Responses to this have been interesting... There is a lot of evidence that humans are over agressively pattern matchers. Another poster pointed out some exampl

Responses to this have been interesting... There is a lot of evidence that humans are over agressively pattern matchers. Another poster pointed out some examples like the limitations of human vision (there is a hole in your vision that your brain fills in with whatever is thinks is there for example). Look up cognitive biases sometimes, or any old optical illusion. Those are just the fun edge cases where you get to see examples of the lies the over agressively pattern matchers of your sensorium tell you. I didn't expect this to be controversial. It is a basic assumption of my life that what I perceive is only roughly correlated with "the truth". Really I meant this as a statement about machine learning doing whatever it's fitness function tells it to, and that the fitness function we select only hopefully correlates with reality.