The User Illusion

"This is by Tor Nørretranders, who is Danish. It’s about how our minds and our memories work. What he focuses on is the tiny bit of bandwidth through which information can go into our brains. It can handle very, very little information at any one time. Much of what we experience in the world is furnished by our memory and what we expect to see. For example, I’m looking outside. I’ve looked out this window many times, and I see the tiles with the last bit of snow melting on them. My eyes are focused on one particular tile with a little bit of snow on it. Around it, the shed across the street, the trees, I’m not really seeing them. I have an image of them, but it’s furnished by my memory. That’s important in Jeopardy! and all kinds of areas of our life. We, as humans, fill in the blanks with what we expect to see, or what we expect to think or hear or know. Very little is actually coming from our senses. I’m going to experiment on you, based on something I read in this book. Here’s my question: How many of each type of animal did Moses bring onto the ark? You fell for it! It should be zero. Because Moses did not have an ark. But your mind says two because you’re focusing on the important part of the question, which is how many animals went onto the ark. That’s what we do. Jeopardy! creates clues to stump players sometimes, and the funny thing is that Watson actually falls for those tricks too. Watson too will think, ‘Animals, ark, Biblical figure, I’ll answer two, even though it shouldn’t be Moses but Noah.’ The other fascinating thing in the Nørretranders book relates to information theory. He spends a lot of time on the second law of thermodynamics, and extends that into the world of information. You’ve got all this information and it’s subject to entropy. It’s all over the place; there’s no intelligence to it; it’s just a flood of data. You’ve got to use a whole lot of energy to distill that information into intelligence. And that is what Watson — and computer science generally — is all about."