[HN Gopher] Clever Hans (Intelligence Misattributon)
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       Clever Hans (Intelligence Misattributon)
        
       Author : anotherhue
       Score  : 52 points
       Date   : 2023-03-26 17:28 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
        
       | StrangeATractor wrote:
       | Sounds like Elon Musk fans.
        
       | LesZedCB wrote:
       | emotional intelligence is intelligence, too. sheesh. the premise
       | is flawed because the horse was engaged in a complex intelligent
       | interaction with the person.
       | 
       | trickery aside, Hans was clearly intelligent by several metrics.
       | mathematics are not the sole domain.
        
         | PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
         | where do you see any suggestion that Hans lacked all
         | intelligence?
        
           | LesZedCB wrote:
           | "Intelligence Misattribution"
           | 
           | right in the title.
           | 
           | either it's clearly a gradient/spectrum, or this article
           | isn't making the solid argument it might seem to be.
        
             | PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
             | no, it's not a gradient/spectrum. The HN title is just
             | missing extra words, like "Mathematical".
             | 
             | Nobody said that Hans had no intelligence, the point is
             | that Hans doesn't have the kind of intelligence that was
             | being attributed to him from the arithmetic demonstrations.
        
       | theknocker wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | version_five wrote:
       | I actually just posted an article that references Clever Hans
       | (pretty sure it's also the name of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale,
       | most of them have names like that).
       | 
       | It's actually not the best analogy for the current fad, I think
       | "confused by a mirror" works much better.
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850890 although I suppose
       | the idea of attributing intelligence where there isn't any holds.
       | 
       | Clever Hans is a good analogy for (mostly deep learning) ML
       | classifiers, the idea being a, say image classifier, can do
       | extremely well despite not using any features that actually
       | causally inform the decision being made. So when the background
       | changes, or lighting, or some other thing, it fails utterly. This
       | is actually true for almost all image classifiers.
        
         | anotherhue wrote:
         | I generally agree, Hans came to mind when I read a recent post
         | where people discovered they had been nudging gpt towards
         | answers without realising it.
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35306095
        
           | version_five wrote:
           | Ah, interesting. I suppose that's a lot like what
           | psychologists or psychics try and do, convince you to prompt
           | them without you noticing.
           | 
           | Reminds me a bit of an old demo where you're trying to
           | measure a certain signal shape in the presence of heavy
           | noise. You get shown waveforms and decide if it looks like
           | there might be a signal present or not, and the ones you
           | approve get averaged to pull the signal out. Very quickly,
           | even if all you are shown is zero mean gaussian noise, the
           | average of what you OK'd starts to look like the waveform
           | you're looking for.
        
         | Tao3300 wrote:
         | Eisenhans (Iron John)
        
         | kune wrote:
         | "Der kluge Hans" is not directly a Brother Grimm title. There
         | is a story "Der kluge Knecht", which translates into "The
         | clever farmhand". The hero of the story is called in the story
         | kluger Hans. There is another story called "Der gescheite
         | Hans", which means exactly the same. Both stories are not fairy
         | tales but droll stories about a simple-minded person.
        
           | ksherlock wrote:
           | The English translation includes "Clever Hans" which seems to
           | be Der gescheite Hans.
           | 
           | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2591/pg2591-images.html.
           | ..
        
       | seydor wrote:
       | Intelligence misattribution does not follow from the story of the
       | horse
       | 
       | More like accidental trickery
        
       | glutamate wrote:
       | GPT-4 is Clever Hansing at web scale
        
         | misnome wrote:
         | I think of it more like extremely efficient large-scale Cargo
         | Culting. It knows exactly what it should look like, without any
         | conception of why or the originating factors that led to it.
        
       | jszymborski wrote:
       | I only knew of this story from looking up the name of this
       | library on adversarial DL https://github.com/cleverhans-
       | lab/cleverhans
        
       | lostmsu wrote:
       | Title is editorialized.
       | 
       | It is also inapplicable to GPTs, as they can answer questions,
       | which the person asking does not know the answer to.
       | 
       | Case closed.
        
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       (page generated 2023-03-26 23:01 UTC)