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Another similar bug/feature of the brain is how we can immediately know if we like a movie or a book, but if asked what movies or books we like, we often blank

Another similar bug/feature of the brain is how we can immediately know if we like a movie or a book, but if asked what movies or books we like, we often blank or name like 3 pieces. Some information is only designed to be retrieved in certain ways in our brain. The fact that neural networks have similar but different limitations isn't that concerning, just something to keep in mind. Another funny limitation: when a word is "on the tip of your tongue", what often happened is you thought of it, but your brain rejected it, so now it's on "cooldown" before it appears in your mind again. Usually this mechanism helps but a bug in your brain causes it to be harmful. If you start thinking of something else it "refreshes the cache" and the word comes to you.. we're really not that much less buggy than the machine. disclaimer: there's other theories about why the phenomenon happens

thehappypm 3y ago
Interestingly, I think the “favorite movies” scenario is also an artifact of our training dataset (our experiences). You spend hours watching a movie, so you have a lot of data about it, and have a lot to build an opinion. But comparing movies? Not something we think about for hours and hours on end. But, people who are movie critics or movie buffs train themselves to do it.
azeirah 3y ago
Yeah this becomes very noticeable when you're deliberately learning facts with Anki. For example when trying to learn immunology, "This bacterium causes neural bacteriumeritis", score 100% on the set of cards after a few sessions. Add "What are the possible causes of neural bacteriumeritis?" and sometimes I'd draw a blank. There's a lot of nuance in how we learn facts and their relationships. It reminds me a lot of data structures in programming to be honest. It's a lot easier to retrieve a person's age from a dictionary indexed by first-name+last-name than from a list with 10000 objects with people in them.

thehappypm 3y ago

Interestingly, I think the “favorite movies” scenario is also an artifact of our training dataset (our experiences). You spend hours watching a movie, so you have a lot of data about it, and have a lot to build an opinion. But comparing movies? Not something we think about for hours and hours on end. But, people who are movie critics or movie buffs train themselves to do it.

azeirah 3y ago

Yeah this becomes very noticeable when you're deliberately learning facts with Anki. For example when trying to learn immunology, "This bacterium causes neural bacteriumeritis", score 100% on the set of cards after a few sessions. Add "What are the possible causes of neural bacteriumeritis?" and sometimes I'd draw a blank. There's a lot of nuance in how we learn facts and their relationships. It reminds me a lot of data structures in programming to be honest. It's a lot easier to retrieve a person's age from a dictionary indexed by first-name+last-name than from a list with 10000 objects with people in them.