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.

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).

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. Some level of this is unavoidable, due to the nature of how quizbowl sets are written, 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.

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."