Week 12 Crit: Just find out

The last crit. Take a prediction you have been circling, design the cheapest possible test of it, and for some of you, run it before the hour is up.

24 May 2027

Last crit of the semester, and the final one from the vote. In How you stopped the room produced a category nobody had named in advance. Ending the uncertainty. Just asking, just sending, just finding out. It got more votes than anything else in the thread, so it gets the last session.

Before the session#

Bring a loop you are currently in that contains a prediction. Something you believe will happen, or has happened, that you have not checked.

They usually hide inside a feeling. “They are annoyed with me” is a prediction. “I will freeze if I ask a question in that seminar” is a prediction. “This email will read as rude” is a prediction. “I am bad at this” is not, at least not yet, and part of the work is getting it there.

In the session#

First, make it falsifiable. In pairs, turn the loop into a sentence that could turn out to be wrong. The test is simple. If you cannot describe what evidence would change your mind, you do not have a prediction, you have a mood, and the rest of the hour will not work on it.

Second, design the cheapest test. Not the definitive one. The cheapest. What is the smallest, fastest, least alarming thing that would give you real information? Usually it is a question, a message, a two-minute attempt, or asking one person. Write down what you expect to happen, with a number if you can. Sixty percent sure they are annoyed. Write down what would count as the prediction failing, before you run it.

Third, some of you run it. There is a chunk of the session set aside for exactly this. Send the message. Ask the question. Try the thing you have been rehearsing. Then come back and tell the room what happened.

This round is genuinely optional and a lot of people will sit it out. Passing is normal here, you do not have to say why, and choosing not to run a test on a real relationship in a classroom is frequently the correct call rather than avoidance. If you prefer, design the test and run it in your own time, or not at all.

What we are actually testing#

The course has spent eleven weeks on the inside of the loop. Conditions, breaks, attention, the empty slot. This session is about the other exit, the one that skips all of that and goes and gets the information instead.

It is worth being straight about the comparison. Nobody here has run a study putting “learn to sit with uncertainty” against “go and resolve the uncertainty” in a cohort of postgraduate students, and neither has anyone else as far as we can find. What we have is eleven weeks of your own data and one very consistent finding from week 6, which is that the exits that worked on you were mostly endings.

Whether that makes finding out the best technique in the course or just the one that skips the course is the argument to have with the time left.

Afterwards#

This is the last thing the course asks of you in a room. What is left is the log, due well after everybody’s exams, and the last lecture later this week.