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Back when I believed the hype, I made the same mistake with materials from Google's recruiters. They gave me driving instructions from SJC which left me in the

Back when I believed the hype, I made the same mistake with materials from Google's recruiters. They gave me driving instructions from SJC which left me in the wrong part of the valley on a Friday night during rush hour (this was before smartphone navigation). I figured it was some kind of test. It wasn't. I called it my "cleverness attribution error" and wrote about it this summer: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/06/19/attrib/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/06/19/attrib/ I've run into it in a few other places, too.

seacond 14y ago
"a _few_ other places" I think you are being very diplomatic. :) But seriously, this cleverness attribution error might be a big problem with large players like Google. Forum posters, blogs and the digital versions of mainstream media all seem convinced Google is somehow special. That they know what they are doing, at every turn. Assuming some silly mistakes is a "test". It's a potentially harmful meme: people assuming ideas like "genius" or "utmost comptetence" without requiring any proof. Blind faith followers take note, because here we have _proof_ that Google makes mistakes too. Silly ones at that.
zwischenzug 14y ago
The chess champion Capablanca said that he was protected from losing games due to minor blunders because his opponents assumed he was so brilliant that he saw something they didn't, so they played safe and avoided taking advantage.
- binxbolling 14y ago
  I think I read an article recently (probably highlighted on HN) that talked about how Deep Blue did exactly this versus Kasparov. A bug caused it to make a sub-optimal move, and it's quite likely Garry misinterpreted it as genius and psyched himself out going forward.
  - zwischenzug 14y ago
    Yeah I'd read that. Kasparov was pretty freaked out by Deep Blue. He wrote this: "I got my first glimpse of artificial intelligence on Feb. 10, 1996, at 4:45 p.m. EST, when in the first game of my match with Deep Blue, the computer nudged a pawn forward to a square where it could easily be captured. It was a wonderful and extremely human move. If I had been playing White, I might have offered this pawn sacrifice. It fractured Black's pawn structure and opened up the board. Although there did not appear to be a forced line of play that would allow recovery of the pawn, my instincts told me that with so many "loose" Black pawns and a somewhat exposed Black king, White could probably recover the material, with a better overall position to boot. " about a move most computers of the time would find pretty quickly, and most decent human players would intuitively have thought OK at first glance. http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/chess.html http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/chess.html My theory is that a significant part of his game was based around human psychology, so he found it hard to grasp computers. He played computer-friendly risky openings as if to taunt the machine, and heavily talked up the influence of the programmers on Deep Blue to an almost paranoid extent. The result was that he lost against Deep Blue when he should have won fairly easily if he'd been more disciplined.

seacond 14y ago

"a _few_ other places" I think you are being very diplomatic. :) But seriously, this cleverness attribution error might be a big problem with large players like Google. Forum posters, blogs and the digital versions of mainstream media all seem convinced Google is somehow special. That they know what they are doing, at every turn. Assuming some silly mistakes is a "test". It's a potentially harmful meme: people assuming ideas like "genius" or "utmost comptetence" without requiring any proof. Blind faith followers take note, because here we have _proof_ that Google makes mistakes too. Silly ones at that.

zwischenzug 14y ago

The chess champion Capablanca said that he was protected from losing games due to minor blunders because his opponents assumed he was so brilliant that he saw something they didn't, so they played safe and avoided taking advantage.

binxbolling 14y ago
I think I read an article recently (probably highlighted on HN) that talked about how Deep Blue did exactly this versus Kasparov. A bug caused it to make a sub-optimal move, and it's quite likely Garry misinterpreted it as genius and psyched himself out going forward.
- zwischenzug 14y ago
  Yeah I'd read that. Kasparov was pretty freaked out by Deep Blue. He wrote this: "I got my first glimpse of artificial intelligence on Feb. 10, 1996, at 4:45 p.m. EST, when in the first game of my match with Deep Blue, the computer nudged a pawn forward to a square where it could easily be captured. It was a wonderful and extremely human move. If I had been playing White, I might have offered this pawn sacrifice. It fractured Black's pawn structure and opened up the board. Although there did not appear to be a forced line of play that would allow recovery of the pawn, my instincts told me that with so many "loose" Black pawns and a somewhat exposed Black king, White could probably recover the material, with a better overall position to boot. " about a move most computers of the time would find pretty quickly, and most decent human players would intuitively have thought OK at first glance. http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/chess.html http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/chess.html My theory is that a significant part of his game was based around human psychology, so he found it hard to grasp computers. He played computer-friendly risky openings as if to taunt the machine, and heavily talked up the influence of the programmers on Deep Blue to an almost paranoid extent. The result was that he lost against Deep Blue when he should have won fairly easily if he'd been more disciplined.