selective attention test

This is sound advice. The only time I've made contact with a moving car as a cyclist was when I was going past an off-ramp. The weird thing was that I thought the driver "saw me". It was late morning, no problem with visibility. From my POV, she was looking right at me. In fact, she was looking "through" me. She simply was expecting other cars and a person on a bike was not what she was looking for. Human attention is very much selective. Check out this shocking video: ▶ this video After that, I ride with a bright flashing headlight at all times, even daylight. It gives some measure of protection, I think.

Never made that claim, but dawn and dusk are the most risky. Mine happened on a lunch break, can't see through rock either. But you only see a fraction of the wildlife that is there. If your sole stratagy is to see them you may be surprised how many deer hit the sides of cars. Complacency and selective attention are very real human problems. The classic basketball game example of selective attention if you don't buy it. ▶ this video

A friend who lives in North Carolina sent me a video of the raging floodwaters in his state- at least that's what the superimposed text claimed it was. When I looked closer, it was clearly an Indian city filled with Indian people and Indian cars. He hadn't noticed anything except the flood water. It reminded me of that famous selective attention test video[1]. I won't ruin it for those who haven't seen it, but it's amazing what details we can miss when we aren't looking for them. I suspect this is made even worse when we're casually viewing videos in a disjointed way as on social media and we're not even giving one part of the video our full attention. 1. ▶ this video

LLMs are radically unlike organic minds. Given their performance, I think it is important to pay attention to their weirdnesses — I can call them "intelligent" or "dumb" without contradiction depending on which specific point is under consideration. Transistors outpace biological synapses by the same degree to which a marathon runner outpaces continental drift. This speed difference is what allows computers to read the entire text content of the internet on a regular basis, whereas a human can't read all of just the current version of the English language Wikipedia once in their lifetime. But current AI is very sample-inefficient: if a human were to read as much as an LLM, they would be world experts at everything, not varying between "secondary school" and "fresh graduate" depending on the subject… but even that description is misleading, because humans have the System 1/System 2[0] distinction and limited attention[1], whereas LLMs pay attention to approximately everything in the context window and (seem to) be at a standard between our System 1 and System 2. If you're asking about an LLM's intelligence because you want to replace an intern, then the AI are intelligent; but if you're asking because you want to know how many examples they need in order to decode North Sentinelese or Linear A, then (from what I understand) these AI are extremely stupid. It doesn't matter if a submarine swims[2], it still isn't going to fit into a flooded cave. [0] link [1] ▶ this video link link link [2] link

> it doesn't understand its own limitations, ie it has no self awareness. And how much self awareness do humans have, exactly? We walk around with heads filled with false memories[1], accidentally ignore surprisingly prominent stimuli[2], and struggle to understand things as simple as material color[3]. And people are mostly unaware of these limitations, or those examples would not be considered surprising! I think we plan around the limitations we observe, not our real limitations. If that's the case, then LLMs simply lack training data to notice those limitations. [1] link [2] ▶ this video (old selective attention test) [3] link