[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.

[grawprog]

>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.

But it is, to the point where there's songs I learn only somewhat and i'll get confused to which lyrics are which and I'll sing a mix of the two songs when playing them, imagine and no woman no cry jump are two it happens to me with all the time. Same with truly madly deeply and kryptonite oddly enough. Then there's the whole pachabel's canon meme which is entirely true. There's a few songs, the most recent is some maroon 5 and i think a jonas brother's song which I was confused as hell as to why I liked until I realized they're just another rework of canon.

That's not even getting started on the direct ripoffs such as the 1000'@ of songs based on the Amen break or the thousands of songs that are basically a simple 8 or 12 bar blues progression or the tangled web of constant remakes that is reggae and dancehall and every song that lifts a bassline or melody from them without credit all the way up to such obscure things as the friendly neighbours tune from earthbound being a relick of the real rock riddim.

[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.

[dkersten]

> Sleights of hand are not proof the brain is failing in any way

You missed the point of what I was saying, which is that because of my interest in sleight of hand, I spend a lot of time reading and watching different material on "magic", the book Sleights of Mind being such material. Its not about sleight of hand, but rather that it's easy to trick the mind into believing things. Also, most sleight of hand isn't really about what our eyes see at all, but more about masking actions -- hiding one action with a bigger action or through misdirection, making use of the fact that our minds find it hard to focus on multiple things at once. I would say most sleight of hand tricks are about curating what the other person perceives. Sure, sometimes its by hiding what is being done from the eyes, but often its doing something in plain sight but in a way that the spectators don't connect the dots.

From the wikipedia synopsis of Sleights of Mind: "Macknik and Martinez-Conde say that magic tricks fool us because humans have hardwired processes of attention and awareness that are hackable. Good magicians use our inherent mental and neural limitations against us by leading us to perceive and feel what we are neurologically inclined to."

I'll give you a simple example:

In card magic, using a concept known to magicians as "time misdirection" (that is, by putting time between cause and effect), spectators often retell the performance as having happened in their hands, even when they never actually touched the cards.

The book and other material has more. The point is that our brains piece together incomplete information and make assumptions. We see what we expect to see, hear what we expect to hear. Our brains pattern match and see patterns in noise.

I'm not saying that this isn't useful to our survival, if you look at the outer ring of this image from wikipedia[1], it shows that there are very good and valuable reasons why we do these things, but they still lead us to make mistakes, errors, wrong assumptions or act illogically, sometimes to disastrous effect. I'm not and didn't say it was a "kludge" exactly, but I do think that the brain is taking less-than-perfect shortcuts (to save time, memory or make up for too much/too little/too noisy information).

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitiv...

[nwienert]

I definitely understood that, I just don’t find it convincing. The pattern matching is as good as it can be, and as suited to survival as can be, and kludgy is never the term I’d use for that. It’s just an oddly negative way to frame the most competent and complex thing we don’t understand yet.

[dkersten]

Do you agree that there are shortcuts, though, which often lead to erroneous outcomes? Like I said, I didn’t personally use the word kludge just that I think the brain is taking shortcuts and those shortcuts lead to imperfect decisions/results at times. I do agree that it’s a super complex system which we don’t yet understand, so why kludgeyness that we see may well just be something we don’t see the true nature or reason for yet.