But there’s a dark secret which everyone in cognitive or behavioral psychology knows: All of these explanations are nonsense. Our decisions about whether we like someone or not are set within the first few seconds of conversation, and can be influenced by something as seemingly random as whether they were holding a hot or cold drink before shaking your hand. Unconscious biases pervade our thinking, and can be measured, even though we aren’t aware of them. Cognitive biases are one of the largest (and IMO most interesting) branches of psychology research today.
And this goes to the second problem, which is the real heart of the matter: ML systems are very smart in their domain, but know nothing at all about the broader world, unless they were taught it. And when trying to think about all the ways in which different pictures could be identified as diff…