Cousins, uncles, aunts, and the two extra relatives no one is quite sure how we are related to.

The table was packed with cakes and sweets, squeezed together til you could barely see the glass underneath.

The house buzzed with greetings and people talking in every corner.

Then, from somewhere down the hallway, you would hear:

“كل تبنه”

This is my little cousin, yelling at his sister.

He meant the مؤنث version of “كل تبن”.

And every now and then, one of my aunts would shout back to correct the grammar.

Not the insult, but the grammar!

Of all the random shit they talked about that night, marriage somehow took over the entire room.

Everyone had an opinion.

The uncles had opinions.

The aunts had louder ones.

The younger cousins, who had never been in a serious relationship, spoke with the most confidence of all.

Even the kids seemed invested.

Then I noticed the conversation drifting toward me.

A few seconds later, the questions started.

Why wasn’t I married?

Who was I waiting for?

How long did I plan to keep waiting?

I knew where this was going, and I needed out before the interrogation got worse.

So I shouted that we should play a game.

Everyone stopped and looked at me.

For a moment they stared like I’d interrupted the debate with the greatest idea in human history.

I knew it would not last. Without money or humiliation on the line, they would lose interest fast. So the stakes had to be high.

I announced that the winner would get a mystery surprise sponsored by my aunt.

It worked instantly.

First, my cousins had a borderline sexual attraction to the unknown.

Second, everyone knew my aunt was absurdly generous. A gift from her could be a piece of chocolate or a piece of land.

Now I had them.

So I explained the game.

Twelve of us, thirty hidden numbers. I would reveal them one at a time, and nobody knew how high or low they could go. When a number appeared, anyone could claim it, but only once.

Pass, and it was gone forever. No going back because the next few turned out to be complete shit. You took what was in front of you or gambled on something better showing up later. After all thirty, whoever picked the highest number won the round.

This is a well known math problem, called the secretary problem (but disguised as a game): it studies when to stop searching and commit, without knowing what the hell comes next.

Basically traditional marriage, but with numbers.

Round 1:

We started, and I revealed the numbers one at a time.

Nobody had a strategy.

They stared with fake concentration, running on instinct and whatever unresolved emotional damage had convinced them commitment was for fucking losers.

By the end, almost everyone had a seven or higher.

Everyone except Reema.

She had passed on every decent number and ended up stuck with a three.

I asked why the hell she passed on all the earlier ones.

She replied with unbelievable confidence: “There were no tens.”

She was the stereotypical eighteen year old Saudi girl with a strong sense of entitlement, so naturally nobody gave a fuck about her answer.

We continued.

Round 2–5:

Did you notice anything? (No, seriously. Stop scrolling and read the fucking graphs.)

Note that they were not allowed to talk. Every choice was submitted privately, and nobody was volunteering anything useful anyway. One winner, so helping each other would have been stupid.

Still, they kept pausing at the same points, jumping on the same numbers, making the same mistakes.

Six people picked the same number in one round. Almost everyone did in the next. By round five, all twelve had independently landed on the same answer.

Nobody had agreed on a strategy.

But they were clearly using one.

Round 6:

By the sixth round, the pattern was impossible to ignore.

The highest of the first eleven numbers was six.

Then seven appeared.

All twelve claimed it.

Every single person in the room had independently landed on the mathematically optimal strategy for the secretary problem: ignore roughly the first third, use it to set a benchmark, then take the first number that beats everything before it.

Nobody had explained it. Nobody even realized there was one.

They kept getting it wrong until, somehow, everyone adjusted and ended up playing optimally.

One person stumbling into it would’ve been luck.

But all twelve? This was fucking weird.

The game showed something simple: people can have no idea why something works and still get dragged toward the right call by enough failed attempts. Trial and error does the thinking long before they can explain it.

So, this brings me to my main point. I think you are rational enough not to take life advice from some dickhead writing on substack ( me ).

By the time you’re in your twenties, you have seen enough marriages, heard enough horror stories, and experienced enough of your own bullshit to know more than you think.

You are simply not starting from zero.

So stop acting like some stranger knows your life better than you do.

Make the fucking decision yourself.

