5 ms·

I've tried this one on lay people before. The problem I have is that they usually can't get past their firm belief that these things are technologically impossi

I've tried this one on lay people before. The problem I have is that they usually can't get past their firm belief that these things are technologically impossible, even after you explain to them that they are. "That all sounds like science fiction, that can't happen in the real world." Also it can fall down if you don't stick only to directly relatable details: "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem". The instant it ceases to speak to their experience directly, you've lost them.

hackuser 11y ago
> it can fall down if you don't stick only to directly relatable details: "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem". The instant it ceases to speak to their experience directly, you've lost them. A tangent: I enounter this too, all the time, with intelligent, well-educated people. It's as if people don't understand what "example" means, or can't project concepts from an example to a broader class. What am I misunderstanding?
- caskance 11y ago
  That this kind of risk is zero-sum. If higher rates are charged to people who meet these criteria, those of us who don't will get better rates from competitive lenders.
imron 11y ago
> "That all sounds like science fiction, that can't happen in the real world." Tell them that the mobile phone they have in their pocket also seems like science fiction - and it was 20-30 years ago. Now it is science fact. Facial recognition is getting the same way. If anything, based on all the shoddy movies that 'zoom in, enhance' with photos, the public should be primed to accept facial recognition quite easily.
- duderific 11y ago
  Ha, when watching those shows, I am always the nerd telling my wife how it's impossible to zoom in and enhance, because you can't create more information than existed when the photo was taken. I'm not sure that she gets it.
  - meric 11y ago
    If you take a blurry photo of a license plate - it can be possible to enhance it (e.g. using sharpen) to reveal the license plate number - just because your naked eyes can't extract that information from a blurry photo doesn't mean the blurry photo doesn't already have enough information to encode the number precisely.
    - yorak 11y ago
      There is also superresolution methods that in practice make the "enhance"-feature possible. The information from the same objects in successive frames, eg. from a security camera feed, are composited into a single frame of higher resolution than the originals. This can even be done for a single image (see. Glasner et al. "Super-resolution from a single image." Computer Vision, 2009 ICCV 2009. IEEE.). If machine learning is brought into play it gets even more interesting. See eg. waifu2x, the anime video upscaler based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. Basically it is a neural net, that has been shown A LOT of anime, and it can therefore creatively(?) fill in the created pixels when upscaling. I have no idea how advanced this kind of ML boosted "enhance" technology can get in the future, and it might even get a little scary: imagine an observer with the experience of million lives spent looking blurry images in poor lighting. It might get surprisingly good at that...
- shabbyrobe 11y ago
  I know it seems crazy, it seems crazy to me too, but this is what I encounter time and time again. No matter how carefully you explain it, it seems too unlikely to them. Once the explanation passes a certain threshhold of complexity (for which the bar is frighteningly low), they tune out and shut down.
BHSPitMonkey 11y ago
Do they not notice Facebook using facial recognition to automatically tag faces in their photos already? That isn't even a very new feature anymore.
deciplex 11y ago
> "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem" That's why it's called an "elevator pitch". If you get this sort of response, you get out of the elevator and pitch the person off the roof of the building.
Springtime 11y ago
> Also it can fall down if you don't stick only to directly relatable details: "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem". The instant it ceases to speak to their experience directly, you've lost them. There is a superb essay written by a law professor that was posted to HN a while back entitled "I've got nothing to hide'' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy [1] which tackled the problem with the way privacy is commonly framed (and limited) in such discussions, going into detail about the nature and definition of privacy, mass surveillance, and the difficulty in getting the point across. One of the issues covered it that often privacy discussions hinge on singular arguments and hypothetical examples that become ineffectual when they don't relate to or affect a person's own experience, or use analogies that don't hold up well. The lack of news stories covering the real world effects of privacy harm, 'dead bodies' as one person put it, also make it hard for people to care for the tangible consequences. Now more than ever there are articles being written on company breaches and database hacks yet the problems we face from mass surveillance are a different, broader and legalized kind, the effect of which still isn't clear to a lot of people even with what we know. Inevitably though people tend to look after their own interests, and if it doesn't affect them and they have no way to change it there are those that simply don't care. [1] PDF: http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf

hackuser 11y ago

> it can fall down if you don't stick only to directly relatable details: "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem". The instant it ceases to speak to their experience directly, you've lost them. A tangent: I enounter this too, all the time, with intelligent, well-educated people. It's as if people don't understand what "example" means, or can't project concepts from an example to a broader class. What am I misunderstanding?

