3 ms·

Billions of Sketches Reveal Hidden Cultural Variation in Human Concepts

134 points by Anon84 3mo ago

ks2048 3mo ago
This seems to be based on Google's QuickDraw datasets. 50 million samples are available in an open dataset, https://github.com/googlecreativelab/quickdraw-dataset https://github.com/googlecreativelab/quickdraw-dataset
- mncharity 3mo ago
  > To build the dataset, we keep only sketches that have been recognized by the neural network in the QuickDraw game. To prevent imbalance from overly represented countries (e.g., the US), we down-sample the data by focusing on the 100 most prominent countries and capping the number of drawings per category–country pair at 10,000. [p19]
- totetsu 3mo ago
  I remember is 2017 closer to the original release of the quick draw data set, there was some analysis of which way circles tended to be drawn in different counties. https://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/way-you-draw-circle-depends-where-you%E2%80%99re https://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/way-you-...
zyralab 3mo ago
Sounds like a lot of sketches.
ggm 3mo ago
There's a story in Rhodes' book on the atom bomb of Otto Frisch & Liese Mettner discussing the ideation of nuclear fission analogised to cell fission, drawn as a dumbbell viewed head on with the neck of the split a circle inside the bigger cell circle:, where we classically see two cells splitting side by side with a channel between them: she meant exactly the same thing viewed 90° rotated.
hereme888 3mo ago
That's a really neat study. Enjoyed it.
whycome 3mo ago
The most striking real world example of something similar has always been the different ways different cultures count/show numbers on a single hand (Ask a friend to show the number 3 on a hand). As far as concepts - it’s a difference in how we perceive the “starting point” of a hand.
- homarp 3mo ago
  single hand six in chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_number_gestures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_number_gestures
dhosek 3mo ago
The phone cluster was especially amusing to see in the context of visiting a small history museum in Ohio earlier today with my kids (12 years old) and explaining to them about how a rotary dial phone worked. (The added bonus comes from watching Monsters and Minions with them yesterday and during a scene where the director is informed that they ran out of film, my daughter turned to me and asked, “What’s film?”)
- pishpash 3mo ago
  Sometimes this is exaggerated. How do people view slide rules, telegraphs, and gramophones, or other historical artifacts from a further generation ago? They aren't that strange, and neither should rotary phone or film be to the current generation.
  - pmontra 3mo ago
    I agree on your general idea but rotary phones were a real PITA. They were slow to operate. We jumped in a very short time to numberpad phones, which initially only replayed the analog signal of rotary phones. I'm surprised that nobody built an analog phone with a numberpad that operated a hidden rotary dial before electronics got everywhere. It would probably need to be plugged into main but those phones were not mobile so a socket was always available. On the other side, a 33 or 45 rpm record is only inconvenient to store and transport but it plays back in the same time of any modern music format and seeking is not so bad: you can see where you move the head and with a little of practice one gets quite good at it. Cassettes were another PITA.
    - aesthesia 3mo ago
      The slowness of rotary phones is coupled to the exchange, which expects pulses at a specific rate (about 10 per second). Shifting to a keypad form factor doesn't speed that up, and would mean you need to be careful about how quickly you dial (or have a way to buffer keypresses). I think that's a major reason why keypad dialing and DTMF signaling were so closely connected.
prvc 3mo ago
Poorly conceived thesis; if the concepts differ, then they are different concepts.
- ctdco 3mo ago
  1. Please read the paper before making that judgement; it is brief. The paper is focused on variation of visual representation of concepts, not variation of concepts themselves. That the concepts of “smiley face” or “pizza” are sketched differently by different people does not mean that those different sketches are actually representing different concepts. They very clearly are still representing the same concepts. 2. However, there can absolutely be variation of concepts without necessitating treatment of those variations as separate concepts (up to a point). There are very strong arguments for understanding concepts as being very often not rigid but fluid/cloudy. Football and crossword puzzles are both wildly different variations of the concept of “games” for example, yet that concept is able to contain such disparate variations without becoming absurd or impractical. See Douglas Hofstadter’s books “Surfaces and Essences” and “ Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies ”; Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” also touches on this, as do many other reputable thinkers in philosophy of mind.
arjie 3mo ago
The funnest bit is page 6 with sketches arranged into clusters visually. Very cool.
chr15m 3mo ago
The universal human language is not music, it is donut.
- euroderf 3mo ago
  Three languages understood by humans: Music, Math, Money. Also donut.
tomrod 3mo ago
This is really cool.
Daub 3mo ago
One paper I am always citing to my students when discussing composition in painting is: ‘Cultural differences in lateral biases on aesthetic judgments: The effect of native reading direction’ The title speaks for itself. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40167-018-0062-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40167-018-0062-6
- WJW 3mo ago
  That's a very cool paper. Weird that LTR people have this bias more than RTL readers? It may have been an artefact of the study design, they state in the results that most RTL readers were bilingual (and the LTR readers presumably not, given that the study was done in Canada), that the study instructions were in English and that this may have primed the RTL readers to be more LTR-y.
drc500free 3mo ago
I would have really liked to see the cultural variation shown visually - i.e. do Eastern Europeans and Americans have different default ways of showing a pizza or a phone?

