Mind-reading

Mind-reading is the process of attempting to figure out where a question is going based off of context. It differs from lateral thinking in that the player relies not on past factual knowledge or deductive thinking but rather from heuristics and gut feeling.

In bad quizbowl

The term originated in bad quizbowl formats, where it was much more feasible to rely entirely off of loose approximations like "The only Romanian leader they ask about at this difficulty is Ceausescu," or "The mythology editor of this set loves Finnish myth." In some cases, mind-reading relies on known aspects of the question writer, such as the original writer for Academic Hallmarks's affinity for Western novels and geography, the poem the Jabberwock, and other pet topics.

Questions that reward mind-reading are the worst kind of speed checks in that they often punish players who might know about more about a subject (e.g. Romanian leaders other than Ceausescu). For instance, a tossup that begins "This Romanian leader..." may make a player who knows of multiple Romanian leaders pause and wait for more clues to specify which Romanian leader than a player who only knows one Romanian leader.

In good quizbowl

The concept of mind-reading can be applied to good quizbowl questions: a player who has knowledge of a set's writers and their strengths may be able to make inferences about which subjects they would be more or less likely to write about. For instance, a player might use Tweets or Facebook posts to deduce what novels an editor is reading or particularly enjoys. A successful mind-reading buzz might be accompanied by a proclamation from the player that the editor or writer "loves that book!"

Some level of this is unavoidable, due to the nature of how quizbowl sets are written and the friendships among quizbowl players, writers, and editors, but explicitly seeking out information about writers to try to determine what they are writing about is frowned upon. Similarly, it is typically expected that writers and editors will not publicly speak about topics which may appear in sets which they are writing for, or at least that they will not emphasis particular clues.

Mind-reading is additionally primarily a concern in questions with clues that are too vague to be helpful, or questions on descriptive concepts that are difficult to follow the writer's train of thought to the answer without literally reading their mind.

Other uses

Colloquially, mind-reading can also refer to the process of quickly deciphering the theme of a complicated question. This idea appears very literally in Wanggories, the vanity sets written by Andrew Wang, where particularly vague questions may conclude with simply "For 10 points, read my mind" or where prompts may be replaced with the instruction to "Read my mind better."