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Comment by twothamendment | Hacker News Reader

It is one thing to hear and correctly identify the words. It is another to understand the meaning.

I've been thinking about this because my son has Auditory Processing Disorder, APD. He can hear great, even a whisper across the house. The trouble is the words don't always make sense. He can tell me the words he heard and they are correct, but assigning a meaning to them doesn't work like it does for most people.

After playing him a bunch of audio with missing words, the lady who tested him was blown away by how smart he is - explaining that he is quickly filling in almost every missing word based by guessing from all thing possible things it could be, narrowing it down on context and getting it right. I guess that is a normal, all day long task for him.

Since then I've thought about voice recognition differently. The AI to understand the context or fill in the blanks is what will make or break it.

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I'd never heard of APD.

Interesting, all my life I've struggled to follow a conversation in a crowded environment, so much so that I actively avoid background noise with words in, I work with silicon ear plugs in or headphones and music with no lyrics.

Looking at NHS symptoms they describe me as a child, didn't learn to read until I was 8.

I nearly ended up in the remedial track but for a single awesome teacher who spotted that it wasn't that I was incapable but that I was struggling to understand in a noisy classroom, she gave up her lunch time for 6mths and taught me one on one by the end of that year I could read much better.

Wow, I wish there was an easy way to pay back star teachers or mentors.

Is it really that they were a star? Or just that they cared.

The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Sometimes just caring when no one else does can make someone a star... at least to the person they help.

What's the difference?

I don't mean to denigrate the wonderful contribution that the teacher in question made, as it's truly a selfless commitment with life changing impact. However -

One distinction may be that the star teacher scales better. What if there were two students with this problem? Should the teacher stay late? Should teachers not take lunch? What if someone needs help in math, etc.

A star teacher may be able to reproduce this effect for a large number of students. Perhaps using technology, recorded lectures, practice apps, etc. Perhaps organizing study groups for kids to teach and learn from each other.

A caring teacher may sacrifice her lunch. A star teacher may not need to.

The thing about teaching is that you can be star just by having one success story. If you are a vital part of the success of 2 people you've already clearly contributed more than your share.

But one is enough; some of the most famous scientists only got where they were because they had a specific advisor. Neither the teacher nor student would ever have accomplished half as much working alone.

I am famous to maybe six people. So, it's not much. However, I wanted to add an account to this.

I can tell you the exact moment, problem, response, and teacher - that changed my life forever. It was at that single moment that I understood mathematics. I wasn't suddenly good at it. No, I still pretty much sucked at math. But, I understood it was a language and it was descriptive.

Many years later, that same teacher would be there to help me celebrate defending my dissertation. I didn't actually march, I was already to busy by the time spring rolled around. He's an old man, now. I still stop in and we are still fast friends.

That one comment changed my life. There's a not insignificant chance that it has had a small impact on your life, assuming you've been impacted by modern traffic engineering, or in some pedestrian venues, or had some goods delivered. All that from a single comment that is entirely obvious, in retrospect.

Just because they didn't solve all the problems doesn't mean it's irrelevant they solved one problem.

I think you're making a mistake here.

You might be a star programmer, but only if you re-wrote every single program exceptionally, because clearly it's not making a fundamental change to someone's life once that counts, you're not a star until you've done that for everyone ...?

Going above and beyond the expectations of your role in order to make a fundamental change to someone's life is enough to call someone a "star" IMO. It's not like someone asked you to personally pay them a bonus, you can award all exceptional effort s a "star" without problem.

I am not clear on what definition you are using for "star teacher". But it sounds like "caring" is in the set of things that are required to be a star teacher.

The best way to pay them back is to succeed, but it's not easy!

>is to succeed //

And then buy them a holiday?

Write them a handwritten letter and make sure it gets to them.

This. I did this with a math teacher (pre-calc and trig) I had at a community college years later when I was taking calculus etc in college and killing it (after having a less than stellar math education before and during highschool) and I think it was a huge deal to him. He really put his all into teaching that class and a lot of people probably went on to 4 yr college and didn't think much of it but after having professors that hardly spoke a word to their students and spent a straight hour just writing on a chalkboard I totally appreciated an invested, engaged math teacher.

