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I don't think "how to draw a bicycle" is the thing that your brain tricks into thinking that you know. Instead, it's "what does a bicycle look like?" If you as

I don't think "how to draw a bicycle" is the thing that your brain tricks into thinking that you know. Instead, it's "what does a bicycle look like?" If you ask most people if they know what a bicycle looks like, I think they'd tell you, yes, definitely. But really they don't. They know that it has a couple wheels and some sort of metal tubes, and that's a workable mental model to convince yourself that you know what a bicycle looks like.

watwut 6y ago
People can recognize bicycle from non-bicycle perfectly well. If you would make bicycle with unusually large wheels, people would recognize that perfectly. In particular, telling bike from random wheels and tubes is easy. So yeah, people do know how bicycle looks like. What people do not know is how to draw bicycle or any other thing. Unless artists, they don't know to abstract important details from unimportant and they are complete crap at proportions. For fun, ask people to draw face. Everything will be at wrong place with wrong size, but I still would not say people don't know how human face looks like.
- anonred 6y ago
  >For fun, ask people to draw face. Everything will be at wrong place with wrong size That’s kind of an odd counter example to use. Most people will certainly draw an anatomically correct face (for all intents and purposes) with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. And you’re unlikely to see anyone add three eyes, turn the nose sideways, or move the mouth above the nose. In contrast, this is _exactly_ what people are doing to bikes, as illustrated by the ridiculously funny renders in the article.
  - watwut 6y ago
    > two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. And you’re unlikely to see anyone add three eyes, turn the nose sideways, or move the mouth above the nose. That is not enough for realistic face. In the first place, people wont draw these on the right places and with the right relative size. While the eyes will be higher then mouth, they still wont be on the right place and it will be extremely visible. The nose can be sideways, it sticks out and thus is harder to draw. Also, the beginners nose wont look like actual nose, eyes wont look like actual eyes and so on. It will be kinda like those bikes. Note that none of those bikes have three wheels, two seats or four handles. All of them have seat around where back wheel is, all of them have handles. There is one bike that have back seat small and one that have pedals under seat. These are the worst proportions and relative position wise, but some people will do stuff like that with human face too. When they teach you to draw faces, they teach you literal guidelines to get thing at the right places and sizes. You are then supposed to erase the guidelines. It takes effort to learn for most of us.
Someone 6y ago
In experiments measuring perceptual thresholds (say of motion, color, or size), it is common that subjects say they can’t see a difference anymore between movement speeds/colors/object sizes, but, when pressed to answer the question, ‘guess’ right way above chance level. I think it’s likely this is similar: they know, but not consciously. To test that, one could ask them whether the drawing they made represents a bicycle. I would guess many of them could say there was something funny with their own drawing, even though they can’t make a better one. (One can have a philosophical discussion about whether that means that they know what a bicycle looks like, but they sure can act as if they know)

watwut 6y ago

People can recognize bicycle from non-bicycle perfectly well. If you would make bicycle with unusually large wheels, people would recognize that perfectly. In particular, telling bike from random wheels and tubes is easy. So yeah, people do know how bicycle looks like. What people do not know is how to draw bicycle or any other thing. Unless artists, they don't know to abstract important details from unimportant and they are complete crap at proportions. For fun, ask people to draw face. Everything will be at wrong place with wrong size, but I still would not say people don't know how human face looks like.

anonred 6y ago
>For fun, ask people to draw face. Everything will be at wrong place with wrong size That’s kind of an odd counter example to use. Most people will certainly draw an anatomically correct face (for all intents and purposes) with two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. And you’re unlikely to see anyone add three eyes, turn the nose sideways, or move the mouth above the nose. In contrast, this is _exactly_ what people are doing to bikes, as illustrated by the ridiculously funny renders in the article.
- watwut 6y ago
  > two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. And you’re unlikely to see anyone add three eyes, turn the nose sideways, or move the mouth above the nose. That is not enough for realistic face. In the first place, people wont draw these on the right places and with the right relative size. While the eyes will be higher then mouth, they still wont be on the right place and it will be extremely visible. The nose can be sideways, it sticks out and thus is harder to draw. Also, the beginners nose wont look like actual nose, eyes wont look like actual eyes and so on. It will be kinda like those bikes. Note that none of those bikes have three wheels, two seats or four handles. All of them have seat around where back wheel is, all of them have handles. There is one bike that have back seat small and one that have pedals under seat. These are the worst proportions and relative position wise, but some people will do stuff like that with human face too. When they teach you to draw faces, they teach you literal guidelines to get thing at the right places and sizes. You are then supposed to erase the guidelines. It takes effort to learn for most of us.

Someone 6y ago

In experiments measuring perceptual thresholds (say of motion, color, or size), it is common that subjects say they can’t see a difference anymore between movement speeds/colors/object sizes, but, when pressed to answer the question, ‘guess’ right way above chance level. I think it’s likely this is similar: they know, but not consciously. To test that, one could ask them whether the drawing they made represents a bicycle. I would guess many of them could say there was something funny with their own drawing, even though they can’t make a better one. (One can have a philosophical discussion about whether that means that they know what a bicycle looks like, but they sure can act as if they know)