TL;DR
(Too Long; Didn’t Read)
Studying magic tricks can teach us about other things too.
Social Media Summary
What can EdTech Startup Founders learn from Professional Magic?
- Be skeptical whenever something convenient appears to be true.
- There’s a massive swamp of inference between observation and knowledge.
- Doing the impossible comes down to preparation.
- There’s a massive difference between how a product works in the mind of the deliverer and the mind of the user.
- Craft (technical fluency) and Artistry (creative expression) are distinct skills.
- Inspiration drives practice.
- There are a lot of amazing people in the world.
- If you do something (anything marginally useful) better than anyone else, you can make a living at it.
At least, that’s what I took away from reading How Magicians Think by Joshua Jay. Longer post linked below.
Full Post
My in-laws kindly gifted me with a copy of How Magicians Think by Joshua Jay, which I finished reading a few days later. I wouldn’t consider it universal reading, since magic tricks and the magician’s profession are niche topics (and niche experiences, as the book describes), but I found it immensely rewarding in three respects:
- As an invitation to visit a “secret” professional world.
- As a rough theory of when and why magic tricks work.
- As an exploration of the interplay between craft and art.
The Secret World of “Magic”
Magic is intrinsically secretive — evoked astonishment often rests on audience ignorance or misperception of key details of what they’ve witnessed, but it’s also just a small community at the top. Like most performing arts, a small number of performers are blowout successes, a larger pool eke out a modest living doing local shows, and even the group of semi-professional and amateur hobbyists only make up a small portion of the population (my guess would be somewhere between .1% and 1%). Most world-class magicians know each other, and because most travel extensively for work, these unique peer-friendships create a tight-knit and somewhat exclusive community. What does this look like?
- The Magic Castle, a members-only mansion with secret passages, artifacts from the history of stage magic, and nightly magic performances.
- David Copperfield’s invitation-only magic museum.
- Conferences, lecture circuits, professional correspondence, and ad hoc workshopping of magic tricks and performance acts.
I got a taste of this in academia (the world’s experts in a topic invariably all know each other, at least by name), but the book really drove home how small the world can be. In any field where ideas matter and the exchange of them is mutually beneficial, there will form a community of practice that determines the culture of the field in practice, and not just in ideal.
A Working Theory of Magic
To quote, as the book did, Teller (of the world-famous Penn&Teller duo): “You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.”
Most tricks come down to an apparent contradiction between what the onlooker believes is possible (or physically expects) and what actually happens. Like a good punchline, the subversion of expectations creates a sudden reconsideration of what came before. This contradiction is generally achieved by leading viewers to make assumptions that are incorrect (e.g. gimmicked props or sleight-of-hand moves are more than they appear), to incorrectly generalize or remember their observations, or to miss - without realizing it - key pieces of information they might have otherwise perceived. (That’s an incomplete and overlapping list from me that at least paints a picture of the category of phenomena I’m trying to describe.)
Some highlights from the book include parts of David Blaine’s acts that blur the line between “stunts” and “tricks”. For example, there’s a part of his show where David sews his own lips shut (a chosen card is later revealed inside). According to Josh (the author), there’s no trickery involved; David just sews his own lips shut. But many audience members don’t believe anyone would ever do that, so they walk away with a mystery where there really wasn’t one.
There are also lots of examples in the book where magicians have developed an incredibly nuanced skill (e.g. dealing from the middle or bottom of the deck in a way that looks almost identical to dealing from the top, or keeping tiny gaps between distinct packets of cards in a stack in their hands) through extensive practice.
But in many cases, the trick doesn’t really lay in the hands of the performer nearly as much as it rests in the assumptions people make about the physical world in order to operate efficiently in everyday life. Part of why tricks with cards are so prevalent in magic performances is that they are common enough that people have unsuspicious perceptions of what they are and how they work, but they are fundamentally designed to conceal information (all the backs should be identical, obscuring the position of any card in a face-down spread or stack). Furthermore, because cards are pliable and much thinner than they are long, they can be hidden in the hand, behind other cards, and in many other locations. Finally, because our attention is drawn to distinct information, we are easily misdirected to focus on face-up cards, rather than face-down ones.
