For readers of the book

You have the answers. Let’s see if they stuck.

You wrote predictions in Chapter One and scored them in Chapter Nine. This is the same instrument, expanded to twenty items, so you can see where your gap sits against everybody else’s.

Two things worth knowing before you start.

Readers score better than non-readers. Not by as much as you would hope, and the margin is smallest on the items where the correction is least comfortable. If you come out thirty points off after thirteen chapters about systematic misestimation, that is not a failure of attention. It is the machine from Chapter Eight, restarting — roughly on the schedule Chapter Fourteen predicted.

Ten of the twenty items are new. They are not in the book. Four of them cover findings the book reports but never puts a number on, which means finishing the book does not guarantee you the answer.

Take the twenty-item test Run the simulator

If a prediction in the book fails here

Chapter Nine named three claims as predictions rather than findings — specifically, that each sex badly misestimates the volume of contact the other receives. Those are being tested on this site. If the data contradicts them, that gets published on the sources page, not quietly dropped. It would be a strange book to write and then not do that.

The twelve questions

Chapter Eleven’s protocol, in a form you can keep on your phone. Predict the answer in writing before you ask. The value is not in what they say — it is in the distance between their answer and what you wrote.

  1. Roughly how many people got in touch with you last week? And how many did you actually open?
  2. What happens to the ones you don’t reply to — is that a decision, or do most of them just never get reached?
  3. When was the last time someone you were genuinely interested in made the first move?
  4. Walk me through what you do before meeting someone you don’t know. From the moment you decide to go.
  5. What’s the realistic worst case for you on a bad first date? Not the nightmare. The thing that actually happens sometimes.
  6. What did it cost you the last time you turned somebody down?
  7. When you’re actually interested in someone, what do you do? What would I probably miss?
  8. What’s something you found attractive in someone that surprised you at the time?
  9. What makes you want to see somebody a second time? Try to answer with something that happened rather than a quality.
  10. What do you assume I think you’re looking for?
  11. What do people get wrong about you specifically — not about your sex, about you?
  12. Is there something you wish someone would ask you instead of assuming?

Question ten is the one worth saving. Almost nobody is ever asked it, and the answers tend to be immediate and slightly embarrassed — which is a reliable sign you have reached something real.