Feb 17 2012: I tend to agree, although I think that having a part of the mind which you're not conscious of is probably necessary to reduce overhead in thinking about things - like the concept of data hiding in computer science... I think when people talk about intuition they're really talking about things like inferring from pattern recognition or by analogy, as well as rules which they've learned and then internalized and incorporated into their perceptions and judgements and are no longer aware that they're incorporating into their decisions, but which ineffably seem to make their decisions "better" than someone else's on a subject. I've heard people talk about "developing your intuition on a topic" and a lot of times they bring up analogies to think about (like the water pump analogy with electricity). I also remember a study in which a complex formula predicted the next position of a dot on a screen, and you'd get ten dollars if you could reliably predict where the dot would land next after a while, and $100 if you could explain how you were able to predict it. Participants were able to learn where the dot would land next, and so could a neural net, but they were unable to put their understanding into words - they didn't have privileged enough access to their own brains to trace their thought processes. Being conscious of your thoughts seems to be a higher level mode and I think a lot of the details are hidden from us because it was simply never to our adaptive advantage to be aware of them.
Feb 17 2012: What is needed is some level of wikilike interaction with the model, then, it sounds like, a 'backstage' or a way to tag stuff where people can communicate their doubts or maybe in a more formal circumstance discrepancies between what is observed and what's modeled, so that this data can drive the creation of new models.
Feb 16 2012: expert systems stuff could help too, since it could do a lot of the logical symbol-pushing and answer questions or suggest relevant information.
Feb 16 2012: A lot of this is already done, really, but:
Augmented reality seems like a promising approach, its already being used a bit in interactive visualisations. Being able to overlay internal views of things onto the things themselves, or deal with models of things interactively with gestures or occular control or neuro control seems useful.
Being able to modify or tag models with meta-data collaboratively might help people build different visualisations based on the tags. Like people might tag all the possible tumors they see in some high resolution scan of a patient, and a doctor might check the spots that are getting multiple hits by having them stand out in some way, as a heat map skinned over the model or something.Some of this kind of stuff, after you've gathered enough human data you can start training neural nets to identify features based on identifications made by people.
I like the idea of using data hiding in 3d models a lot. Being able to open up a thing and dig into it with more complexity or pack it down to a simpler form means you can kind of tweak which aspects of the representation you need to see in how much detail. This is also a pretty good way to simulate and blueprint stuff, since the highest level blocks of your simulation can be dummy modules until their details are filled in.
Since lots of different kinds of systems interact with each other, I'd suggest a kind of universal modular simulation system, where users could get on and collaboratively apply detail, that was in some way tagged or connected to physical scans or models if possible, with a lot of different views that a person can arrive at, and with the ability to take the model part of it and hide it completely, or make it as abstract as possible, or dig into specific details as deep as necessary. modules might also be linked to media that can explain how that component works. And if all the people using the model can communicate with each other, they can all share intuition.
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A reply on Conversation: How can computer models help us build intuition?
A reply on Conversation: How can computer models help us build intuition?
A comment on Conversation: How can computer models help us build intuition?
A comment on Conversation: How can computer models help us build intuition?
Augmented reality seems like a promising approach, its already being used a bit in interactive visualisations. Being able to overlay internal views of things onto the things themselves, or deal with models of things interactively with gestures or occular control or neuro control seems useful.
Being able to modify or tag models with meta-data collaboratively might help people build different visualisations based on the tags. Like people might tag all the possible tumors they see in some high resolution scan of a patient, and a doctor might check the spots that are getting multiple hits by having them stand out in some way, as a heat map skinned over the model or something.Some of this kind of stuff, after you've gathered enough human data you can start training neural nets to identify features based on identifications made by people.
I like the idea of using data hiding in 3d models a lot. Being able to open up a thing and dig into it with more complexity or pack it down to a simpler form means you can kind of tweak which aspects of the representation you need to see in how much detail. This is also a pretty good way to simulate and blueprint stuff, since the highest level blocks of your simulation can be dummy modules until their details are filled in.
Since lots of different kinds of systems interact with each other, I'd suggest a kind of universal modular simulation system, where users could get on and collaboratively apply detail, that was in some way tagged or connected to physical scans or models if possible, with a lot of different views that a person can arrive at, and with the ability to take the model part of it and hide it completely, or make it as abstract as possible, or dig into specific details as deep as necessary. modules might also be linked to media that can explain how that component works. And if all the people using the model can communicate with each other, they can all share intuition.