I don’t think this is about the difficulties of communication (the effect persists even if you do a vivid real-time demonstration!) or about the “normal people” deliberately going in with the mindset of not being impressed. I think it’s just flatly because they don’t have a reference frame for grokking why this is supposed to be impressive.
It’s particularly clear in the grandfather example. The man probably has no idea how any of the current technology works, it’s all black-box magic to him. Why should “the box is able to generate a picture ex nihilo given a natural-language description of it” parse as significantly more impressive to him than “the box is able to find any picture on the internet given its annotation”? Given a gears-level model of things, it’s obvious to us; lacking such a model, the impressiveness is just an informed attribute.
Similar is in effect with non-tech-savvy younger people. They don’t think about this stuff much.
Similar is in effect with you, when it comes to some field you’re not familiar with at all. If there was some amazing breakthrough in e. g. seismography (or linen manufacture, or galaxy-evolution modeling), and you were presented with two papers — one outlining it and one that’s just a completely ordinary paper in the field — how would you tell them apart? (Besides judging the excitement with which the text is written and such.)
Definitely good to keep this in mind, but to me some of this stuff seems obviously super impressive even if you do not know the technical details. Generating complex rich pictures on demand that mostly match requested details not being impressive doesn’t parse for me.
It parses for me; pretty sure a lot of people just don’t see why that is impressive, and I can model their mental state. (As the XKCD alt-text notes, last century a lot of specialists thought such problems were tractable for a small group of people working for a few months. The specialists have grown wiser since then, but who’s to say such understanding percolated to everyone else?)
But I suppose there is another component to this: whether you find something viscerally impressive depends on whether you think it’s actually cool or useful. We here have dispositions such as “technology is cool/powerful/dangerous!”, so we’re very impressed and excited to see technological breakthroughs. A lot of people don’t; they don’t immediately see the implications, don’t care that a major problem was solved, so it just looks like, say, nerds being excited by irrelevant nerd stuff.
By analogy, again, imagine that you were informed that some theorem in an obscure mathematical field far from any practical applications was solved after decades of work. Even if you grok why it was so difficult, would you be excited by these news? (Or maybe “we’ve finally found this obscure species of moss long thought extinct!” or “we’ve improved the technique for filtering clay water by 1%!”.)
I don’t think this is about the difficulties of communication (the effect persists even if you do a vivid real-time demonstration!) or about the “normal people” deliberately going in with the mindset of not being impressed. I think it’s just flatly because they don’t have a reference frame for grokking why this is supposed to be impressive.
It’s particularly clear in the grandfather example. The man probably has no idea how any of the current technology works, it’s all black-box magic to him. Why should “the box is able to generate a picture ex nihilo given a natural-language description of it” parse as significantly more impressive to him than “the box is able to find any picture on the internet given its annotation”? Given a gears-level model of things, it’s obvious to us; lacking such a model, the impressiveness is just an informed attribute.
Similar is in effect with non-tech-savvy younger people. They don’t think about this stuff much.
Similar is in effect with you, when it comes to some field you’re not familiar with at all. If there was some amazing breakthrough in e. g. seismography (or linen manufacture, or galaxy-evolution modeling), and you were presented with two papers — one outlining it and one that’s just a completely ordinary paper in the field — how would you tell them apart? (Besides judging the excitement with which the text is written and such.)
Relevant XKCD.
Definitely good to keep this in mind, but to me some of this stuff seems obviously super impressive even if you do not know the technical details. Generating complex rich pictures on demand that mostly match requested details not being impressive doesn’t parse for me.
It parses for me; pretty sure a lot of people just don’t see why that is impressive, and I can model their mental state. (As the XKCD alt-text notes, last century a lot of specialists thought such problems were tractable for a small group of people working for a few months. The specialists have grown wiser since then, but who’s to say such understanding percolated to everyone else?)
But I suppose there is another component to this: whether you find something viscerally impressive depends on whether you think it’s actually cool or useful. We here have dispositions such as “technology is cool/powerful/dangerous!”, so we’re very impressed and excited to see technological breakthroughs. A lot of people don’t; they don’t immediately see the implications, don’t care that a major problem was solved, so it just looks like, say, nerds being excited by irrelevant nerd stuff.
By analogy, again, imagine that you were informed that some theorem in an obscure mathematical field far from any practical applications was solved after decades of work. Even if you grok why it was so difficult, would you be excited by these news? (Or maybe “we’ve finally found this obscure species of moss long thought extinct!” or “we’ve improved the technique for filtering clay water by 1%!”.)