The wording "Congress/1778/sign these" led me to think of an important early American document. Next I started thinking of the different documents constitution/declaration of independence/bill of rights/articles of federation/federalist papers. Next I started reviewing each one to see if it fit the clue. Constitution didn't work because I knew it was signed later. Declaration of Independence didn't work because that was signed before the revolutionary war. Bill of Rights didn't work for the same reason as the Constitution. The Federalist Papers didn't work because those were just editorial and not an act of Congress in any way. The Articles of Confederation worked and was selected as my answer. This all happened very quickly or immediately and it happened automatically without my brain having to articulate everything it was doing via inner voice. It just made those series of connections one after another and then it compared the facts I knew about the possible answers with the facts presented in the clues.TenPoundHammer wrote: ↑Mon Apr 23, 2018 11:53 pm All right, fine, so my brain just doesn't work the same way as yours.
Wanna explain why I had nothing on tonight's FJ!? The key words were right there:
"Blah blah blah, document early in the US' life that's obviously not the Constitution". I know what the Articles of Confederation were. But I just hit a brick wall mentally and couldn't think of anything at all.Congress met in June 1778 to sign these but found errors in the official copy; it had to reconvene with a new set in July
Why do I so often have literally nothing? I stared at the clue for a good 5 minutes and nothing surfaced.
I can't explain your thought process or why it's different. I'm not sure if I'm even explaining my thought process correctly. I could be presenting an inaccurate picture based only on what I thought happened or only on how I idealize the process to work. At what step did your process differ from mine?
Did you immediately realize the answer was an important early American document?
If you did, did you also think of several important early American documents?
If you did, did you also you compare your knowledge of these documents to cross check against the clue?
You already mentioned you realized it was an early American document but didn't realize it was the Articles of Confederation. It appears you're not creating good lists of things in a way you can easily recall. When most of us are given a category or keywords we automatically populate a list of things that completely covers the category. It seems like you're not doing that. Have you tried memorizing lists of things as a study aid? Do you remember the lists some time after you stop studying them?
I think a lot of being good at Jeopardy! is having the complete list available as a reference. For example if you know all 12 signs of the zodiac you'll get most of the clues correct because you'll know it can only be one of the 12 signs. If you can only think of 10 or 11 of the signs then it's going to be much much more difficult because you'll have 10 or 11 answers but also "some other" answer that could be anything. Having a comprehensive list immediately changes it from "could be anything" to "one of these 12 things." Most of the things on Jeopardy! can be broken down into lists that way and a lot of us have a lot of complete lists. US Presidents, US States, countries, capitals, 7 dwarves, birthstones, gemstones, etc...
At some point most of us probably sat down and listed all the different early American documents to the point that we were confident that there was no other document that we didn't know about. Did you ever do that?