Is This Anything? 10

One of my guiltless pleasures is watching this new generation of youtube gameshows where a panel of funny people has to Guess the X, e.g. which of the contestants behind the curtain is secretly a 5 year old child while the others are all adults?

I would have thought these shows would design their scenarios so that it's genuinely very difficult to guess the answer, and the reveal at the end has stakes and meaning, but instead most of them have solutions that are flagrantly obvious within the first 4 minutes, to the point where I have to assume the producers are specifically aiming for that.

The panelists don't pretend to not-know the answer either, they'll often spend 40 minutes making jokes about how "obviously number 4 is the child, everyone else here can draw social security." Why does this work? Why is it still interesting even though there's no drama?

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Francis Bacon had a model of three types of scientists: "The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own." That is, the ants are empiricists, using material from outside themselves; the spiders are theorists, using only the material inside their own selves/minds; the bees take the outside world and process it internally to create something new.

I think this is a good model for podcasters: Many podcasters are ants, they just take external events and rearrange them for you; some are spiders, spinning up thoughts without reference to external material; few are bees, taking external events and processing them internally to give you something new.