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AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

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11–20 of 42 posts

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#11

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"

Is that a true statement? Has Peter Watts transcended his humanity and entered the ethereal realm of gods where he is no longer subject to that which he claims humans are subject?

Yes. Pretty much. For example your conscious awareness processes all the time just 2% of the image your eyes actually see.

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#12
post #6

Some interesting ideas, but it’s all conjecture and very little data. I’m sure Dr Kim knows this stuff inside out, but I felt like the content lacked support. Also, there are somewhat contradictory statements. Eg. The point about evolution being equivalent to millions of years of AI training is absurd - In a later sentence, the author states that computers were designed for computation (duh) and so it shouldn’t be a…

> The whole thing reads as being rushed and superficial. Journalism tends to reward this. I used to work in a much more public-facing field where we would regularly get calls from local journalists about projects we were involved in. The journalists never printed the quotes from the engineers who gave thoughtful, measured, and accurate answers. They always quoted the blowhards and the charlatans in our office who'd i…

> A journalist's job is to sell newspapers, or clicks, not to keep anyone informed.

Yes. And to propagandize on behalf of his and his organization's preferred political views. Seldom do they probably consciously realize they are doing this. The echo chamber synergizes with their prejudices and steers them in that direction. And for them, it's a job. Their reward is the editor's approval, or at least the absence of his disapproval.

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#13

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"

This seems illogical.

This boils everything down to brains, and discards the human individual, and how different human individuals react differently to the same things depending on their pre-existing understandings of their worlds.

So this statement cannot be true.

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#15
post #13

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"

This seems illogical. This boils everything down to brains, and discards the human individual, and how different human individuals react differently to the same things depending on their pre-existing understandings of their worlds. So this statement cannot be true.

Can you expand more on your distinction between talking about brains being bad and talking about individuals being good? Are you saying all brains are the same, and something else makes us different?

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#16

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"

Is that a true statement? Has Peter Watts transcended his humanity and entered the ethereal realm of gods where he is no longer subject to that which he claims humans are subject?

Suppose you have at an old analog clock with a second hand that ticks. Look somewhere else in the room, then look at the clock. The first tick as you're looking at it takes much longer to occur, or at least that's the way it will seem to you.

The human eye doesn't move continuously, but moves in short rapid jumps. [0]. Your eye isn't perfect, and during those rapid jumps it produces blurry images. Rather than feeding those blurry images to the image recognition centers of the brain, those images are thrown out. That prevents your brain from using known-faulty data, but now you have a problem because motion tracking requires continuity. So you cheat. You take some of the images that arrived after the blurry images, extrapolate backwards to make an estimation of how things looked before, and then feed those to the motion tracking [1].

The neat thing is that this depends on how the second hand of your analog clock moves. If it ticks every second, then the brain's back-extrapolation to fill in the missing images sees a stationary second hand, and assumes that it was stationary in the past. If it rotates smoothly instead of ticking, then the brain's back-extrapolation sees the motion, assumes that the motion was constant during the past, and back-extrapolates accordingly. So if you glance over to a ticking clock, the first tick feels like it takes longer, but you don't have the same effect glancing over to a smooth motion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#17

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"

Then the same applies to Mr. Watts’ statement, and we are therefore under no obligation to take it as true.

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a true statement? Has Peter Watts transcended his humanity and entered the ethereal realm of gods where he is no longer subject to that which he claims humans are subject?

Yes. Pretty much. For example your conscious awareness processes all the time just 2% of the image your eyes actually see.

And how would you solve the compression problem of dealing with all that data? Our brains are running a similar algorithm to mpeg-4 where we discard redundant data and make some basic predictions about movement. If they didn’t we’d waste a lot of time paying attention to unimportant things in our visual field.

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#19

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"

The levels of buttmad the replies to this has generated shows how very little the self-appointed intellectual titans of HackerNews understand neurology.

Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases

#20

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. - Peter Watts "Blindsight"

Responses to this have been interesting...

There is a lot of evidence that humans are over agressively pattern matchers. Another poster pointed out some examples like the limitations of human vision (there is a hole in your vision that your brain fills in with whatever is thinks is there for example). Look up cognitive biases sometimes, or any old optical illusion. Those are just the fun edge cases where you get to see examples of the lies the over agressively pattern matchers of your sensorium tell you.

I didn't expect this to be controversial. It is a basic assumption of my life that what I perceive is only roughly correlated with "the truth".

Really I meant this as a statement about machine learning doing whatever it's fitness function tells it to, and that the fitness function we select only hopefully correlates with reality.

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