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> We don't know, ourselves, how to do that. Have we actually tried? There is a cursory discussion about how this is "inconceivable to those who spent their ca

> We don't know, ourselves, how to do that. Have we actually tried? There is a cursory discussion about how this is "inconceivable to those who spent their careers looking at retinas". However, if it's not clinically useful (as the next sentence says), those experts probably haven't spent much--if any--training themselves to try. Humans can learn to detect surprisingly subtle features. For example, the right training regime can make you much better at reporting the tilt of a line, but it requires practice and feedback, just like the network got.

barry-cotter 5y ago
I bet this would end up like chicken sexers. Near 100% reliability, no ability to explain how they do it.
spoonjim 5y ago
How do you learn to get good at the tilt of a line?
- mattkrause 5y ago
  Practice, practice, practice. The umbrella term for this is "perceptual learning" and it turns out that training can tweak the visual system: baseball players learn to read where an incoming pitch will go, radiologists can find subtle clues that indicate a tumor, and--as someone pointed out above--chicken sexers can tell the sex of a baby chicken somehow. These are fairly "high-level" phenomenon. Surprisingly, training also works on low-level visual phenomena, which you might think are limited by the eye itself or 'hard-wired' neural circuits. It's mostly just practice. One of the classic experiments looks at vernier (hyper-)acuity. You're shown pairs of lines that are slightly offset, like: | or | | | You report whether the top is shifted rightwards or leftwards. The computer gives you feedback, and shows you another pair (varying the distance to make it easier or harder). If you keep doing this, your threshold (i.e., the smallest offset you can reliably report) will about decrease 5-fold. The same thing happens for many other phenomena too--reporting the direction that some dots are moving, the tilt of a line, etc. In some cases, the improvements continue for days or even weeks of training. The wild thing is that they're often very specific to the training. For example, if you trained with the vertical stimuli above, the improvement does not transfer over to stimuli like: _ or _ _ _ There are "tricks" to designing a curriculum that generalizes and is relatively efficient, but there's still a lot to learn.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
>> We don't know, ourselves, how to do that. > Have we actually tried? Doesn't matter; most of the stuff we don't know how to do is stuff we've never bothered trying. That doesn't mean we secretly do know how to do it.
- mattkrause 5y ago
  The title claims that humans "can't" do this. For that to be true, it seems important to me that they've actually tried and failed, versus having never bothered.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Not at all. The usage of can't is fully within the norm. For example, I cannot tango, despite the fact that, with training, I could.

barry-cotter 5y ago

I bet this would end up like chicken sexers. Near 100% reliability, no ability to explain how they do it.

spoonjim 5y ago

How do you learn to get good at the tilt of a line?

mattkrause 5y ago
Practice, practice, practice. The umbrella term for this is "perceptual learning" and it turns out that training can tweak the visual system: baseball players learn to read where an incoming pitch will go, radiologists can find subtle clues that indicate a tumor, and--as someone pointed out above--chicken sexers can tell the sex of a baby chicken somehow. These are fairly "high-level" phenomenon. Surprisingly, training also works on low-level visual phenomena, which you might think are limited by the eye itself or 'hard-wired' neural circuits. It's mostly just practice. One of the classic experiments looks at vernier (hyper-)acuity. You're shown pairs of lines that are slightly offset, like: | or | | | You report whether the top is shifted rightwards or leftwards. The computer gives you feedback, and shows you another pair (varying the distance to make it easier or harder). If you keep doing this, your threshold (i.e., the smallest offset you can reliably report) will about decrease 5-fold. The same thing happens for many other phenomena too--reporting the direction that some dots are moving, the tilt of a line, etc. In some cases, the improvements continue for days or even weeks of training. The wild thing is that they're often very specific to the training. For example, if you trained with the vertical stimuli above, the improvement does not transfer over to stimuli like: _ or _ _ _ There are "tricks" to designing a curriculum that generalizes and is relatively efficient, but there's still a lot to learn.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

>> We don't know, ourselves, how to do that. > Have we actually tried? Doesn't matter; most of the stuff we don't know how to do is stuff we've never bothered trying. That doesn't mean we secretly do know how to do it.

mattkrause 5y ago
The title claims that humans "can't" do this. For that to be true, it seems important to me that they've actually tried and failed, versus having never bothered.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Not at all. The usage of can't is fully within the norm. For example, I cannot tango, despite the fact that, with training, I could.