Magic as Craft and Magic as Art
On the one hand, practicing a particular technique for tens of thousands of repetitions is sometimes necessary merely to sustain the illusion of a particular trick. On the other hand, flawless mechanical execution does not necessarily make a trick entertaining. Josh (the author) spends a number of chapters reflecting on what it takes to create a successful act, beyond mechanically sound tricks.
The first thing he notes is that tricks need to have an internal logic and narrative flow. In many ways, this is the actual substance of the trick. Not just surprise, but the suggestion of a cause-and-effect relationship (however impossible) that gives a reason for the effect. In many tricks, this is a vague explanation (the magician/object/audience have supernatural abilities) where the effect results in a surprising convenience (or fulfillment of a character trait). Josh gives the example of a trick that appears to turn a banana into a bowling pin. By itself, this is just a bizarre and random twist. But if the pin is actually one missing from a existing set, the effect suddenly “makes sense”.
Beyond that, Josh reflects that good acts combine tricks to appeal to an audience metaphor. The trick pulls a rabbit from a hat, but the audience sees the creation of life. The trick saws a woman in half (and restores her), but the audience sees the women’s rights movement and the aftermath of World War I. Flight represents freedom, vanishing represents loss, mind reading is the opposite of loneliness (or surveillance, or any number of other contextualized interpretations).
At the highest level, magic tricks become a vehicle for artistic expression, and the lines between various forms of performance art are blurred. Is this a magic show or a staged monologue about grief that happens to feature magic tricks? What about a one-act play, pantomime, or dance? Magic is uniquely intellectual, in that it manufactures (however ephemerally) astonishment and wonder, but there’s an expansive buffet of combinations with other emotional flavors. There are world-class acts that engage fear, horror, suspense, love, delight, nostalgia, ennui, sadness, or mirth.
In the hands of a master, magic becomes a tool for self-expression, not just an end in itself. Local entertainers may reprise the old classics, but on the world stage, every great performer’s act is unique. Methods and inspirations may be shared, but the whole is distinct and greater than the sum of its parts. To put my own words in Josh’s mouth, magic becomes art when the act is “about something”. When I reflect more broadly, I think this is a relevant distinction in most fields. While we sometimes use “art” to refer to what is actually applied abstracted experience (and maybe better termed “abstract craft”), I think fiction, visual media, and even a person’s life can cross from being productions to being art when they start being “about something”. Not that all art is beautiful, but it becomes relevant to judge it on its artistic merit, and not just its execution.
What Can Other Fields Learn from Magic?
Science
- Be skeptical whenever something convenient occurs. One of the longest learning cycles in pursuing my doctorate was a strengthening of my sense of absolute skepticism when I think I know something. I applied a theory to a new situation and got the predicted result. The theory is justified, right? Not if the result could be equally well explained by an alternative. It is incredibly humbling to go through the tedious process of ruling out 9 forms of experimental error (e.g. wrong dataset loaded, wrong algorithm run, wrong evaluation code, wrong output logging, incorrect plotting procedure, test-set leakage, lack of randomization, incorrect variance estimates, lack of a baseline) only to discover a fundamental flaw on the 10th revisit (E.g. failure to scale algorithms to equivalent resource constraints).
