Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology

Nora Ephron is a screenwriter who scripts for Silkwood, when Harry Met Sally, and sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the New York Post and Esquire. . Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class although although the students had no journalism experience, they walked in their first-class with a sense of what a journalist does: a journalist gets the facts and reports them. To get the facts, he tracked down the 5W's -- who, what, where, when, and why.

 As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron's teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: “ Kenneth L. peters, the principle of Beverly Hills high school, announced today that the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchens, and California Gov. Edmund "Pat" Brown. “

 The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that recorded the facts and condensed them into a single sentence: " Gov. Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills high school faculty Thursday in Sacramento . . . blah blah blah.

 The teacher collected leads and scanned them rapidly than he lay them aside and paused for a moment finally, he said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’”

 It was a breathtaking moment, Ephron recalls “In that instant I realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn't enough to know the who what when and where; you had to understand what it meant. And why it mattered.” Made to Stick. Chip and Dan Heath. 75-76.

I've seen this puzzle in several places, though I've never seen it attributed. I'm quoting it from David J.Lieberman, You Can Read Anyone, a pop psych book about unconscious communications and conscious interpretations. Anyway, my question about the puzzle is, would a compsci or a math person be better able to solve the puzzle than your average "humanities" person. It might make an interesting survey.