[nwienert]

I’d take the other side of that strongly, if it was possible. The human brain is definitely not a kludge by any definition. And a lot of the tricks people think they know are not tricks at all.

Neuroscientists are the new doctors of the 50s. We thought the appendix was useless turns out it has many uses. We thought priming and all these “tricks” were things and then the crisis and Kahneman et al were debunked.

I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the incredible complex things we do, and we’re just so far from really understanding it that we run around appendicizing all sorts of things we just don’t really know well yet.

[robotresearcher]

> I bet the brain is just as elegant and powerful as it has to be to do the incredible complex things we do

But no more than that. Which is what Minsky was saying.

[nwienert]

Not at all. Kludge being the operative word. I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts. It “has to be” incredibly good at so many things - it’s basically the perfect general computation machine. It “has to be” not kludgy. Minsky is part of an era where scientists were all about showing how humans were easily fallible and much of that was debunked.

Sorry but you’re not following my point or his if you think they agree.

[grawprog]

>I claim the brain is fantastically not kludgy. It has incredibly flexibility, adaptiveness and no duct tape or shortcuts.

Why can't it be both? Maybe the duct tape and shortcuts are what give the human brain it's fantastic adaptability. Duct tape and shortcuts aren't a bad thing necessarily. Personally, I think that's what gives the human race as a whole it's fantastic adaptability. You've got millions of people each with their own duct tape and shortcuts to the same problems, meaning each of us does things just a little bit differently, we see other humans with their shortcuts and slap them onto our own with some duct tape and we get better at things or learn something new. Do this over millions of years and generations and you've got a pretty damn capable brain that's slapped together millions of years worth duct taped together solutions and skills that keep growing as we hand our giant ball of duct tape to successive generations.

[nwienert]

I just don’t think in millions of years of evolution the shortcuts are what worked. I think our brains are the result of non shortcuts winning over a long period of time.

It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape analogy. I think it’s because programming, which is basically the polar opposite of a brain (precise and unintelligent) requires so much damn duct tape if you want to get anywhere useful. Meanwhile a brain literally requires as little duct tape as possible if you want it to be generally good.

[grawprog]

>It is funny how willing computer scientists are to want to use a duct tape analogy.

I'm not a computer scientist. I'm just going off of the way I learn and the way i've watched other people learn or the way i've seen people learn while i've been teaching them or training them. That and the general way everything kind of works. As amazing as everything in the world seems, when you break everything down to the smallest components, they all rely on the same skills and techniques we've been using since we were picking berries and hunting mammoths. The materials, accuracy and scales of our work have changed and improved dramatically, but fundamentally, most of what we do can be traced back to the same old things we've always done. We're just really good at building on layers and layers of things and applying things and knowledge to novel concepts and ideas.

Take music for an example, we just keep making the same music over and over and over again, yet we still find new and novel ways to make it sound different and new to the point where most people don't realize they've been listening to the same few songs in new forms for the last 100 years or so at least.

[nwienert]

Your music example is just wrong. Music has changed consistently, constantly and honestly miraculously and in such beautiful ways over the years. From all the great classical geniuses to jazz to the extraordinary advances in sound design and mixing, avante garde and experimental new styles that show up year after year, I mean that’s your example? Sorry, but disagree, strongly.

[joenot443]

> we just keep making the same music over and over and over again, yet we still find new and novel ways to make it sound different and new to the point where most people don't realize they've been listening to the same few songs in new forms for the last 100 years or so at least.

What do you mean by this? Oftentimes I see people reaching the conclusion that because a lot of modern music is built around the same major scales and largely homogenous chord progressions, it must be the same, but this simply isn't the case.

[dkersten]

The cognitive biases linked in another comment and other general failure of our reasoning and logic (or even how our pattern matchers work too well, seeing patterns where there are none, looking at you, clown-shaped-cloud) tells me that there are still shortcuts, errors and less-than-elegant. We make mistakes in reason and thought all the time, sometimes fatally. I don't think that diminishes from how incredible the brain is and how adaptable and generalised its function is, I just don't believe that it doesn't take shortcuts given all of the errors we make.

I'm a hobbyist at sleight-of-hand magic and therefore like to read and watch lots of material on the matter (eg the book "Sleights of Mind" by neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, and science writer Sandra Blakeslee) and there are an incredibly many ways to fool or trick the brain into believing untruths, even obvious ones.

[nwienert]

Sleights of hand are not proof the brain is failing in any way. That our visual processing is limited is not a sign that the brain is somehow taping together systems in poor ways.

Cognitive biases were also incredibly exaggerated and if you’ve read into the replication crisis and various pushback Kahneman has gotten on his studies you’ll find much of what we call cognitive bias was wrong or exaggerated.

That we figure out super inventive ways to trick others into thinking we’re not smart is just more proof of how clever we really can be.

A great example is loss aversion which, if you read the debate around, is a totally smart strategy given we have absorption barriers.

That I pay attention to things in a certain way that allows magicians to fool me in predictable ways doesn’t mean our brains are failing in some way - it means they are making a trade off that helped us survive better with the given processing power we have. But that trade off is almost certainly the smart trade off, and labeling it “kludgy” is lazy thinking.

[navjack27]

It's not kludgey until it's "certain" about something and then it just offloads to past experience reaching temporal projections.

[nwienert]

Sounds like the right way to do things. I mean people aren’t perfectly intelligent, but being a bit stubborn about things even when you’re wrong sounds like a safe strategy in world of incomplete information. If people were less wrong-headed-confident they may not defend important other things they don’t know 100% to be right.

It’s a heuristic that can be wrong, but the heuristic itself isn’t kludgy just the occasional specific use case can be wrong.

Here’s an analogy: any individual ant does many things that look stupid for its own survival. But would you call the ants thinking “kludgy”?

[jstummbillig]

> We thought the appendix was useless turns out it has many uses.

Can you elaborate?

I recently learned that current appendectomy procedure (at least in Europe) calls for the removal of the appendix even if a surgery should reveal that the organ is in fact completely healthy – because the procedure from that point is considered so unrisky, and the organ considered so useless, that the potential future risk of a medical professional misinterpreting the existence of an operational scar as an indicator of a previously performed appendectomy is deemed more problematic.

[chychiu]

One recent theory suggests that the appendix acts as a safehouse for beneficial gut bacteria in the event that the gut microflora is wiped out:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3551545/