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During my service in the Israeli army I had the pleasure of working with various Bedouin trackers. It was the closest experience to what working with a wizard w

During my service in the Israeli army I had the pleasure of working with various Bedouin trackers. It was the closest experience to what working with a wizard would be. They would look at something where you see nothing, and tell whole stories. Too bad we were all too tired to actually spend more time asking questions and learning from them. I also heard the legend of a person who installed backward soles on their shoes so it would fool the trackers thinking they’re going the other way, but the weight distribution gave this trick away as the tracks looked odd to them.

cik 4y ago
Classic legend. I remember staying in Mamshit and getting a fantastic demonstration from a Bedouin on exactly why this doesn't work. He brought out a tape measure, in order to physically show the difference. It's mind blowing that the attention to detail is so high, that they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and not at eye level!
- toss1 4y ago
  >>that they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and not at eye level! Yes, their trained eye can most likely see far more than any of us. One thing I learned in neuroscience courses about perception is that one of the measures they take is the lower bound sensitivity of the perceptual system. One of the units is the JND = Just Noticeable Difference, which is well self-descriptive; find the smallest difference between two things that can be noticed. E.g., what is the smallest difference in pressure that is noticeable on a fingertip, tone or volume difference between two sounds, or the smallest size difference noticeable between two objects, etc.? It turns out that top experts in any skill can have a JND that is about 10x finer than the average person. Moreover, they can not even know it! I weirdly experienced this myself when I was one of the subjects in a test of discrimination of light brightness levels on a field with subtle differences. As they turned down the brightness in each round (and randomly moved the darker/lighter zones), the dark/light areas were completely obvious to me when everyone else swore that it was absolutely flat/even. I could only chalk it up to a decade of alpine ski racing training that had gotten me to top international racing levels — much of it was racing/training in flat light of cloudy days in snowfields — where we need to discern at high speed even the subtlest variations in shades of white to get critical information about snow conditions or contours. Until that test, I literally had no idea that anything was exceptional about my perceptual ability in this regard (my experience was generally that I wanted to see better), but training obviously drove changes down to the level of tuning the nervous system, even without specific intent to do so. Science is so cool, and so are those Bedouin trackers!
  - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
    This is an interesting addition to my not-very-well stocked store of information about how tunable a human being is to specific tasks or situations. The second half of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves focuses on physical attributes, but I think it's the internal stuff like this that would be the real evolution paths.
  - giardini 4y ago
    The human eye can detect a single photon. Our other senses aren't so exquisite (it might be interesting to have the "nose of a dog" for awhile, say). But I am so often surprised at what I see.
    - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
      I can't remember where I read it (probably a link from HN), about someone who, for a limited amount of time, had their sense of smell relatively suddenly become incredibly boosted, and my recollection is that they likened it to being a dog - the amount of information available to them about people in a Doctor's waiting room was surprising and confronting.
      - toss1 4y ago
        Wow, that's probably amazing! I once had an experience that gave me just a hit of what it must be like for cats and dogs. My cat had been hit by a skunk, and of course it was after hours in a rural area so it was the next day before we could get the tomato juice to clean him off. While he was still stinky, he mostly hid under a blanket with just his nose sticking out so he could minimize the smell. But he came out to go to his food/water bowl while I was reading a newspaper in a big chair (pre-internet times). So I couldn't see him and he was walking silently, but the smell was so strong that I could sense his location in full 3D — it was just a wonderous AHA! moment — "so THIS is what it's like for them - they can literally sense in 3D using smell the way we do with sight and hearing...". I know it was just a hint, as this was just the gains cranked way up on one smell, whereas they get the full-spectrum richness for everything, but, wow, what a revelation! The person's experience must have been truly mind-blowing!
- thaumaturgy 4y ago
  A tape measure isn't necessary depending on the substrate. :-) This was one of my favorite tricky things to do for students, because I'd see their entire face light up with the realization once they got it. All mammals, as far as I know, scatter a bit of material at the front of their step. The foot lands in the substrate, rolls forward, and then gets picked up, and that naturally causes a little bit of material to fall away from the front of the foot and end up at the front of the track. In advanced tracking, you learn to use the material at the front of tracks to determine direction of travel. Most people duck-walk a bit, or have one foot pitched out more than the other, or might make a sudden change of direction, but the material at the front of the track is a pretty reliable indicator for direction of travel. So one exercise we'll set up is in a sandy or soft substrate, a volunteer will hop into a boxed area, change direction of travel with each step and cover each print with a plastic cone. They jump out, and then a bunch of other plastic cones get scattered into the boxed area. Students start with the first cone, and from that track -- without being able to see any other prints -- they have to determine where the next track is (which cone contains the next print). So you drill on this a lot until looking for that toe drag becomes reflexive, and then you take them to a set of backwards-walking tracks and see how long it takes them to realize there's no toe drag in the prints -- because the foot is rolling backward from the toes. There are a few other giveaway clues for backwards walking too that get into the finer details of pressure points and the mechanics of movement, but toe drag is the easy one.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
They see that they just laugh. Dude, oh this is going to be easy, I'm going to have to charge extra, too boring. Like think of all that you do with a computer, all that magic. Dude Stanford CS department in CS106A Mehran Sahami says it's the closest thing to magic. And witchcraft also...eh. Like typing on Dvorak is magic, like the raw speed, the comfort, the freedom of thought stedda the sad fad qwerty.
- Fatnino 4y ago
  Did you have a stroke or are you gpt3?
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    Those accusations contradict each other.
    - mcguire 4y ago
      It's an exclusive 'or'.
      - pegasus 4y ago
        Exactly the kind of faulty logic GPT3 is prone towards.
        daniel-cussen 4y ago
        No like if you're accusing me of either being the tallest man in basketball and the shortest loser on the street, both your accusations disprove the other.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        notsapiensatall 4y ago

cik 4y ago

Classic legend. I remember staying in Mamshit and getting a fantastic demonstration from a Bedouin on exactly why this doesn't work. He brought out a tape measure, in order to physically show the difference. It's mind blowing that the attention to detail is so high, that they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and not at eye level!