I am sure you have thought about it but since you didn't mention it, are your symptoms those of Asperger's syndrome? Asperger's is often thought of as a sensory perception problem and Aspies tend not to be able to filter out sounds from background noise.

Only one data point, but I find it much harder to filter out speech from background noise in my second language than I do when people are speaking my first language in a noisy environment. My guess would be that we have multiple ways of processing language that use different bits of our brains.

I also notice that even though I can't read lips, I often find it much easier to understand what people are saying when I can see them. I think part of the reason speech recognition isn't generally at a human-level is that they don't receive the same amount or kind of data that we do.

An interesting experiment might be to include a speaker's native tongue when trying to recognize their speech in a different language. I bet that speech recognition would be a lot easier on e.g. native Spanish speakers speaking English if you know to ignore, for example, the sound "e" when spoken before "st" or "sp"

My son was so good at reading lips that we'd play a game where we only mouthed words and he'd tell us what we "said". In school we let the teacher know he needed to see her say the words on a spelling test. In those younger years that was the only way he could tell the different in some sounds. The big one I remember was "th" and teaching him to look for the tongue on the front teeth.

As he is getting older he relies less on seeing lips. I'm hopeful at some point he'll outgrow most issues.

I took one of those online tests a while back that said if you get over 25 you need to see a specialist, I got 43.

Not sure I have Asperger's though, I'm just a programmer who likes his own company.

One the pillars of psychiatrical diagnosis according so doctors I met, is that any kind of diagnosis or treatment is only to be judged by its ability to improve your quality of life.

If you don't suffer in any way shape or form, it doesn't matter how many boxes you tick, if you feel fine there is no compelling reason to go through with diagnosis, except possibly if you have kids.

Autism spectrum disorders are quite heritable, and it's a tremendous advantage to be aware of ones own psychiatric oddities when you raise a child with his or her own. I speak from experience, I wish I known about my ADHD-PI/ADD with a dash of Autism earlier. I am however very happy I got to know about it early enough to help me guide my daughter into a way of thinking that has helped her a lot.

In general, without the knowledge that people on average might have a WILDLY different cognitive landscape than yours, it's very very hard to know which advice to take to heart, and what to completely ignore.

With that said, I'm fairly well aware of what type of questions are on those questionnaires. If the test is legitimate, a result that high over the limit would probably include at least a few 'yes' answers to questions that usually have a negative impact of quality of life.

Adding to that, in my experience people actually on the spectrum are the least likely to self diagnose prematurely, even when the answer is essentially staring them in the face.

Anything that can improve quality of life a little is worth considering, because sometimes it's really hard to judge the magnitude of how it can help.

Hmmm I can relate to what you are describing. I have some of that and was diagnosed with ADD in my 30s and I am a woman. Diagnose and medication helped immensely. It's as if you can't process too much signal at once. There is such a thing as asperger's spectrum. I cannot deal with high-pitched noises and noise in general really disturbs me.

I'm pretty sure I've seen this exact question (do you have trouble understanding speech in noisy environments, etc.) on several Asperger and related self-assess questionnaires.

wonder if i have that. i always try to fill in words with context or words that rhyme with the sound. - when people talk on tv, i need the volume at 95%, everything else like 4 bars. - i hate phones because only one ear gets the information, headphones makes talking on the phone so much more relaxing. - i dont understand how anyone understands anything at clubs, how is that even possible?

> i dont understand how anyone understands anything at clubs, how is that even possible

Mostly, I don't. Earbuds help for some weird reason, as does pressing your ear shut. Looking at their mouth does 80% of the work. And most conversations I have in clubs are pretty mundane and uninspired. “What do you want to drink?” “This DJ is good. Do you also think this DJ is good?” “Do you agree with late justice Earl Warren that Baker v Carr was the most important supreme court decision of his era?” etc... Low entropy, easy to error correct.

Wow, you just made me cry. That's beautiful that your teacher was willing to do that for you. Thanks to all the awesome teachers out there.

> Since then I've thought about voice recognition differently. The AI to understand the context or fill in the blanks is what will make or break it.

