in the telephone game element. So one 0:21:19.800 --> 0:21:24.960 person's attempt to remember the text becomes the next person's 0:21:25.119 --> 0:21:29.160 study material, their text to memorize, and then their attempt 0:21:29.160 --> 0:21:33.000 to reproduce it becomes the next person's study material. And 0:21:33.040 --> 0:21:35.480 you do this on down the chain with lots of 0:21:35.480 --> 0:21:38.480 different people, with lots of different types of text, to 0:21:38.520 --> 0:21:41.920 see what sorts of trends emerge. Now, the goal of 0:21:41.960 --> 0:21:44.760 the repeated reproduction experiments was to sort of study how 0:21:44.760 --> 0:21:48.000 people remember the same event over time. You know, how 0:21:48.080 --> 0:21:51.520 well do people remember something that happened to them a 0:21:51.640 --> 0:21:55.240 year ago or several years ago, or remember something they 0:21:55.280 --> 0:21:58.639 read from a year ago, and what tends to change. 0:21:58.680 --> 0:22:01.600 But the goal of the serial reproduction study, the telephone 0:22:01.600 --> 0:22:05.000 game version, was to study the effects of the social 0:22:05.240 --> 0:22:09.920 transmission of information through word of mouth in culture or 0:22:09.960 --> 0:22:13.160 through memory of written sources in culture. 0:22:13.760 --> 0:22:15.880 Yeah, this is fascinating. On one hand, I can't help 0:22:15.920 --> 0:22:18.920