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?
AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases
#12Some 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…
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
#13Brains 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 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
#14Earlier version: https://www.naverlabs.com/en/storyDetail/212
Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases
#15Brains 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
#16Brains 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?
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
#17Brains 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"
Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases
#18Earlier 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.
Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases
#19Brains 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"
Re: AI and Robots Are a Minefield of Cognitive Biases
#20Brains 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"
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.