[jfarmer]

It's more broad than that. I'm pretty sure that's just what it means to be an expert at anything. You have a set of heuristics at work as an expert. To a beginner, everything has the same emphasis. They won't even be able to differentiate correct from incorrect in many cases.

Watch a lawyer scan through a contract or a copyeditor edit your essay -- same thing. They catch in a second something you'd never catch in hours and hours, if ever.

[jfarmer]

It's funny because that's perfectly backwards. :)

Machine learning is a model of this thing we observe in ourselves. Don't mistake a picture of a pipe for the pipe itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)

[LukeShu]

I'm not sure what your point is. What is the image, and what is the actual object?

[jfarmer]

I was replying to wting, but HN doesn't let me reply to a reply by the same author as a way to combat back-and-forth style arguments, I guess.

He said that experts doing that is "trained pattern matching gained through experience, i.e. machine learning."

But that's backwards: machine learning in this style is a model of something we observe in ourselves. The thing that's in us is the pipe, the machine learning algorithm is the picture.

[pooriaazimi]

You have to either wait a few more minutes till the "reply" link appears, or simply click on "link" link(!) and write your reply there.

[jfarmer]

Thanks! I've been an HN member for ~5 years and I didn't know this. :D

[wting]

It's trained pattern matching gained through experience, i.e. machine learning.

What you said in the GP post stands true, it's important that beginners learn the correct patterns (look up documentation for idiomatic examples) and not false ones (blindly copy and pasting code).

You see this all the time in casinos; their goals is to reinforce poor pattern matching behavior. From roulette tables' results signs to bad poker players chasing terrible odds, the human mind has the ability to disproportionally increase the significance of selected memories.