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Age is unrelated to wisdom and I'm talking about the full experience. A Google Image search for "Wonder Wheel" (the famous Coney Island Ferris Wheel) shows thi

by tacos 11y ago

Age is unrelated to wisdom and I'm talking about the full experience. A Google Image search for "Wonder Wheel" (the famous Coney Island Ferris Wheel) shows this spoked diagram within the first page of results: http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2011/07/google-wonder-wheel.png http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2011/07/... Also this year, Google Photos classified black people as gorillas. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/07/01/google-apologizes-after-photos-identify-black-people-as-gorillas/29567465/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/07/01/google-apologi... Consumers are rarely exposed to the raw machine output -- for good reason. My experience building these sorts of systems is that they're pretty goofy and they fail unexpectedly. After chasing audio and video problems using custom software as well as three major toolkits, I find myself hyper-aware of the flaws in public systems. Also common sense dictates that it's more about the data scientist on the way in and the UX person on the way out than the machine.

QuercusMax 11y ago
That spoked diagram's image is named "google-wonder-wheel" and is linked from an article referring to Google's Wonder Wheel. That doesn't seem like a spurious result to me...
- tacos 11y ago
  It's clearly an outlier. Try an image search for "Google Wonder Wheel" and you'll see a few Ferris wheels among lots of spoked diagrams -- but not the Wonder Wheel. The gorilla example is more to the point. Google pushed a quick fix and couldn't fix it. So they blocked the gorilla tag altogether. Why? Because a data scientist couldn't figure out how to fix the problem properly and deploy a solution. To me, that says quite a bit about the current realities of machine learning systems.
gnaritas 11y ago
> Age is unrelated to wisdom and I'm talking about the full experience. That's not true; age and wisdom are quite related, just not directly causal. They are correlated. Older people are generally wiser, it's just not a guarantee, nor is it impossible for young people to be wise, but it's certainly far less common. With age comes experience and with experience, wisdom has fertile ground to grow, though it doesn't always.
- tacos 11y ago
  Notwithstanding the fact that "age is unrelated to wisdom" was a gentle contextual device used to dismiss the commenter's odd assumption about my age, a search for "age is unrelated to wisdom" turns up actual research papers. "neither general nor personal wisdom have a positive linear relationship to age... age is not only not related to personal wisdom (as is the case for general wisdom) but even negatively related..." [Mickler & Staudinger (2008), Sneed & Whitbourne (2003)] Source: The Scientific Study of Personal Wisdom: From Contemplative Traditions to Neuroscience http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Study-Personal-Wisdom-Contemplative-ebook/dp/B00HRNLC5U http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Study-Personal-Wisdom-Conte...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - gnaritas 11y ago
    If you actually searched for that, then you know there's far more studies showing the opposite. You can find a research paper supporting just about any position, that doesn't make it the majority opinion of the field. You actually had to ignore a lot of stuff saying the opposite, to find something saying age and wisdom weren't related. That's OK, you're young, you'll get wiser with age.
nl 11y ago
I'm not commenting at all on wisdom, merely on how quickly time passes for people of different ages. 5 years seems like a long time for a 15 year old, and hardly anything for a 50 year old. The first result for me is https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Wonder_Wheel.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Wonder_W... Looks good to me? As for the gorilla incident, I don't think anyone is claiming that errors don't occur, and it's very fair to say that particular error was very embarrassing for Google. It's interesting how children make the same kind of embarrassing mistakes, eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/24me24/embarrassing_moment_at_the_store_today/ch8q9d6 https://www.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/24me24/embarrass...

by tacos 11y ago

QuercusMax 11y ago

That spoked diagram's image is named "google-wonder-wheel" and is linked from an article referring to Google's Wonder Wheel. That doesn't seem like a spurious result to me...

tacos 11y ago
It's clearly an outlier. Try an image search for "Google Wonder Wheel" and you'll see a few Ferris wheels among lots of spoked diagrams -- but not the Wonder Wheel. The gorilla example is more to the point. Google pushed a quick fix and couldn't fix it. So they blocked the gorilla tag altogether. Why? Because a data scientist couldn't figure out how to fix the problem properly and deploy a solution. To me, that says quite a bit about the current realities of machine learning systems.

gnaritas 11y ago

> Age is unrelated to wisdom and I'm talking about the full experience. That's not true; age and wisdom are quite related, just not directly causal. They are correlated. Older people are generally wiser, it's just not a guarantee, nor is it impossible for young people to be wise, but it's certainly far less common. With age comes experience and with experience, wisdom has fertile ground to grow, though it doesn't always.

tacos 11y ago
Notwithstanding the fact that "age is unrelated to wisdom" was a gentle contextual device used to dismiss the commenter's odd assumption about my age, a search for "age is unrelated to wisdom" turns up actual research papers. "neither general nor personal wisdom have a positive linear relationship to age... age is not only not related to personal wisdom (as is the case for general wisdom) but even negatively related..." [Mickler & Staudinger (2008), Sneed & Whitbourne (2003)] Source: The Scientific Study of Personal Wisdom: From Contemplative Traditions to Neuroscience http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Study-Personal-Wisdom-Contemplative-ebook/dp/B00HRNLC5U http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Study-Personal-Wisdom-Conte...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- gnaritas 11y ago
  If you actually searched for that, then you know there's far more studies showing the opposite. You can find a research paper supporting just about any position, that doesn't make it the majority opinion of the field. You actually had to ignore a lot of stuff saying the opposite, to find something saying age and wisdom weren't related. That's OK, you're young, you'll get wiser with age.

nl 11y ago

I'm not commenting at all on wisdom, merely on how quickly time passes for people of different ages. 5 years seems like a long time for a 15 year old, and hardly anything for a 50 year old. The first result for me is https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Wonder_Wheel.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Wonder_W... Looks good to me? As for the gorilla incident, I don't think anyone is claiming that errors don't occur, and it's very fair to say that particular error was very embarrassing for Google. It's interesting how children make the same kind of embarrassing mistakes, eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/24me24/embarrassing_moment_at_the_store_today/ch8q9d6 https://www.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/24me24/embarrass...