134 points by Anon84 3mo ago

ks2048 3mo ago

This seems to be based on Google's QuickDraw datasets. 50 million samples are available in an open dataset, https://github.com/googlecreativelab/quickdraw-dataset https://github.com/googlecreativelab/quickdraw-dataset

mncharity 3mo ago
> To build the dataset, we keep only sketches that have been recognized by the neural network in the QuickDraw game. To prevent imbalance from overly represented countries (e.g., the US), we down-sample the data by focusing on the 100 most prominent countries and capping the number of drawings per category–country pair at 10,000. [p19]
totetsu 3mo ago
I remember is 2017 closer to the original release of the quick draw data set, there was some analysis of which way circles tended to be drawn in different counties. https://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/way-you-draw-circle-depends-where-you%E2%80%99re https://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/way-you-...

zyralab 3mo ago

Sounds like a lot of sketches.

ggm 3mo ago

There's a story in Rhodes' book on the atom bomb of Otto Frisch & Liese Mettner discussing the ideation of nuclear fission analogised to cell fission, drawn as a dumbbell viewed head on with the neck of the split a circle inside the bigger cell circle:, where we classically see two cells splitting side by side with a channel between them: she meant exactly the same thing viewed 90° rotated.

hereme888 3mo ago

That's a really neat study. Enjoyed it.

whycome 3mo ago

The most striking real world example of something similar has always been the different ways different cultures count/show numbers on a single hand (Ask a friend to show the number 3 on a hand). As far as concepts - it’s a difference in how we perceive the “starting point” of a hand.

homarp 3mo ago
single hand six in chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_number_gestures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_number_gestures

dhosek 3mo ago

The phone cluster was especially amusing to see in the context of visiting a small history museum in Ohio earlier today with my kids (12 years old) and explaining to them about how a rotary dial phone worked. (The added bonus comes from watching Monsters and Minions with them yesterday and during a scene where the director is informed that they ran out of film, my daughter turned to me and asked, “What’s film?”)

pishpash 3mo ago
Sometimes this is exaggerated. How do people view slide rules, telegraphs, and gramophones, or other historical artifacts from a further generation ago? They aren't that strange, and neither should rotary phone or film be to the current generation.
- pmontra 3mo ago
  I agree on your general idea but rotary phones were a real PITA. They were slow to operate. We jumped in a very short time to numberpad phones, which initially only replayed the analog signal of rotary phones. I'm surprised that nobody built an analog phone with a numberpad that operated a hidden rotary dial before electronics got everywhere. It would probably need to be plugged into main but those phones were not mobile so a socket was always available. On the other side, a 33 or 45 rpm record is only inconvenient to store and transport but it plays back in the same time of any modern music format and seeking is not so bad: you can see where you move the head and with a little of practice one gets quite good at it. Cassettes were another PITA.
  - aesthesia 3mo ago
    The slowness of rotary phones is coupled to the exchange, which expects pulses at a specific rate (about 10 per second). Shifting to a keypad form factor doesn't speed that up, and would mean you need to be careful about how quickly you dial (or have a way to buffer keypresses). I think that's a major reason why keypad dialing and DTMF signaling were so closely connected.

prvc 3mo ago

Poorly conceived thesis; if the concepts differ, then they are different concepts.

ctdco 3mo ago
1. Please read the paper before making that judgement; it is brief. The paper is focused on variation of visual representation of concepts, not variation of concepts themselves. That the concepts of “smiley face” or “pizza” are sketched differently by different people does not mean that those different sketches are actually representing different concepts. They very clearly are still representing the same concepts. 2. However, there can absolutely be variation of concepts without necessitating treatment of those variations as separate concepts (up to a point). There are very strong arguments for understanding concepts as being very often not rigid but fluid/cloudy. Football and crossword puzzles are both wildly different variations of the concept of “games” for example, yet that concept is able to contain such disparate variations without becoming absurd or impractical. See Douglas Hofstadter’s books “Surfaces and Essences” and “ Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies ”; Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” also touches on this, as do many other reputable thinkers in philosophy of mind.

arjie 3mo ago

The funnest bit is page 6 with sketches arranged into clusters visually. Very cool.

chr15m 3mo ago

The universal human language is not music, it is donut.

euroderf 3mo ago
Three languages understood by humans: Music, Math, Money. Also donut.

tomrod 3mo ago

This is really cool.

Daub 3mo ago

One paper I am always citing to my students when discussing composition in painting is: ‘Cultural differences in lateral biases on aesthetic judgments: The effect of native reading direction’ The title speaks for itself. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40167-018-0062-6 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40167-018-0062-6

WJW 3mo ago
That's a very cool paper. Weird that LTR people have this bias more than RTL readers? It may have been an artefact of the study design, they state in the results that most RTL readers were bilingual (and the LTR readers presumably not, given that the study was done in Canada), that the study instructions were in English and that this may have primed the RTL readers to be more LTR-y.

drc500free 3mo ago

I would have really liked to see the cultural variation shown visually - i.e. do Eastern Europeans and Americans have different default ways of showing a pizza or a phone?