Billions of Sketches Reveal Hidden Cultural Variation in Human Concepts | Hacker News Reader

Billions of Sketches Reveal Hidden Cultural Variation in Human Concepts

arxiv.org

134 pointsAnon8422 comments

This seems to be based on Google's QuickDraw datasets. 50 million samples are available in an open dataset,

https://github.com/googlecreativelab/quickdraw-dataset

> To build the dataset, we keep only sketches that have been recognized by the neural network in the QuickDraw game. To prevent imbalance from overly represented countries (e.g., the US), we down-sample the data by focusing on the 100 most prominent countries and capping the number of drawings per category–country pair at 10,000. [p19]

I remember is 2017 closer to the original release of the quick draw data set, there was some analysis of which way circles tended to be drawn in different counties. https://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/way-you-...

The most striking real world example of something similar has always been the different ways different cultures count/show numbers on a single hand (Ask a friend to show the number 3 on a hand). As far as concepts - it’s a difference in how we perceive the “starting point” of a hand.

single hand six in chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_number_gestures

There's a story in Rhodes' book on the atom bomb of Otto Frisch & Liese Mettner discussing the ideation of nuclear fission analogised to cell fission, drawn as a dumbbell viewed head on with the neck of the split a circle inside the bigger cell circle:, where we classically see two cells splitting side by side with a channel between them: she meant exactly the same thing viewed 90° rotated.

One paper I am always citing to my students when discussing composition in painting is: ‘Cultural differences in lateral biases on aesthetic judgments: The effect of native reading direction’

The title speaks for itself.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40167-018-0062-6

That's a very cool paper. Weird that LTR people have this bias more than RTL readers? It may have been an artefact of the study design, they state in the results that most RTL readers were bilingual (and the LTR readers presumably not, given that the study was done in Canada), that the study instructions were in English and that this may have primed the RTL readers to be more LTR-y.

The phone cluster was especially amusing to see in the context of visiting a small history museum in Ohio earlier today with my kids (12 years old) and explaining to them about how a rotary dial phone worked.

(The added bonus comes from watching Monsters and Minions with them yesterday and during a scene where the director is informed that they ran out of film, my daughter turned to me and asked, “What’s film?”)

Sometimes this is exaggerated. How do people view slide rules, telegraphs, and gramophones, or other historical artifacts from a further generation ago? They aren't that strange, and neither should rotary phone or film be to the current generation.

I agree on your general idea but rotary phones were a real PITA.

They were slow to operate. We jumped in a very short time to numberpad phones, which initially only replayed the analog signal of rotary phones. I'm surprised that nobody built an analog phone with a numberpad that operated a hidden rotary dial before electronics got everywhere. It would probably need to be plugged into main but those phones were not mobile so a socket was always available.

On the other side, a 33 or 45 rpm record is only inconvenient to store and transport but it plays back in the same time of any modern music format and seeking is not so bad: you can see where you move the head and with a little of practice one gets quite good at it.

Cassettes were another PITA.

The slowness of rotary phones is coupled to the exchange, which expects pulses at a specific rate (about 10 per second). Shifting to a keypad form factor doesn't speed that up, and would mean you need to be careful about how quickly you dial (or have a way to buffer keypresses). I think that's a major reason why keypad dialing and DTMF signaling were so closely connected.

I know how it worked. Buffering (probably complicated on a pure mechanical device) or locking the keys until the dial came back to rest would still be better than rotating and misrotating the dial.

The funnest bit is page 6 with sketches arranged into clusters visually. Very cool.

I would have really liked to see the cultural variation shown visually - i.e. do Eastern Europeans and Americans have different default ways of showing a pizza or a phone?

Poorly conceived thesis; if the concepts differ, then they are different concepts.

1. Please read the paper before making that judgement; it is brief. The paper is focused on variation of visual representation of concepts, not variation of concepts themselves. That the concepts of “smiley face” or “pizza” are sketched differently by different people does not mean that those different sketches are actually representing different concepts. They very clearly are still representing the same concepts.

2. However, there can absolutely be variation of concepts without necessitating treatment of those variations as separate concepts (up to a point). There are very strong arguments for understanding concepts as being very often not rigid but fluid/cloudy. Football and crossword puzzles are both wildly different variations of the concept of “games” for example, yet that concept is able to contain such disparate variations without becoming absurd or impractical. See Douglas Hofstadter’s books “Surfaces and Essences” and “ Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies ”; Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” also touches on this, as do many other reputable thinkers in philosophy of mind.

The universal human language is not music, it is donut.

Three languages understood by humans: Music, Math, Money. Also donut.

That's a really neat study. Enjoyed it.

This is really cool.

Sounds like a lot of sketches.

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