Men Are Better at Maps Until Women Take This Course
nautil.us
nautil.us
I know that deep learning systems can recognise, e.g., different animal toys held in the hand, at different distances from the camera. How about shapes which are rotated? (I assume shapes rotated with the same face showing the camera are fairly trivial to recognise, I mean the other two rotations - 'pitch' and 'yaw').
I have a hunch that humans have a ton of perceptual hardware devoted to precisely this task, and that deep neural nets are going to have a hard time cracking it. Is my hunch accurate?
The way I understand it the most reliable way of training for plasticity if it is possible at all is to learn as many different things as you can. That means: Learn to program, learn a language with a different root (Chinese), learn to dance, learn woodworking, learn to practice law, learn to do team sport, etc.. Basically have as many hobbies as you can. (Switching every X months) making sure they have as little in common as possible.
Here's a talk on how long it takes to become 'good enough' at anything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY
Have fun ;)
Do you engage yourself on different hobbies such as you suggested? When do you stop one hobbie and move to another one?
The construct behind the IQ test is known as g, or general mental ability, as opposed to domain-specific ability. While it's true that repeated practice with a specific IQ test will boost performance, it won't boost it that much, and it won't generalize very well -- that kind of domain-specific improvement is not that interesting.
One interesting IQ test you might want to peek at would be Raven's matrices. Raven's matrices involve a 2-dimensional grid of figures which progressively change due to some hidden factors. The goal is to rapidly generate hypotheses as to what factors might be controlling for the figures, and to make a prediction as to what comes next.
On an aside, I think that the golden objective of AI is to develop a general thinking machine. Such a machine, when bounded by a goal, would be able to develop its own hardware drivers or make software better than itself. It would be able to tackle a game like Go without fine-tuning by expert Google employees, and that same machine would be able to look at scientific data and develop its own causal theories -- as opposed to a domain-specific Go machine, or a domain-specific Chess machine.
Actually they do themselves a disservice with these numbers. while it is true that out of 100 students, 20-30 more will graduate, the pass (retention) rate goes up by 40-60%.
I'd like to see them compare their course to other tasks that might seem intuitively helpful. Folding origami with instructions is one thing that immediately comes to mind.
I have to note that my father did that trick too (made a poster with algebraic defs, etc and put it above my study table). I am relatively good at math.
[1] http://www.iwitts.org/proven-practices/retention-sub-topics/...
I don't know if the ubiquity of GPS is helping or hurting this phenomenon.
Also it is interesting how "small" effect is, is it absolutely or relatively small?
Anyway, my small experiment had told me that even girly girls who participate in more or less manly sport activity (namely, karate) would score quite high in the tests from article. I actually tested several girls from karate group with the test like that, they were better than boys (though boys were older than girls).
However, I may be a bit biased. I did back the Oculus kickstarter.
By this logic, the use of fire for cooking is "some kind of hormones or evolution thing", not culture. (Or are there any cultures that never cook?)
That's not impossible at this point: humans don't fare that well on completely raw diet with studies of raw vegan diets show increases in amenorrhoea, underweightness, dental erosion and lower bone densities (raw non-vegan diet being possibly even riskier due to high concerns of food poisoning and food-borne diseases). Richard Wrangham has argued that modern humans are in fact obligate cooks (though he's also argued that modern human evolution was triggered by cooking, I know most anthropologists disagree with the latter, not sure about the former, could be an interesting question to ask in /r/askscience)
And if this isn't culture then I don't know what is.
My comment was something along the lines of this:
You can learn new skills by taking classes on them. In other news, scientists identify fluffy white object in sky as a 'cloud'.
On HN, though, please don't make snarky, shallow dismissals of new work. (It's far from obvious that you can learn any new skill by taking a class on it, and there's other interesting stuff in this article.)