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Can you explain how you, as a human being, understand handwriting? Can you explain it in detail without handwaving some stuff away as "now I detect the pattern"

Can you explain how you, as a human being, understand handwriting? Can you explain it in detail without handwaving some stuff away as "now I detect the pattern"? Because I'm pretty sure you can't, but you use it for basically everything in life. So, should a person's eyes not be trusted when it comes to "something important"?

afthonos 8y ago
Given that eyewitness testimony is consistently unreliable, biased, and internally inconsistent, no, they shouldn’t. Human judgement is the best we can do so far, but it is hardly a worthwhile goal, especially with systems that take us from affecting individuals on a person-to-person level to influencing the interactions of millions of people with their government. Algorithms can be explainable, and I agree that anything that affects your standing in the eyes of government should have that as a minimum requirement.
rizzin 8y ago
>So, should a person's eyes not be trusted when it comes to "something important"? A documentary called "Murder on a Sunday Morning": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFLbptkb1eM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFLbptkb1eM A woman was murdered in front of her husband. The man saw the attacker up close and was the only eyewitness. He accused a completely innocent man, and it took half a year of jail and court-related turmoils for this to get cleared up.
honzzz 8y ago
> Can you explain how you, as a human being, understand handwriting? I do not want to speak for the parent but I think you might be on a different level of abstraction when talking about "explaining" things. Consider this for example: someone writes a letter to your boss that you should be fired. That someone does not need to explain the process of writing but probably should be required to explain why you should be fired.
colllectorof 8y ago
>Can you explain how you, as a human being, understand handwriting? We explain how to understand handwriting to every single child that goes to school. It's not the answer you want, but it's the answer that actually matters here. Trying to equivocate AI and human cognition in this way is completely disingenuous. Human reasoning is not 100% reliable, but we know very well in which ways it's unreliable and how to deal with it. We have shared biology and millennia of experience trying to empathize and communicate with others.
- discobot 8y ago
  We do not explain how to read handwriting, we teach by example - and that is exactly how ML works. And your last point is wrong. ML models are studied and understood much better than human reasoning.
  - dariusj18 8y ago
    But if you were to present handwriting as evidence in court, if the veracity of the evidence were in question, you would need to present an expert whose job it is to explain the methodology behind the analysis.
  - colllectorof 8y ago
    >We do not explain how to read handwriting, we teach by example - and that is exactly how ML works. Teaching children to read is an interactive process that has pretty much nothing in common with data steamrolling in modern machine learning. >And your last point is wrong. ML models are studied and understood much better than human reasoning. Is that why new ANN architectures are almost universally constructed by trial and error?
sgt101 8y ago
The best work on this was done by Brendan Lake and Josh Tannenbaum. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~astocker/lab/teaching-files/PSYC739-2016/Lake_etal2015.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~astocker/lab/teaching-files/PSYC7... There's a recent review that they published. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.03477.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.03477.pdf

afthonos 8y ago

Given that eyewitness testimony is consistently unreliable, biased, and internally inconsistent, no, they shouldn’t. Human judgement is the best we can do so far, but it is hardly a worthwhile goal, especially with systems that take us from affecting individuals on a person-to-person level to influencing the interactions of millions of people with their government. Algorithms can be explainable, and I agree that anything that affects your standing in the eyes of government should have that as a minimum requirement.

rizzin 8y ago

>So, should a person's eyes not be trusted when it comes to "something important"? A documentary called "Murder on a Sunday Morning": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFLbptkb1eM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFLbptkb1eM A woman was murdered in front of her husband. The man saw the attacker up close and was the only eyewitness. He accused a completely innocent man, and it took half a year of jail and court-related turmoils for this to get cleared up.

honzzz 8y ago

> Can you explain how you, as a human being, understand handwriting? I do not want to speak for the parent but I think you might be on a different level of abstraction when talking about "explaining" things. Consider this for example: someone writes a letter to your boss that you should be fired. That someone does not need to explain the process of writing but probably should be required to explain why you should be fired.

colllectorof 8y ago

>Can you explain how you, as a human being, understand handwriting? We explain how to understand handwriting to every single child that goes to school. It's not the answer you want, but it's the answer that actually matters here. Trying to equivocate AI and human cognition in this way is completely disingenuous. Human reasoning is not 100% reliable, but we know very well in which ways it's unreliable and how to deal with it. We have shared biology and millennia of experience trying to empathize and communicate with others.

discobot 8y ago
We do not explain how to read handwriting, we teach by example - and that is exactly how ML works. And your last point is wrong. ML models are studied and understood much better than human reasoning.
- dariusj18 8y ago
  But if you were to present handwriting as evidence in court, if the veracity of the evidence were in question, you would need to present an expert whose job it is to explain the methodology behind the analysis.
- colllectorof 8y ago
  >We do not explain how to read handwriting, we teach by example - and that is exactly how ML works. Teaching children to read is an interactive process that has pretty much nothing in common with data steamrolling in modern machine learning. >And your last point is wrong. ML models are studied and understood much better than human reasoning. Is that why new ANN architectures are almost universally constructed by trial and error?

sgt101 8y ago

The best work on this was done by Brendan Lake and Josh Tannenbaum. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~astocker/lab/teaching-files/PSYC739-2016/Lake_etal2015.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~astocker/lab/teaching-files/PSYC7... There's a recent review that they published. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.03477.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.03477.pdf