“I see dead people.” – The Sixth Sense
I find this picture . . . disturbing. Should this be the XY-Files?
I think that a lot of times, we have no ideas of the capability of humanity. From the ability to understand subatomic particles from the basis of equations and thought experiments that we constructed to the ability to build pyramids and land on the Moon, we continually do lots of stuff the warning label said not to do. And we make bratwurst. Which is, when cooked right, the Best of All Possible Foods®.
Human senses are apparently much more finely tuned than we ever expected and we’ve managed to gather data that we’re way smarter than we ever thought we were. Human senses are adequate to:
- Around 60% of the time, judge from a photo if a man or woman is gay or straight. For some reason, this gives gay people the heebee-geebees.
- Determine which student came from a rich or poor family with about 53% accuracy. Not super accurate, but better than chance. Perhaps it was because Ivana Trump was in the photo stack?
- Determine if people are sick from looking at a picture of their stupid sick face – 81% of the time.
- And we might have even more amazing skills:
That could have been the end of it. But another biochemist encouraged the pair to track Milne down and try a blind T-shirt test: She sniffed six sweaty tees from people diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and six from healthy controls. Milne correctly identified which six had Parkinson’s, but she also tagged one of the control subjects as having the disease.
Despite that error, Barran was intrigued—all the more so eight months later, when the same supposedly healthy control subject Milne had identified was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
This is from National Geographic . . . you can view the article here (LINK). It’s not a great article, but I’ll cite the source . . . .
Sick people and well people, I’m not sure who is who, mainly because I don’t care about other people. (Audrey Henderson/St Andrews University)
Yeah, humans can smell diseases. Or, at least old British women can smell Parkinson’s disease, and some people can see them, at least some of the time.
And AI shows that what our brains are doing is processing subtle biological cues that are actual, physical patterns. An AI was set up to determine the whole gay/straight question by feeding it tons of pictures of gay and straight people, and the accuracy of the algorithm was in the high 80% level, if you gave it five facial images per person. Me? My ability to judge gay people vs. straight people is totally non-existent unless I “accidently” open the door when they’re having sex. My ability is zero.
Here’s what the AI figured out: both Gay and Straight people are blurry. NYTimes was where I found this, but it was originally from the original study.
One thing I’ve noted – generally just watching two wrestlers walking onto a mat, I can guess the winning wrestler about 80% of the time. And I can tell which two bratwurst will be tastiest when I grill them. Even if it’s a tie. (It’s always a tie – they’re bratwurst.)
