Introduction

Do You Still Think You’re Clever?

A couple of years ago, I wrote a book entitled Do You Think You’re Clever?. The question in the title is one of the legendarily difficult questions candidates for Cambridge and Oxford Universities sometimes get asked at their interviews. That first book was a selection of possible responses to this and an assortment of other equally tricksy questions that have actually been asked at interviews, such as ‘Is nature natural?’, ‘What happens when you drop an ant?’ and ‘Does a girl scout have a political agenda?’.

Some people think these Oxbridge questions are just weird and pretentious. Or that they’re designed as traps to frighten off any young students foolhardy enough to apply to those privileged pinnacles of learning – like some cabbalistic riddles or a trial of fire for budding Harry Potters. Of course, there probably are some dastardly tutors who do use them in this way – and I must admit that this how I saw them at first. But the brilliant thing about them is: they make you THINK. Aggravating and provocative as they are, they set your mind racing. That’s what to my mind makes them fascinating for everyone, not just those applying to Oxbridge.

The thing is, most of us love thinking. We love having our intellectual curiosity piqued, and it’s the element of surprise in these questions that sparks the mind. The publishers of Do You Think You’re Clever? and I were quite astonished by how well it was received, and how well it sold right across the world, from Korea to Canada. But I realised that the key to its success was that delight in thinking we all have. That’s why I decided to have a go at another set of questions.

I’m sure a lot of people disagreed with my answers in the first book. I’m sure some thought they were rubbish. In fact, I know myself that I was guilty of a foolish error in a question about a man falling down a hole in the world, much to my embarrassment! But that’s the point. Neither Do You Think You’re Clever? nor this new book are meant to be about answers; they’re about asking questions, and getting people thinking – and even flaws can do that (that’s my excuse, anyway!).

I’ve called this new book Do You STILL Think You’re Clever?. It’s a variation on the awkward question in the title of the first book, of course, but it is in some ways even more awkward to answer. It’s what’s called a ‘loaded question’ in that it is based on an unjustified presumption that makes it hard to respond to directly without falling into a trap. Students of logic would call it a ‘complex fallacy question’; I’d just call it plain mean. The first (possibly) unjustified presumption is that you at least once thought you were clever. From that flows the implication that if you answer ‘yes’ you’re a fool if you haven’t realised by now in face of all the glaring evidence to the contrary that you’re not so clever as you thought; and if you answer ‘no’ you’ve seen how utterly mistaken you were in ever thinking you were clever. Either way you lose.

An apocryphal example of such a loaded question is to a witness in court who is asked, ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ The witness is incriminated whether he answers ‘yes’ or ‘no’. In a law court, such questions might be described as entrapment, and the judge will usually steer interrogators away from them, but it’s a technique journalists famously try.¹ And, of course, we face such loaded questions every day, as when a girl asks her boyfriend, ‘Do I look slimmer in this dress?’ or a dad asks his truculent teenager, ‘When are you going to grow up?’ Fortunately, the consequences of failing to negotiate the traps set by some of the questions in this book aren’t quite so perilous.

The responses I’ve suggested to these questions are by no means intended as definitive or even model answers. Far from it. I’m sure some interviewers would shake their heads in disappointment and turn me down flat. My intention is different. What I have tried to do is carry on where the question leads off – and provide you the reader with food for thought. Quite often, for instance, this means giving background information rather than responding to the question. Or it might mean going off on a flight of fancy. But what I’ve tried to do, throughout, is avoid technical jargon, or assume academic knowledge beyond that which most intelligent readers will normally have. My feeling was that interest in these questions shouldn’t be restricted to subject specialists. After all, questions about the purpose of laws, or how to deal with world poverty, or what makes poetry matter, or just what makes matter – can be fascinating for us all.

Responding to these tricky questions is about being clever. But that’s something that all of us can be. It’s not about knowledge. It’s not even about education. It’s about bending and twisting your thoughts in all kinds of intriguing ways. And that’s something everyone can do. It’s certainly not the exclusive territory of those lucky enough to gain or even try for a place at Oxbridge. There’s no bigger obstacle to genuine cleverness than smugness.

And just in case you don’t believe me, when I say everyone can do it, let me introduce the ultimate birdbrain.

A couple of years ago, a group of Cambridge scientists put some rooks to a test, to see if there was any truth in the famous fable by Aesop about the raven and the water pitcher. They put a nice, juicy worm floating on water in a long narrow tube, too narrow for the rooks to reach in and grab. So how would you get that worm if you were a rook?

The rooks were ingenious. They found stones and dropped them into the water one by one to gradually raise the water level until they could reach the worm. Damned clever, eh? Think about it. It means they not only had to know that putting stones in the water would raise the water level, but actually think of doing so and put it properly into practice. Almost creepy!

And if rooks can be so clever with their tiny brains, do you think all of us with our big brains could too? You bet we could.

Of course this book may help students applying for Oxford and Cambridge. But it is not just for them. It’s for everyone, everywhere in the world, from Australia to Anatolia. We face difficult questions in the world every day – about where we are going, what we are doing – and we badly need new answers, new ways of thinking, thinking ‘outside the box’, and I hope these questions will help do just a little to make people think afresh, to think, yes, we could do this or that differently, we could try this instead. We don’t have to make the same mistakes again …

Footnote

1 Back in 1996, US Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright was apparently trapped like this when interviewer Lesley Stahl asked on the 60 Minutes programme about the effect of UN sanctions on Iraq: ‘We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?’ Albright replied ‘I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.’ – and immediately regretted it.