4 ms·
"Pattern matching" is like astrology for smart people.
by jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
"Pattern matching" is like astrology for smart people.
- pavlov 15y agoMaybe you can drop the "for smart people" -- the same kind of magazines that blather about horoscopes tend to run lots of stories along the lines of "How to recognize a narcissist".
- jeffreymcmanus 15y agono, dumb people just use guessing, actual astrology, etc. smart people use "pattern matching" because it makes bigotry (which is a form of guessing) seem smart.
- rhizome 15y agoI think you're dancing around the word "discrimination" which is actually a fundamental aspect of thought and language, and is how humans can tell, for instance, the difference between good and bad. Are you saying that people shouldn't have standards?
- lukifer 15y agopoTAYto, poTAHto. The fundamental engine of consciousness is fuzzy pattern matching; when done poorly, it's called "guessing", and when done well, it's called "intuition".
- pjscott 15y agoPattern matching is a general term for what you do every time you see a letter and recognize the pattern of light, or hear a word and match it to a concept. Don't give it a bad name just because human pattern-matching is flawed and unreliable in the (relatively rare) edge cases.
- paulbaumgart 15y ago"Pattern matching" is just another phrase for applied Bayesian probability.