toss1 4y ago
>>that they could notice a 1.5cm indentation difference - and not at eye level! Yes, their trained eye can most likely see far more than any of us. One thing I learned in neuroscience courses about perception is that one of the measures they take is the lower bound sensitivity of the perceptual system. One of the units is the JND = Just Noticeable Difference, which is well self-descriptive; find the smallest difference between two things that can be noticed. E.g., what is the smallest difference in pressure that is noticeable on a fingertip, tone or volume difference between two sounds, or the smallest size difference noticeable between two objects, etc.? It turns out that top experts in any skill can have a JND that is about 10x finer than the average person. Moreover, they can not even know it! I weirdly experienced this myself when I was one of the subjects in a test of discrimination of light brightness levels on a field with subtle differences. As they turned down the brightness in each round (and randomly moved the darker/lighter zones), the dark/light areas were completely obvious to me when everyone else swore that it was absolutely flat/even. I could only chalk it up to a decade of alpine ski racing training that had gotten me to top international racing levels — much of it was racing/training in flat light of cloudy days in snowfields — where we need to discern at high speed even the subtlest variations in shades of white to get critical information about snow conditions or contours. Until that test, I literally had no idea that anything was exceptional about my perceptual ability in this regard (my experience was generally that I wanted to see better), but training obviously drove changes down to the level of tuning the nervous system, even without specific intent to do so. Science is so cool, and so are those Bedouin trackers!
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  This is an interesting addition to my not-very-well stocked store of information about how tunable a human being is to specific tasks or situations. The second half of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves focuses on physical attributes, but I think it's the internal stuff like this that would be the real evolution paths.
- giardini 4y ago
  The human eye can detect a single photon. Our other senses aren't so exquisite (it might be interesting to have the "nose of a dog" for awhile, say). But I am so often surprised at what I see.
  - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
    I can't remember where I read it (probably a link from HN), about someone who, for a limited amount of time, had their sense of smell relatively suddenly become incredibly boosted, and my recollection is that they likened it to being a dog - the amount of information available to them about people in a Doctor's waiting room was surprising and confronting.
    - toss1 4y ago
      Wow, that's probably amazing! I once had an experience that gave me just a hit of what it must be like for cats and dogs. My cat had been hit by a skunk, and of course it was after hours in a rural area so it was the next day before we could get the tomato juice to clean him off. While he was still stinky, he mostly hid under a blanket with just his nose sticking out so he could minimize the smell. But he came out to go to his food/water bowl while I was reading a newspaper in a big chair (pre-internet times). So I couldn't see him and he was walking silently, but the smell was so strong that I could sense his location in full 3D — it was just a wonderous AHA! moment — "so THIS is what it's like for them - they can literally sense in 3D using smell the way we do with sight and hearing...". I know it was just a hint, as this was just the gains cranked way up on one smell, whereas they get the full-spectrum richness for everything, but, wow, what a revelation! The person's experience must have been truly mind-blowing!
thaumaturgy 4y ago
A tape measure isn't necessary depending on the substrate. :-) This was one of my favorite tricky things to do for students, because I'd see their entire face light up with the realization once they got it. All mammals, as far as I know, scatter a bit of material at the front of their step. The foot lands in the substrate, rolls forward, and then gets picked up, and that naturally causes a little bit of material to fall away from the front of the foot and end up at the front of the track. In advanced tracking, you learn to use the material at the front of tracks to determine direction of travel. Most people duck-walk a bit, or have one foot pitched out more than the other, or might make a sudden change of direction, but the material at the front of the track is a pretty reliable indicator for direction of travel. So one exercise we'll set up is in a sandy or soft substrate, a volunteer will hop into a boxed area, change direction of travel with each step and cover each print with a plastic cone. They jump out, and then a bunch of other plastic cones get scattered into the boxed area. Students start with the first cone, and from that track -- without being able to see any other prints -- they have to determine where the next track is (which cone contains the next print). So you drill on this a lot until looking for that toe drag becomes reflexive, and then you take them to a set of backwards-walking tracks and see how long it takes them to realize there's no toe drag in the prints -- because the foot is rolling backward from the toes. There are a few other giveaway clues for backwards walking too that get into the finer details of pressure points and the mechanics of movement, but toe drag is the easy one.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

They see that they just laugh. Dude, oh this is going to be easy, I'm going to have to charge extra, too boring. Like think of all that you do with a computer, all that magic. Dude Stanford CS department in CS106A Mehran Sahami says it's the closest thing to magic. And witchcraft also...eh. Like typing on Dvorak is magic, like the raw speed, the comfort, the freedom of thought stedda the sad fad qwerty.

Fatnino 4y ago
Did you have a stroke or are you gpt3?
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Those accusations contradict each other.
  - mcguire 4y ago
    It's an exclusive 'or'.
    - pegasus 4y ago
      Exactly the kind of faulty logic GPT3 is prone towards.
      - daniel-cussen 4y ago
        No like if you're accusing me of either being the tallest man in basketball and the shortest loser on the street, both your accusations disprove the other.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        notsapiensatall 4y ago