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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

> 1. The software can recognize a feather, as long as it looks similar to what it thinks a feather looks like.

I was prompted to draw a hurricane. I drew something that looked like the typical hurricane doodle used on news reports.

The software didn't recognize it.

When the game was over and I was able to look at all of the doodles that were used to train the software to recognize a hurricane ... the majority of them instead looked like tornadoes!

So maybe we should more precisely say:

1. The software can recognize a feather, as long as it looks similar to what the humans who contributed its training set think a feather looks like.

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My hurricane was just terrible. I ended up with a scribbled mess because I got that in the first set or two, didn't really have a plan and drew components of a hurricane as I remembered them.

I'm also ashamed to admit I drew some less than ideal stuff due to forgetting details on things and then panicking because of the timer. Like the spots on a panda's face for some odd reason.

Hopefuly my drawings were treated as outliers.

Apparently most players of this game didn't see the "carrier" part in "aircraft carrier" and just drew airplanes. Probably because of the time constraint.

Or maybe they mistook it for "carrier aircraft", as in "cargo plane".

Which is actually a pretty big win. After all you could also say this:

1. The person can recognize a feather as long as it looks similar to what the other people who contributed to it's learning think a feather looks like.

I was asked to draw: brush I drew a hair brush. It was trained to see brush as a bunch of circles or trees.

Are you sure that wasn't "bush"?

...or something for sweeping the floor

When the game was over and I was able to look at all of the doodles that were used to train the software to recognize a hurricane ... the majority of them instead looked like tornadoes!

Idiocracy was prophetic -- except it missed the aspect that "Idiocracy" would first manifest on the Internet.

The premise of Idiocracy is actually false; IQs have been rising over time.

So the internet is really just revealing more of the idiocy that's always been there.

You are really stretching to find a way to feel superior to people.

Alas, if I had to stretch. Basically, there's rampant prejudice and anti-intellectualism from all points on the political spectrum. The response to the enabling of trolling by anonymity is an upsurge of authoritarianism by (of all people) many on the Left. The Right? Not much better.

If I had a dollar for every time someone pattern matched me or a phrase I wrote, then jumped to conclusions about my ideas of internal emotional state then even insisted I am lying when I tried to disabuse them of the notion -- I'd have a whole lot of dollars. (Hint, if you start sniffing around trying to justify that they're right, I haven't left you sufficient evidence and you're probably also doing that.)

Apolitical people? Mostly just as bad.

Citation needed. IQs are defined such that the average IQ is always 100. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

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