why proofreading is hard

Proofreading is hard, because there's a lot of processing going on between seeing and reading.

After reading the
the sentence, you are
now aware that the
the human brain
often does not
inform you that the
the word 'the' has
been repeated twice
every time.

We are pretty insensitive to letter shape (fortunately, given the plethora of fonts), so can quite readily overlook O-0 and I-l-1 problems, although these are worse in some fonts than in others.  An extreme example doing the rounds at the moment (although it's not new), based on maximal substitution of digits for letters, is:

‎7H15 M3554G3 53RV35 7O PR0V3 H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5 1MPR3551V3 7H1NG5! 1N 7H3 B3G1NN1NG 17 WA5 H4RD BU7 N0W, 0N 7H15 LIN3 Y0UR M1ND 1S R34D1NG 17 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17

By it's not just doubled words and simple substitution that we can overlook.  The most extreme example I've seen is:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Spell checkers, though, are a boon for many of these problems.  So today's proofreaders can concentrate on higher-level issues

---

Sources:

1. After reading the...
2. an early reference to 7H15 M3554G3
3. the research behind Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch

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narrating complexity

Our new interdisciplinary network on Narrative and Complex Systems is having its first workshop, in York.  Yesterday we had a great time explaining to each other what we did, from narrative in fiction, in films, in computer games, to the narrative of complexity and emergence, and trying to discover common concepts.  We finished the day by brainstorming a mindmap:

This process was amazingly helpful in distilling our ideas.  The result, however, is pretty incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't there!

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seeing is believing -- orly?

We've all grown up with standard optical illusions -- the Ponzo illusion of converging lines making identical objects appear to be different sizes, that kind of thing.

These illusions have been getting more sophisticated.

There's a whole set of colour illusions. First of all there are the ones that show two identically shaded squares (A and B), but one appears white, one black, due to our vision perception "correcting" for shade. Then there are ones that make black and white photographs appear to be in colour, thanks to a persistence of vision effect.

There are aural illusions, such as the ever rising or falling Shepard tone, too.

Aural and optical channels can be combined. I first came across the McGurk effect a few years ago. In this a person speaks a particular simple repetitive sound, and the sound you percieve depends on whether you listen only, watch only, or do both. Weird.

Although these are fun, and weird, I feel I have some kind of handle on how, and why, these happen. I think I can see what's being fooled. But then, via Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog, I came across the "Flashed face distortion effect". Watch the video at You Tube. If you look at the individual faces, they look fine. But if you stare at the central cross as the faces flash up, "some faces appear highly deformed, even grotesque. The degree of distortion is greatest for faces that deviate from the others in the set on a particular dimension (eg if a person has a large forehead, it looks particularly large)."

Now this is really weird. Disturbing, even. To me at least, some of these faces appear almost alien -- until looked at directly. I'm seeing stuff that isn't even there!

These illusions with their ever-increasing sophistication demonstrate how much better our understanding of perception and cognition is getting. And this increased understanding is showing how very fallible our perceptions can be. It graphically demonstrates the need for rigour, validation, and repeatability in observations, and just why anecdotal evidence should be so suspect.

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Other minds, other worlds

I've recently read Devlin's Logic and Information. One example he gave in there got me thinking at a tangent; on p.103 he says:

Just as when you are thirsty you don't concern yourself with the complex biochemical processes that led to that state. Nor do you try to analyze just what constitutes that state. You may, conceivably, just say to yourself "I'm thirsty." Usually though, you simply go and get a drink, and think no more of it.

I have a somewhat different experience.

When I was younger, I got thirsty but didn't realise it. I got mild dehydration sometimes because of this. When I was a student, I once gave up coffee for a week, just to see if I could. I didn't crave coffee, but I had a constant bad headache, so decided the withdrawal symptoms weren't worth it. Only later did I realise the headaches were mainly dehydration: when I gave up the coffee I didn't think to substitute anything else.

Later on, I started making a connection between a certain physiological state---a particular feeling in my mouth, throat, and head---and the fact that if I didn't drink something soon, I would get a headache. I eventually deduced that this physiological state must be what people refer to as "thirst".

Now, when I recognise that state, I say to myself "ah, I must be thirsty", and go and get a drink. But I definitely do have to think about it. The experience is almost totally intellectual, and quite easy to ignore (despite the foreknowledge of the headache), qualitatively unlike hunger, where something inside me is going "food, food, food! now!!"

