

Paul Buchheit: Brilliantly wrong - brlewis
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/brilliantly-wrong.html

======
robg
What a fantastic post.

One thing I'd like to add: It's extremely difficult to overwrite or unlearn
things that have already been learned. You can teach users something new, but
if it conflicts with what they already know, they're going to run into trouble
and much effort will be expended to overcome the multiple messages.

One silly example from my research: We found developmental traces of pre-
school knowledge in biology professors. The professors acted like children
even though they've had at least 20 years to overcome their early confusions.
The simple, bastardized story: The brain doesn't have a delete button and
overwrite appears to be very hard.

Better to conform to users, because they're not likely to conform to you. At
most, pick one thing you want them to learn and the more novel, the more
likely they'll "get it"..

~~~
downer
" _We found developmental traces of pre-school knowledge in biology
professors. The professors acted like children even though they've had at
least 20 years to overcome their early confusions."_

Details!

~~~
robg
Sorry, it's still rare for me that folks outside my research area want to hear
more. Two people makes a quorum!

The abbreviated background: Young children tend to confuse movement and
naturalness with life. So if you ask a typical four-year-old if a cloud is
alive, they'll tend to say yes. Same deal for things like a mountain and a
truck. They don't know yet that life involves mechanistic things "inside" the
organism. Similarly, they'll deny life to plants becuase they don't do
anything. There's been a ton of research in this area because it addresses why
young children are initially confused and how they can best be brought along
toward mature knowledge. Even still, it takes us years to understand basic
life processes. You might learn what's alive or not alive, but obviously the
knowledge drills much deeper than that.

Results: Any case, the very first study I conducted as a grad student, I found
that undergraduates, when tested under speeded conditions, have much more
difficulty answering, for example, that a cloud, a mountain, and a truck are
not living things than saying the same for a table. Same difficulty for
calling plants living things as compared to animals. Just to show how hard it
is to see the forest for the trees (pun intended), it took me five years to
even think about testing bio profs. And wouldn't you know, they replicated the
effects but with one important caveat. They showed improved performance for
living things, as compared to the undergrads, but still much worse for plants
than for animals and no improvement for the moving and natural non-living
things. Even after 20 years of advanced biology training, they are still
"thinking" like little kids, on some level.

Of course, I'm interested to hear complaints, concerns, or questions. But my
take-away is that if something as simple as living or non-living can't be
overwritten once much more advanced knowledge is acquired, and for many years
at that, then learning that involves change is really, really hard. Better to
rely on common schemes as much as possible, and expect users to learn as
little as possible.

I wish I could cite a paper, but this startup stuff has had me happily
distracted from the joys of publishing. But the manuscript is in decent shape
and once my co-author looks at it, we'll send it out for review.

~~~
eru
Interesting. But this does not necessarily say much about unlearning - as the
distinction between living and non-living may be hard-wired into our brain.
(Something along the lines of Steve Pinker's "the brain as a box of tools".)

~~~
robg
It's an interesting point. A few quick reactions -

1\. I don't know how to test that hypothesis (and indeed most
neuroevolutionary "conjectures"). A mutation is one thing, but linked to very
specific aspects of cognition is something else. For instance, how can we run
a controlled study while leaving evolution free to vary? Some animal models
may help, eventually, with certain aspects of knowledge (e.g., tools), but
abstract thought is a whole other beast.

2\. We've done some preliminary developmental work, and it seems with a
specifically targeted instruction we can radically improve performance in
young kids, and quickly too. So one answer might be to start early and never
let kids (or users) go too far afield. The best way seems to be to show kids
that only biological things move toward goals (e.g., you go to the sink when
thirsty, roots grow towards moisture). But we don't know if that learning
sticks or if they fall back into old patterns.

3\. An alternative approach is to test a population that may not see animacy
in the same way early in development and so may not exhibit the same types of
traces later on. One idea is to follow up with autistic kids. To me, that's
the difference between evolutionary accounts and a testable hypothesis about
neurodevelopment. If the results show less potent traces, then we can use
brain imaging to examine how early differences in the neuroanatomy lead to
different processing streams.

4\. If I were to agree with anything in that direction, an evolutionary
foundation may reflect a static versus dynamic division (rather than living or
non-living) of the visual system. Problem is, to understand biological
mechanisms, static things (e.g., plants) have to be seen as dynamic, and
dynamic things have to be seen as illusory (e.g., cloud). So irrespective of
the true first cause, learning involves overcoming biases that initially
"appear" to be powerfully important.

~~~
eru
I read about a study where they found that people noticed moving animals
faster than equally large moving cars. (I could look up the source if anyone
is interested.) For your point 3: As far as I recall this effect did not seem
to rely on whether those people grew up with animals (African subjects) or not
(American subjects).

Perhaps if you would find some other task for your volunteers to test you
learn/unlearn hypothesis with. Some task that we do not suspect of being hard
wired into our brain. But a task people would nevertheless encounter at an
early age.

Anyway - thanks for reading through my amateurish ideas.

------
uuilly
When I was at MegaCorp the smartest guy I knew (photographic memory, ninja
puzzle solver) thought that users should be required to pass a test to use OUR
software! His rendering engines were amazing and his UI's were a disaster.

~~~
downer
That's not very smart.

~~~
uuilly
The title of the post is "brilliantly wrong." I thought this story was
apropos.

------
daniel-cussen
Bravo, man. I always wanted to be able to articulate what you just said.

------
nootopian
My Vigor router has a JS alert dialog that reads

If you have a fixed IP address press cancel to continue

------
eru
"As for "undo", in general, the more we can lower the costs of making
mistakes, the faster we can move."

One of the reasons for version control systems and automated-testing.

------
edw519
"While an Undo feature could be useful, isn't this just coddling people who
should otherwise be paying closer attention to what they are doing?"

While a parachute could be useful, isn't this just coddling skydivers who
should otherwise be paying closer attention to where they are falling?

~~~
brlewis
The funny thing is, your skydiver statement could be argued true more
effectively than the original quote.

------
as
Reminds me of an Overcoming Bias post. If your source of stupid is pure enough
you can just reverse it to get right.

