The News As A Situation Puzzle
or a lateral thinking puzzle...
A situation puzzle, also called a lateral thinking puzzle, is a puzzle in which participants are to construct a story that the host has in mind, based on a puzzling situation that is given at the start.
“Usually, situation puzzles are played in a group, with one person hosting the puzzle and the others asking questions which can only be answered with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Depending upon the settings and level of difficulty, other answers, hints or simple explanations of why the answer is yes or no, may be considered acceptable. The puzzle is solved when one of the players is able to recite the narrative the host had in mind, in particular explaining whatever aspect of the initial scenario was puzzling.
These puzzles are inexact and many puzzle statements have more than one possible fitting answer. The goal however is to find out the story as the host has it in mind, not just any plausible answer. Critical thinking and reading, logical thinking, as well as lateral thinking may all be required to solve a situation puzzle.
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One situation puzzle would be:
A man walks into a bar, and asks the bartender for a drink of water. The bartender pulls out a gun, points it at the man, and cocks it. The man pauses, before saying ‘Thank you’ and leaving. What happened?
The question-and-answer segment might go something like this.
Question: Could the bartender hear him? Answer: Yes
Question: Was the bartender angry for some reason? A: No
Question: Was the gun a water pistol? A: No
Question: Did they know each other from before? A: Irrelevant (or: ‘no’ since either way it does not affect the story)
Question: Was the man's ‘thank you’ sarcastic? A: No (or with a small hint: ‘No, he was genuinely grateful’)
Question: Did the man ask for water in an offensive way? A: No
Question: Did the man ask for water in some strange way? A: Yes
Eventually the questions lead up to the conclusion that the man had the hiccups, and that his reason for requesting a drink of water was not to quench his thirst but to cure his hiccups. The bartender realized this and chose instead to cure the hiccups by frightening the man with the gun. Once the man realized that his hiccups were gone, he no longer needed a drink of water, gratefully thanked the bartender, and left.”
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Now this particular situation puzzle was obviously just invented as an amusing game, but thinking of the news as a situation puzzle could be seriously useful.
If we think of reality or experience, or our many realities or experiences, as a *ginormous* evolving situation, then we can think of the news or a particular news account as a situation puzzle that can be used as the subject of various lines of questioning that can evoke the story the author has in mind.
The news post or article is one facet of the story but does not explain all of the account or narrative, the rest being in the author’s mind, to be drawn out with lines of questioning.
It goes without saying that *no* authors account, no matter how well explained, can ever approach the underlying and evolving reality in all its complexity. The account is an approximation only, and the post or article is an approximation of that approximation.
My idea with opinions on wedge issues is to use lines of questioning as search vectors, to find authors and their accounts of different facets of reality, and match them to the readers preferences, to match readers and authors, and bypass gatekeeping measures like the number of subscribers, to bring to the surface authors that may be ignored or (God forbid, on Substack? No way!) —- *shadowbanned*.
That project is in a rudimentary state and the blocking problem is that authors don’t see the value and are by and large unwilling to offer answers to even *one* line of questioning, so I’m faced with using some AI tool to generate answers from their public posts. And that will produce a lot of hallucinations.