- There’s a massive swamp of inference between observation and knowledge. When watching a magic performance, everybody knows (hopefully) that what they’re seeing isn’t real. But when people have a stake in the outcome of a particular observation of data (e.g. when it has political implications), I’ve been surprised at how hostile non-scientists (and scientists operating outside their field) can get when more parsimonious explanations are offered for observed data. (In fairness, I’m still learning how to be more tactful; my point is just that when people don’t have a stake in the issue, curiosity usually trumps defensiveness.) In the wake of any national tragedy, for example, there’s often an outpouring of politicized quantitative “facts” on social media, which are unfortunately devoid of critical (as in, in-critique-of) analysis. For example, are certain acts of violence against a particular group by a particular class of perpetrator more common in a particular area because of local differences in policy or culture, or perhaps because the area is more urban (violent crime is more common in cities)? Maybe it’s merely because the region is poorer (low income areas have more violent crime). The availability of alternative explanations doesn’t mean the politicized inference isn’t true, just that the data presented isn’t sufficient to show that it’s true. Another challenging question is around wage discrimination. It can be unpopular to point out that a large amount of income inequality can be explained by what professions people are in. Is that an issue? It is if certain groups are prevented or discouraged from entering professions where they could do more valuable work (that’s an economic inefficiency, in addition to an issue of fairness), but maybe it’s the case that the differences are driven by personal preferences, rather than external pressures. (If it’s a mixture, exactly how much is it due to each factor?) The sad truth is that good science is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult, and there are ethical and economic reasons why we have to make do with our own ignorance. In the spirit of good science, we need to be willing to admit more often, “I don’t know,” or “The data don’t allow me to draw a firm conclusion yet.” But I think the insight from magic is that we need to do a better job of analyzing and describing the models we’re using when interpreting observations. When we externalize the line of thinking that we’re using to make predictions, we create opportunities to identify assumptions (which may be correct, but may also not be).
Business
- Doing the impossible comes down to preparation. When users have “magic experiences” with an offering, it’s definitionally doing something they don’t get elsewhere. Businesses can do more deliberate practice (more customer interviews, user studies, active experimentation), have better tricks (hidden technological innovations), and sacrifice more for the sake of a good customer experience (110% refunds, result guarantees) than any sane customer (or competitor) would be willing to do.
- There’s a massive difference between how a product works in the mind of the deliverer and the mind of the user. This was one of the hardest things for me to learn when moving from academia to entrepreneurship, but it’s fundamental to how all magic tricks work. As the creator, I expect the user to be in awe of the cutting edge techniques we applied and unimpressed with the wires holding up the whole experience, but the user swears they’ve seen a levitation. (Although Josh points out that many levitations don’t use wires, because that’s the first thing people suspect.)
Education
- Craft (technical fluency) and Artistry (creative expression) are distinct skills. A common shortcoming in US schools (this is a broad overgeneralization) is that the pendulum of curricular and pedagogical emphasis has swung too far away from basic practice and too far toward “creative” thinking. Art is unattainable without the craft to execute it. For magicians, greatness requires both, but the craft comes first. In K-12 education, there are some basic volume-of-practice measures that have huge downstream effects on academic success: total number of words typed (which drives typing speed, which drives execution speed on most academic assignments), total number of words read (which drives reading comprehension and baseline propositional knowledge), total number of words written, total number of problems solved, total number of questions answered, total number of questions asked.
- Inspiration drives practice. People pursue magic after seeing magic performed. Now magic is, admittedly, unusually well-structured for self-study — beginner knowledge is well-segmented across discrete collections of skills, and individual tricks have a near-term reward once they can be performed. And not everybody who sees a performance becomes a professional magician. But no one becomes a professional magician because they want to spend hours every day shuffling cards in the dark.
Life
- There are a lot of amazing people in the world. There are people who have spent their whole lives inventing ways to create astonishment. People who have spent tens of thousands of hours preparing for instants of delight. People who have diligently collected and studied the history of a secretive craft. I think one of the most uplifting and humbling things I’ve ever realized is that the world is full of people who are remarkable in ways that I am not and may never be (whether by choice or by nature).
- If you do something (anything marginally useful) better than anyone else, you can make a living at it. Okay, so this was something my parents reinforced from an early age, rather than an insight directly from the book, but it’s very much typified by the distribution of magician incomes. At the margin, the world probably doesn’t need more magicians of median skill. But there’s always room at the top. For startups, the encouragement to “niche down” is almost always correct (certainly for first-time founders). For individuals, economic value largely comes from specialization and trade. It’s risky to try to become excellent at something before you have the ability to guarantee stable income. But if you can practice one thing where you have the chance to be truly exceptional, there’s probably a pathway to success. With that said, don’t underestimate the value of mentorship and existing professional infrastructure. When people create unique value, they often participate in a net-positive economic game (growing the pie, rather than taking a larger slice).
At least, that’s what I think.
Thanks,
- (S)am