Okay---writing all this has made me recognise that I'm currently experiencing that physiological state again---I've analysed the state, and decided it means that I must be thirsty. So, having thought about it, I'd better go and drink a glass of water.

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Artificial BIID

Charlie Stross, in his recent blog post "Three arguments against the singularity", made an interesting comment on how to stop advanced AIs going all Skynet on humanity, an idea he attributes to Karl Schroeder:

Consciousness seems to be a mechanism for recursively modeling internal states within a body. In most humans, it reflexively applies to the human being's own person: but some people who have suffered neurological damage (due to cancer or traumatic injury) project their sense of identity onto an external object. Or they are convinced that they are dead, even though they know their body is physically alive and moving around.

If the subject of consciousness is not intrinsically pinned to the conscious platform, but can be arbitrarily re-targeted, then we may want AIs that focus reflexively on the needs of the humans they are assigned to — in other words, their sense of self is focussed on us, rather than internally. They perceive our needs as being their needs, with no internal sense of self to compete with our requirements. While such an AI might accidentally jeopardize its human's well-being, it's no more likely to deliberately turn on its external "self" than you or I are to shoot ourselves in the head. And it's no more likely to try to bootstrap itself to a higher level of intelligence that has different motivational parameters than your right hand is likely to grow a motorcycle and go zooming off to explore the world around it without you.

I’d not come across this idea before, and when I read it first, I thought "cool, that’s an interesting solution to the problem". But the idea kept pecking away in my brain, and after a while I began to be very uneasy about it. Not because of the AIs, but because of us.

There's a problem called Body Integrity Identity Disorder, or BIID (which I thought it was called body dysmorphia before I checked, but that seems to be somewhat different), where people want to have a limb amputated, because it does not "belong" to them. The current idea is that the limb is somehow "missing" from the brain's "map" of the body, and so really isn't part of that person's body identity.

Well, what happens to my body-map when I have all those AIs with their sense of self safely focussed on me? Now, the human brain is remarkably plastic, and we do manage to incorporate many external devices into our body-map quite freely. Canes, tools, cars, whatever, can quickly come to feel like part of our bodies. But these are all under the direct control of the very brain where the body-map resides. What of more autonomous tools with their own brains (albeit focussed on me)? What if for some reason those focussed AIs don't smoothly mesh into my body-map? Will I want to "amputate" them? And will what today seems like a natural desire sometime in the future be treated as a mental disorder on my part?

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I can't go deeper

A few days ago, I came across this quotation:

We humans can take an entire proposition and give it a role in some larger proposition. Then we can take the larger proposition and embed it in a still-larger one, creating a hierarchical tree structure of propositions inside propositions. Not only did the baby eat the slug, but the father saw the baby eat the slug, and I wonder whether the father saw the baby eat the slug, and the father knows that I wonder whether he saw the baby eat the slug, and I can guess that the father knows that I wonder whether he saw the baby eat the slug, and so on. Just as ability to add 1 to a number bestows the ability to generate an infinite set of numbers, the ability to embed a proposition inside another proposition bestows the ability to think an infinite number of thoughts.

---Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, pp124-5, Penguin, 1997

I've seen many similar such examples, and they all say that because we can recurse, we can think (or generate) an infinite (I think they mean unbounded) number of thoughts (or sentences).

Funnily enough, the examples given always stop around the depth shown above. That's because although we can recurse 4 or 5 or 6 deep, we can't (well, I know I can't) go much deeper. My stack overfloweth.

Unboundedness requires us to be able to recurse to a depth much much more than 6. It requires any depth: to a hundred, to a trillion, to a googolplex, and beyond. Clearly, it is nonsensical to think that we can do this.

I believe that some of the writers who come up with such statements about unbounded recursion think we need it to get a sufficiently large number of sentences. But even without it, there is no problem that we might run out of thoughts. Combinatorics is quite sufficient to give a ridiculously huge number of possible sentences. "The small purple octopus frowned thoughtfully as it slowly drank cold green tea from the heavy pewter mug held gently in its fifth tentacle" -- I bet that's never been said before! And the number of sentences that follow just this one particular, rather simple, structure is mind-bogglingly huge (even the number that actually make some kind of sense).

So let's dispense with the idea of "an infinite number of sentences thorough unbounded recursion", please. We don't need to go that deep.

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