Unless you are a desperate loser, or as my seven year old cousin would politely put it:

“مخك صندل”

Then maybe ask someone.

Give me three observations, two anecdotes, and a poorly designed spreadsheet, and I will convince myself I have discovered a fundamental law of human behavior.

I suspect I inherited this from my mother.

My mother is from Alqassim.

If you know a Qassimi mother, you already know where this is going. No matter the topic, she can somehow explain why Qassimis are superior.

Business? Qassimis.

Education? Qassimis.

Family values? Qassimis.

The invention of fire? Probably a Qassimi.

By the end of the conversation she will have built a complete racial hierarchy using nothing but confidence, selective memory, and a sample size of four relatives.

The scary part is that she is occasionally convincing.

I inherited that same disease.

I notice some tiny pattern, find two examples that support it, ignore the thirty that do not, and suddenly I am ready to publish a statistically illiterate theory about an entire population.

Most of these theories turn out to be complete bullshit.

This story begins with one that did not.

Or at least one that has survived longer than it has any right to.

I have always had a bad habit of walking into a room and immediately deciding how intelligent the people inside it are.

Sometimes because of something someone said.

Sometimes because of something nobody said.

Sometimes because convincing myself everyone around me is stupid is easier than confronting my own shortcomings.

The problem is that if you are going to judge a room, you should probably have some evidence.

Or at least the illusion of evidence.

So naturally, I went looking for a statistic.

Not a measure of individual intelligence. That would require humility, rigor, and the kind of careful statistical work that sounds admirable right up until someone asks me to actually do it.

I wanted something much more suited to my character.

A crude way to walk into a room, indulge my worst habit, and pretend I had data.

In other words:

How much room intelligence are we working with here?

And after playing a certain game far more times than any sane person should, I started believing I had found one.

Before you continue reading, play the game.

Pick a number between 0 and 100.

You are in a room with a group of people. Everyone picks a number. Once all the numbers are revealed, the average is calculated. Whoever picked the number closest to half of that average wins.

Write your answer down.

Do not change it later.

I have played this game a stupid number of times.

At work.

With friends.

With the type of Saudi guy who somehow turns every conversation into where he studied and who his cousin knows.

The funny thing is that the game itself is not actually very interesting.

The equilibrium is zero.

Since nobody can choose a number above 100, the average can never be above 100, which means the winning number can never be above 50.

So why would any rational person choose 60?

It can never win.

Once everyone realizes that, every number above 50 disappears.

Now the highest possible average is 50, so the winning number can never be above 25.

Then every number above 25 disappears too.

Then 12.5.

Then 6.25.

Then 3.125.

Zero is the only number that survives an infinite chain of “I know that you know that I know” reasoning.

But humans are not equilibrium machines.

Almost nobody picks zero.

Most people end up somewhere around 15.

And that is where the game becomes interesting.

Because people are not really choosing a number.

They are judging the room.

Someone who picks 25 is saying:

“I do not think most people here are going to think very hard about this.”

Someone who picks 10 is saying:

“I think people will understand the trick.”

Someone who picks 3 is saying:

“I think people will understand the trick, and understand that everyone else understands the trick.”

A high average means the room expects shallow reasoning.

A low average means the room expects people to think a few steps ahead.

And that is what I find interesting.

If you want to know what a room thinks about itself, asking one arrogant dickhead is not especially reliable.

Especially when that arrogant dickhead is me.

Trust me, I have tried.

Leave me alone in a room for five minutes and I will confuse instinct, insecurity, and two random comments for sociological insight.

This is the same mind that once looked at my uncle, noticed he looked like سمول كابتشينو, still went to Tutti caffe, and wore a yellow thobe, and immediately diagnosed him as a sugar daddy.

My judgement alone is just bias dressed up as insight.

But a room full of arrogant dickheads all trying to predict one another?

That is surprisingly useful.

A weak predictor is a weak predictor.

A hundred weak predictors can become something else entirely.

And that is why I keep coming back to this stupid game.

A room full of people politely calling each other idiots in the language of game theory.

Which, for a man with a pathological need to quantify vibes, a lifelong commitment to over interpreting tiny patterns, and just enough racism to think entire populations can be explained by a single data point, is unfortunately more than enough.

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