caskance 11y ago
That this kind of risk is zero-sum. If higher rates are charged to people who meet these criteria, those of us who don't will get better rates from competitive lenders.

imron 11y ago

> "That all sounds like science fiction, that can't happen in the real world." Tell them that the mobile phone they have in their pocket also seems like science fiction - and it was 20-30 years ago. Now it is science fact. Facial recognition is getting the same way. If anything, based on all the shoddy movies that 'zoom in, enhance' with photos, the public should be primed to accept facial recognition quite easily.

duderific 11y ago
Ha, when watching those shows, I am always the nerd telling my wife how it's impossible to zoom in and enhance, because you can't create more information than existed when the photo was taken. I'm not sure that she gets it.
- meric 11y ago
  If you take a blurry photo of a license plate - it can be possible to enhance it (e.g. using sharpen) to reveal the license plate number - just because your naked eyes can't extract that information from a blurry photo doesn't mean the blurry photo doesn't already have enough information to encode the number precisely.
  - yorak 11y ago
    There is also superresolution methods that in practice make the "enhance"-feature possible. The information from the same objects in successive frames, eg. from a security camera feed, are composited into a single frame of higher resolution than the originals. This can even be done for a single image (see. Glasner et al. "Super-resolution from a single image." Computer Vision, 2009 ICCV 2009. IEEE.). If machine learning is brought into play it gets even more interesting. See eg. waifu2x, the anime video upscaler based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. Basically it is a neural net, that has been shown A LOT of anime, and it can therefore creatively(?) fill in the created pixels when upscaling. I have no idea how advanced this kind of ML boosted "enhance" technology can get in the future, and it might even get a little scary: imagine an observer with the experience of million lives spent looking blurry images in poor lighting. It might get surprisingly good at that...
shabbyrobe 11y ago
I know it seems crazy, it seems crazy to me too, but this is what I encounter time and time again. No matter how carefully you explain it, it seems too unlikely to them. Once the explanation passes a certain threshhold of complexity (for which the bar is frighteningly low), they tune out and shut down.

BHSPitMonkey 11y ago

Do they not notice Facebook using facial recognition to automatically tag faces in their photos already? That isn't even a very new feature anymore.

deciplex 11y ago

> "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem" That's why it's called an "elevator pitch". If you get this sort of response, you get out of the elevator and pitch the person off the roof of the building.

Springtime 11y ago

> Also it can fall down if you don't stick only to directly relatable details: "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem". The instant it ceases to speak to their experience directly, you've lost them. There is a superb essay written by a law professor that was posted to HN a while back entitled "I've got nothing to hide'' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy [1] which tackled the problem with the way privacy is commonly framed (and limited) in such discussions, going into detail about the nature and definition of privacy, mass surveillance, and the difficulty in getting the point across. One of the issues covered it that often privacy discussions hinge on singular arguments and hypothetical examples that become ineffectual when they don't relate to or affect a person's own experience, or use analogies that don't hold up well. The lack of news stories covering the real world effects of privacy harm, 'dead bodies' as one person put it, also make it hard for people to care for the tangible consequences. Now more than ever there are articles being written on company breaches and database hacks yet the problems we face from mass surveillance are a different, broader and legalized kind, the effect of which still isn't clear to a lot of people even with what we know. Inevitably though people tend to look after their own interests, and if it doesn't affect them and they have no way to change it there are those that simply don't care. [1] PDF: http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf