

Why It’s So Hard to Catch Your Own Typos - quantisan
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/wuwt-typos

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zhte415
I find this interesting from a professional perspective -

A lot of companies employ manual input of information, my experience being in
finance. Often a hand-written copy of a form in input to a system. Mistakes
can involve financial loss. An often used 'solution' (often applied in
finance) is to use a 'maker / checker' system where an individual (maker)
inputs a field, and a checker checks what the maker input. [A checker is often
ranked an order of corporate seniority over a maker.] For large value or
sensitive transactions, a string of checkers may be applied (or suggested as
remedies where accuracy is seen as a problem).

But... adding checkers rarely improves error rates. Checkers tend to trust
Makers, and Makers tend to trust Checkers. More Checkers means more trust /
less care - adding checkers can often make the chance of a mistake occurring
higher.

A HNer may now suggest incentive structures, independent makers, technological
solutions including drawing analogies with reCaptcha. I have done the same.
Some operations companies do tried varied approaches, but many, including the
largest of financial companies, do not for varying reasons. Not least as
Operations departments of large multinationals have been squeezed by budget
cuts of 10% per year for more than half a decade - some leads to outsourcing
or offshoring, some moving the effort to the 'creator of cost' (i.e. changing
the paper form to an input form).

I feel it would be an interesting challenge to sell something to enterprises
seeking very high levels of accuracy (by which I mean, something in the order
of 99.9% for non-standardised poorly scanned hand-written forms often
including numbers, names and addresses).

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bsmartt
I've always felt that software bugs are much like typos in nature (not
necessarily complexity).

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ape4
I like how the NSA is the example of something that catches everything.

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waps
The article is bull. This happens because your brain is predictive, not
because there are magical "high-level" areas of the brain that don't pay
attention to "lower" details. That's not how it works at all.

The brain transmits information between parts of it. A -> B -> C -> ..., with
A, B, and C being sets of neurons (so one arrow is not just one connection,
but somewhere between thousands and millions).

Whenever you're doing anything with your brain, you can simplify to this
situation : every part of your brain is attempting to provide inputs to every
other part. When multiple inputs are coming in, a selection is made (1) it
wants correct input data (2) faster input data is better (3) when a "best" set
of data is found, attention provided to any other signal will fall off
exponentially.

This is normally very useful. Say you're jumping over a rock. You've done this
before, so the part of the brain controlling your legs wants information ...
"what's happening". And 2 parts of the brain will provide. One part will
ultimately come from the sensors in your leg. But it's too late : by the time
the sensors say you've hit the ground, it'll be ~0.05-0.2 seconds after you've
hit the ground, potentially too late to compensate without falling over.

Fortunately, when you started the jump, a piece of your memory also said "hey,
I recognize this, here's what's going to happen", and your leg control system
will compare the values of the sensors for a while, agree with the memory, and
start responding to memory input instead of sensor input.

Meaning your brain is responding to events it could not possibly have sensed.
If you're looking for this behaviour, you'll see it everywhere. (In practice,
of course, your brain also has a "physics simulator" that will provide input).

Assuming you've got good components providing all sorts of inputs, this
mechanism is fantastic. You can look at something for a bit, have a simulation
routine in your brain "synchronize" to it, look away to something else,
synchronize to it, and then respond to both stimuli simultaneously despite
your sensors (say, eyes) not actually capable of observing both stimuli.

Unfortunately, when you're re-reading a text you've written, the spell checker
in your brain will switch to what you remembered writing down, and after a
short while won't care what your eyes are actually reading any more. So unless
the reading method calls attention (which it will only do in WTF cases),
you'll miss any spelling errors.

Then you have the following 2 parts of your brain :

* a reading method that is providing outputs that contain the spell errors, but isn't actually connected to the spell checker any more, various other pieces of your mind might pay attention to it because they've got nothing better to do, and this might result in capturing attention, but probably won't.

* the memory, providing the correct input, connected to the spell checker

(in fact, shortly after that, the conscious part of the brain that is
attempting to spell check will realize that the chance of getting an "error"
signal from the spell checker is very small, and will "predict" that the spell
checker will return an "OK" for the entire text and simply not listen for
other signals anymore).

In short : do NOT count on humans (or animals, for that matter) to find small
errors in repeating patterns. Write a short python function to do it for them.

I like to say that human minds respond "faster than light". In a sense, they
do. You see this in martial arts championships (e.g.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4lX0fKDTD8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4lX0fKDTD8)
), where the outcome of an attack is determined before the first signals go
out to the muscles, and these fighters are acutely aware of that. You see
neither fighter is looking at anything other than his opponents' face.
Everything else mostly comes from the predictor. This then often results in
the situation "I'm going to go for left top attack, change the balance between
my shoulders to X, then step 2 is ... Oh no crap he's seen my plan, abort". Of
course, if you haven't fought karatekas before you won't be able to play that
game, and you'll be very predictable to them ... But for spell checking this
sucks.

I can't believe I actually had to have my spell checker correct
"spellchecking".

It also means that, for example, you want to endlessly mesmerise a human
being, you have to give it a signal it superficially thinks it understands (so
it gets deep into the brain, and gets a lot of different components involved
in analysing it), but contains an obvious "core" random component, so the
brain will never successfully predict it for any period of time. Ideally it
should have random signals at multiple levels of meaning.

Such a signal, however, would be very bad for you. But addictive.

~~~
seba_dos1
About that mesmerizing signal: just take a look at the pop music industry.

