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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

> humans are worst at discerning faces today because we need to discern letters and words and dedicate brain power for that.

I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but my gut tells me this risks being one of those bold claims that grows legs and runs for a while until we debunk it.

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Yeah, has that Malcolm Gladwell knowledge porn vibe. A book that empowers its reader with secret knowledge of explanation that all fits together a little too neatly and loses nuance or is often just plain wrong.

I think the “secret explanation” can simply be things you don’t know (or that most people don’t know) because they’re not interesting per se, but when combined they make an interesting whole.

I enjoyed some books that don’t have anything unknown in its parts but that brought a lot of shift in perspectives for me, such as “Man’s Worldly Goods”[1] and “The Drunkard’s Walk”[2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Worldly-Goods-Wealth-Nations/dp/... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Drunkards-Walk-Randomness-Rules-Lives...

There are plenty of great books that treat a topic right for a lay reader while still leaving you satisfied at having learned something interesting and novel. But there are also a lot of books like I described that cash in on the desire for such experiences but it ended up being more of a sugary treat than a full meal :)

That explanation sounds great until you find out that Gladwell is more than willing to misrepresent events to fit into whatever point he's trying to make. The most egregious example I know of being the Korean Air Line Flight 801 crash.

https://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell...

Are you saying the theory of igon values is not so universal after all?

After finding out even Think Fast, Slow (a book from a very creditable researcher and nobel laureate) is full of replication crisis, I approach pop-sci as entertainment instead of self-education.

*nobel memorial laureate. This is exactly why people get annoyed with the branding of the bank of Sweden’s economics prize. We have yet to see the prize for chemistry awarded for research that does not reproduce.

I suppose to be fair to the field of economics, the replication issues were mainly with research in psychology (as I recall).

On the other hand, does economics have less of a replication issue because it’s basically unreplicable?

> We have yet to see the prize for chemistry awarded for research that does not reproduce.

Maybe, but e.g. Millikan's prize for physics was on the basis of results that appear to have been at least partially fabricated.

Was it? I thought Millikan's measurement had a minor error from an incorrect viscosity of air, and several other researchers' subsequent measurements were fabricated to agree with Millikan's.

That also happened, but there are suspicious patterns in Millikan's data considered in isolation.

The peace prize is awarded to warmongers all the time though.

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

You can find, maybe, three or four such recipients out of 100. And they usually did make peace, even if they previously or later made mistakes.

Obama.

As one of the professors I had undergrad classes with liked to say "Economics is the only field where you can be awarded the Nobel prize for showing A and then next year someone gets a Nobel prize for showing not A".

It's not completely insane, the part of the brain that gets used for recognising words is very close to the part of the brain that recognises faces. The brain likely cannibalises the part of the cortex that's used to recognise faces to recognise words and letters instead. See this study[1] where the visual word form area reacts much more strongly to faces in illiterates than in people who have learnt to read.

[1] https://www.unicog.org/publications/1-s2.0-S1364661311000738...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_word_form_area

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area

There are people who have face-blindness (inability to discern faces) or dyslexia (visual processing disorder that leads to severe difficulties with reading). The two aren't strongly correlated.

Dyslexia seems to be tied to some broader visual processing issues, which impair the ability to discriminate faces somewhat. But not the other way around.

If the two skills were strongly related, you'd expect a very strong and obvious link. Maybe in form of both performing poorly, if damage to the same pathways impairs both. Or as one performing poorly while another performs unusually well (super-recognizers? children who learn reading at 2?) - if the two skills compete for brain real estate and create a performance tradeoff, as claimed.

It's the one that immediately set off my alarm bell. I always try to put myself in the shoes of a scientist and imagine how it would be possible to design a study to test a claim. To me, this one implies humans of today are worse at recognizing faces compared to humans of the past who did not read as much or at all. That one cannot possibly be tested because you cannot test the cognitive capabilities of people of the past who no longer exist.

On the more productive side, this suggests we might develop standardized tests of human capabilities and limits that would allow people of the future to compare themselves to us.

There are people who are illiterate today who you can test.

I'm struggling to think of any way to test the hypothesis which is (A) practical and (B) accurate.

For example, suppose you sampled a group today and found an inverse-correlation between "good at recognizing many faces" and "good at recognizing written text"... That still wouldn't show that one facility grew causing the other to shrink, because maybe people are just born (or early-development-ed) with a certain bias.

The part of the brain that recognises faces quite literally shrinks in literates compared to illiterates

https://www.unicog.org/publications/1-s2.0-S1364661311000738...

I'm quite willing to believe that human brains do Weird Stuff with respect to reusing circuits and development, but I still don't see how they concluded "the skill encourages the brain state" by disproving "the brain state encourages the acquisition of the skill."

It would be ethically difficult to randomly assigned children to groups (A) taught to read versus (B) forced to remain illiterate while ensuring both groups had the same number of people's faces in their social circles.

IIRC the author compares brain scans and recognition abilities of children of hunter gatherers that where sent to school vs same age relatives that were not. I’m bringing this up from memory now and I’m not so sure of this, but this claim stems from some studies of the author

The author uses mostly hunter-gatherers tribes/societies in different continents as the control groups, usually. Most of his work is in anthropology.

It seems that there is an study in which the part of the brain used to recognize words is also used for recognizing letters, and when one increases taking more space the other shrink. That study used brain scanners to measure and detect brain activity.

Or perhaps something that it's true even after we "debunked" it

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