Hacker News Reader

Comment by Artoemius | Hacker News Reader

> O(n^2) listening: cross-comparing all the things they've said for informational pairings

If you manage to think of a good hash function for everything they say, you can use a hash table and cross-check every new thing they say in O(1), which makes the total complexity O(n).

View on HN

Which kind of describes a lot of discussions on the Internet - people pattern-matching what they see/hear to cached thoughts in their brains, and replying to those cached thoughts instead of to what was actually said.

Yeah, in computing, a cache is a hardware or software component that stores data so future requests for that data can be served faster.

when referring to human mind these terms describe a similar phenomenon:

Salience: facts are more prominent from either highlighting or frequency.

Priming: Recently noted topics may be recalled with less effort.

Recency: Memories from more recent times are more readily accessible.

I saw this in person, once. Guy with one of the those super-christian inflammatory signs in the middle of UC Berkeley. Both students and "protester" felt like they were presenting canned arguments "at" each other rather than "to" each other.

Now that I think about it, I could totally see a cabal of professors hiring someone to be antagonistic as a teaching moment.

I see this a lot in abortion debates, because to find any common ground you would need to have a really deep philosophical discussion about the definition of life. There's nowhere else to go from "I think it's murder", "I think it isn't". "Don't legislate my body" is completely irrelevant to people who think it's murder, and "stop killing babies" is nonsensical to people who think there aren't any babies involved.

Not only on the Internet, I'm afraid.

I believe so too, but I couldn't come up with an obvious example from meatspace when typing my comment, so I decided to mention only the on-line variation of this phenomenon, which should be familiar to everyone here.

It's even more necessary in meatspace (LOL!) but we learn to be subtle about it. This analysis is very insightful. Proper listening is cognitively expensive. In many circumstances it can't happen in real-time. Ideas are big and words are small. Both echoic and working memory are very limited. We have no choice but to optimize. Hashing is very efficient. We can hold a lot in our long term memories. The problem is that your new idea isn't in my head already. We need "idea arithmetic" to utilize our existing ideas without voiding new ones. The concept chicken-burger can be represented as hamburger + chicken - beef. That happened to be a perfect match. If it were Bob's Best Turkey Burger then it would be hamburger + chicken - beef ± ???. This is a more optimal representation than just ???. Each "chunk" saves memory for the most novel and important details. Assuming we continue listening. If we run into a chunk we don't like we're liable to start preparing arguments instead. Sometimes we're just tired and decide the match was good enough. The problems with this algorithm occur when it terminates early.

I think our built-in neural network provides a great hash function for these kind of things

Reply on news.ycombinator.com