December 04, 2007
Thought Puzzles for Presidential Candidates
John Allen Paulos over at abc.com.
Why then are candidates for the presidency never presented with a few simple puzzles to help the electorate gauge their cognitive agility? The same goes for interviewers who ask the same dreary, insipid questions time after time and accept the same dreary, insipid non-answers time after time.
These puzzles shouldn't be difficult since, after all, the primary job of the president is to enforce the Constitution, ensure an honest and open administration, and, in some generalized sense, make things better. For this task, judgment and wisdom are more essential than the ability to solve puzzles. Nevertheless, I think some non-standard questions like the following would help winnow, or at least chasten, some of the candidates...
1. Scaling. Imagine a small state or city with, let's say, a million people and an imaginative and efficient health care program. The program is not necessarily going to work in a vast country with a population that is 300 times as large. Similarly a flourishing small company that expands rapidly often becomes an unwieldy large one. Problems and surprises arise as we move from the small to the large since social phenomena generally do not scale upward in a regular or proportional manner.
A simple, yet abstract problem of this type? How about the following (answers on page 4): A model car, an exact replica of a real one in scale, weight, material, et cetera, is 6 inches (1/2 foot) long, and the real car is 15 feet long, 30 times as long. If the the circumference of a wheel on the model is 3 inches, what is the circumference of a wheel on the real car? If the hood of the model car has an area of 4 square inches, what is the area of the real car's hood? If the model car weighs 4 pounds, what does the real car weigh?
Posted by Robin Varghese at 01:06 PM | Permalink
Comments
Note also the comments at the end of the article, which are incredibly disconcerting for those of us who don't usually frequent the ABC website.
Posted by: mario | Dec 4, 2007 5:36:33 PM
So, y'think John reads 3qd? These questions seem quite familiar.
Posted by: Carlos | Dec 4, 2007 7:37:17 PM
The puzzles are great, but a President's responsibility is two-fold: 1) to be able to solve them, and 2) to be able to communicate the solution well to the masses.
Posted by: beajerry | Dec 5, 2007 11:10:24 AM
Yes, John does read 3qd. It's one of his favorite sites, and it is indeed the origin (or proximate origin) of one or two of the puzzles.
Posted by: J.A. Paulos | Dec 5, 2007 12:51:10 PM
Yes, John does read 3qd. It's one of his favorite sites, and it is indeed the origin (or proximate origin) of one or two of the puzzles.
Posted by: J.A. Paulos | Dec 5, 2007 12:51:40 PM
John, this is not your first puzzle I scored short of 100% on, but it is the first one to answer a nagging question: why I should not -- really -- be president.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Dec 5, 2007 1:45:48 PM
Elatia,
On the contrary. Your self-deprecation suggests why you might be a good president.
Posted by: J.A. Paulos | Dec 5, 2007 2:08:26 PM
well, this is exactly the crux of our dilemma, isn't it? Anyone smart/well-adjusted enough to be a good President is likely to be too smart/well-adjusted to subject themselves to the process of becoming president.
Posted by: Vicki Baker | Dec 5, 2007 2:25:32 PM
But Elatia, in her persona from Monday, would be a very entertaining president. Picture the VP during the State of the Union Address fully aware that the cameras are capturing the direction of his gaze at every moment.
Posted by: Carlos | Dec 5, 2007 2:44:32 PM
Maddened by my less than perfect score, I've had to do as J.A.P. suggests, and guess which candidates would perform well on this test, which would have difficulty with some of the problems, and which would lack the patience to be tested.
I would be interested to hear what other people think, but I think it would go something like this: Fred Thompson would fail the test, as Ronald Reagan would have, if not because Ronald Reagan would have; John McCain would refuse the test, having patience but nothing to prove through tests of any kind; Rudolph Giuliani would get the first two questions right and refuse to continue; Mitt Romney would answer the harder questions correctly while eating a defatted chicken breast and riding his stationary bike, but this would only cause people to wonder if he's SO smart, why he spent much time a while back baptizing the dead. Dennis Kucinich would get every answer right -- another nail in his coffin. Dodd and Biden would achieve imperfect scores -- it's the gentlemanly thing to do -- but would point out that some of the questions they got right were rather harder than the ones they missed, thus alienating people who admired the social meaning of their imperfect scores. Bill Richards would score high enough for "a heartbeat away," causing people to admire his powers of calculation. John Edwards would wave the test away -- unlike the other Democrats, he's made real money from working, and he doesn't need this kind of test because it predicts nothing that can't already be demonstrated, on top of which -- it's not where his head is at. Hillary Clinton's answers to the test, which she declined to take in the controlled setting detailed by J.A.P., would be found in an unmarked envelope in the box room of the Senate. Having achieved high grades in elite schools 40 years ago, Hillary had the experience to turn in a perfect performance on the test, but in fact Bill took it, because he's genuinely good at math. The important thing was that Hillary "felt prepared," would not back down, and would not entertain doubts -- anyone's doubts -- about her performance on the test. Obama, who enjoyed the test and didn't stress about how he scored -- it's only math, it's not leading the nation back from the brink of universal execration -- indeed scored perfectly, but was on an airplane when it was time to decide how to release this information.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Dec 5, 2007 5:19:58 PM
And what of Bush? If he had to take the test back in 2000, he'd have handed it out the window to Elaine, George Costanza-style!
Posted by: beajerry | Dec 7, 2007 5:08:10 AM
And what of Bush? If he would've had to take the test back in 2000, he'd have handed it out the window to Elaine, George Costanza-style!
Posted by: beajerry | Dec 7, 2007 5:10:44 AM
Post a comment