On Confirmation Bias

Last week I ran a simple experiment on Twitter, inviting people to find a pattern in a three-number sequence. The numbers were 6–12–18. In order to solve it, people had to do two steps. First, propose their own sequence of three numbers that would conform to the pattern they thought I was thinking of. They could propose as many three number sequences as possible, and for each one I would tell them if it fit the pattern I had in mind or if it didn’t…