Of course, and all humans rely on this as well. No one hears every word perfectly all the time --- it's impossible, because the source person doesn't pronounce every word perfectly all the time. Context clues are a huge part of speech recognition, as well as gestural typing recognition and other forms of machine interpretation of human input. While it's always been a component of NLP, you can clearly see it in action with the Android keyboard these days because after you type two words in a row, the first may be corrected after you enter the second one, based on context provided by the second one.

This is why I think Google recently saying 95% word accuracy is just as good as a human is wrong. If I ask if you after dinner if you "Want to get a pizza cake", you'll probably quickly realize I mean "piece of cake". Mistakes like that in 1/20 words is a lot.

Google is the best of all the big players at figuring out this context (I once asked it what a Dead Left Shrimp was, apparently I was mishearing the name of basketball player Detlef Schrempf), but it will still search for "Pizza Cake" rather than correcting it.

Not only that, but even if you were to get 100% word accuracy, context is still important for choosing between multiple possible meanings.

As an example, I was being directed by Google Maps to a new place, and I asked it "What is the ETA?" It responded, "From Wikipedia, the estimated time of arrival or ETA is the time when a ship, vehicle, aircraft, cargo or emergency service is expected to arrive at a certain place." It was a completely valid answer to the question, but not one that any human would give.

I think you give humans too much credit. If it were so, this joke[0] wouldn't be funny.

s/Microsoft/Google/g s/Seattle/Mountain View/g

[0] http://alunthomasevans.blogspot.com/2007/10/old-microsoft-jo...

Humans make those mistakes too. Once, while talking to somebody about money, I asked "do you know what inflation is?", meaning what the rate is,to help make a decision, but they were offended and replied that yes, of course they knew what the concept meant.

Having a "the" in there like you did should remove ambiguity though. I guess Google Maps defers to Wikipedia when it doesn't know what a term means.

Have you ever considered that pizza cake is delicious?

I don’t know about you, but I wanna try this: https://g.co/kgs/4D4er9

That Gboard "feature" is extremely annoying because it's almost always wrong. This is another case where artificial intelligence ends up being worse than no intelligence.

This reminds me a lot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia also known as "face blindness". People with the disorder can see perfectly fine, but have trouble recognizing people's faces, just as your son hears just fine, but has trouble recognizing people's speech. Similarly, I know someone who beat brain cancer, but after a certain point he became unable to properly taste/enjoy food.

Interestingly, these disorders all seem to have pretty direct neurological causes: there is something causing a difference in the person's brain between where they sense the information and where they process it, whether it's genetic (i.e. affecting the layout and growth of the brain) or due to trauma such as a head injury.

I'm curious as to whether your son is able to enjoy music, especially music with multiple different instruments playing simultaneously. I have a theory that the same process on a neurological level that makes food pleasurable is what makes smells smell good, music sound good, certain surface (e.g. soft fur) feel good, and certain sights (e.g. a mountain stream) look good. I mean that not from a neurotransmitter perspective, but in the actual neural processing. It seems these configurations are programmed into our brains genetically, just as our propensity toward recognizing faces/speech are, which is fascinating.

> After playing him a bunch of audio with missing words, the lady who tested him was blown away by how smart he is - explaining that he is quickly filling in almost every missing word based by guessing from all thing possible things it could be, narrowing it down on context and getting it right. I guess that is a normal, all day long task for him.

Sure it is; it's an essential part of speech recognition for all humans.

What you're asking for is equivalent to a general purpose intelligence, i.e. human intelligence, i.e. AI-complete. All (most?) of our ideas can be expressed in language, so in order to actually understand language, you have to actually understand any idea.

Interesting. I wonder if your son will be smarter as a result, kinda like when neural networks generalize better if trained with a dropout.

He seems a bit behind on social cues, but I am often shocked at things he picks up on. We just started playing the board game "Clue". The second game he was using tricks that I use but hadn't mentioned. His deductive reasoning was awesome. He won that game and I don't "let" my kids win.

Sorry to hear that your son has APD! This makes me wonder though - do you know if this condition is language-specific? I assume you taught him English; would he have same problems with a very foreign language - say, Chinese?

I don't think it is language specific. He is in karate and I didn't see and difference.

The background noise seems to be key. He was doing great in karate and a new teacher started blasting music. He went from doing great to being unable to know he should put his right for forward when told to. That was one of the clues that something wasn't normal.

TIL I have APD

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