Multi-Blind outreach (misconceptions removal)

[abunickabhi]

This topic is close to my heart and I wish to address it fully.

Multi-Blind is said to bring a feeling of awe to a speedcuber and a "what's that" feeling to a non-cuber. The feeling of amazement is of similar proportions to what a non-cuber feels when they see a cuber complete a 3x3 solve.
A lot of my friends and relatives, have a strange conception as to what I exactly do with my main event in cubing. I wish to make them understand the difficulty and the technicalities of my main event so that they can appreciate my ups and downs or understand why I need some time out of my daily schedule to grind and get better at multi.

Over the course of 10 years, they have somewhat understood cubing, but they are nowhere close to understanding how multiblind works. I have~ 400 3x3s at home, which they do not understand the use-case for.

Some roadblocks making the explanation process harder are:

• jumping to conclusions quickly and not hearing me out completely (MBLD rules take a while to explain)
• less patience and/or bandwidth
• no background to understand cubing and do not understand multi-blind at all
• judging the event at its face-value (asking what the WR is, and what my PR is)
• not caring about cubing or a side event like MBLD at all
• seeing a MBLD video and thinking of creative ways to prove that it is fake
• not having the attention span to understand the entire statistics of the attempt (total time, solved cubes, DNFs)
• not understanding the scope of possibilities of a cube, and how memorization works for a single cube and multiple cubes in MBLD

Their common sense derives conclusions like,
me wasting resources, me not having a life, or me trying to make a mosaic and turn cubing into an art and craft project etc.

Please suggest ways in making MBLD more understandable among the non-cubers. I kinda feel offended when people pass remarks without thinking what MBLD actually is and disrespect the event. Their aim is to just to create a joke and reach to a conclusion that they are comfortable with (which is mostly incorrect)

 

[Lord_Oscar]

I'm not a Multi-Blinder. I don't know much about the event, but I'm going to voice some of my feelings towards the event.

I think one of the (many) reasons people have a dislike or suspicion towards Multi is that the Rubik's Cube is already so, so difficult, and then there are people who speedsolve it. Adding a blindfold makes it even more amazing, let alone adding multiple cubes, blindfolded?! Many people have struggled to solve a Rubik's Cube, and are simply amazed that Multi is possible.

Think of it like this: in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, when Lance Armstrong and the US Postal Service Cycling Team were dominating the Tour de France, there were many allegations of doping. There's some simple logic behind this: if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. This was exactly the case. (In 2012 Lance Armstrong was found guilty of doping, and his seven Tour de France titles were stripped from him by the US Anti-Doping Agency.)

Many people are so amazed at the prospect of doing multi well that they just can't imagine replicating it, using the saying: "If something seems too good to be true, it probably is"

 

[bldcuber314]

I don't have much time so short response- solving lots of Rubik's Cubes blindfolded is also the kind of thing that is often faked on social media, making people suspicious.

 

[Fred]

MBLD is pretty wild. Other memory sports you just have to recall digits of pi or several decks of cards (also super impressive), but in MBLD you have to translate your recall into solving Rubik's cubes. But it's not just memorizing a bunch of cubes in a way to solve them. You also have to memorize a dictionary of images corresponding to letter pairs/triples/quadruples that are then used to memorize the cubes, as well as putting those images in a pre-planned (and memorized) route. Then there are also the very many algs that BLDers memorize to solve the cubes faster. So there are several aspects that all have to come together for a MBLD success.

 

[Lord_Oscar]

MBLD is pretty wild. Other memory sports you just have to recall digits of pi or several decks of cards (also super impressive), but in MBLD you have to translate your recall into solving Rubik's cubes. But it's not just memorizing a bunch of cubes in a way to solve them. You also have to memorize a dictionary of images corresponding to letter pairs/triples/quadruples that are then used to memorize the cubes, as well as putting those images in a pre-planned (and memorized) route. Then there are also the very many algs that BLDers memorize to solve the cubes faster. So there are several aspects that all have to come together for a MBLD success.

I agree. MBLD is arguably the most impressive event, and some people just don't believe that MBLD solves are real.