I wonder what effect this will have on our culture long term. It would be unfortunate if Glass' determination ends being seen as the ground truth.
I have noticed a certain phenomenon where people who are bad at something read books about it to compensate, and then having read books on the subjects start considering themselves experts on it and preach to others, closing the loop from descriptive to prescriptive.
> I have noticed a certain phenomenon where people who are bad at something read books about it to compensate, and then having read books on the subjects start considering themselves experts on it and preach to others, closing the loop from descriptive to prescriptive.
I had a bad case of this, I did it a lot. Fortunately, some people made me aware of this tendency. Now a lot of those things I've learned are natural as if they've always been part of me. To be fair, there's 10 years in between both points.
I think this is a fairly natural cognitive bias, possibly a form of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but there might be a better explanation I don't know for sure.
Only a beginner can teach a beginner. First you struggle. Then you think you know it all. Then you forget what was so hard. Then you master it. And then you realize you know very little.
And yet, oddly, sometimes mastery confers the inability to teach something, because most of what you now know, you never learned in association to a structured explanation, only in association to your own trained reflexes.
People who learn a second language understand its grammar from the first stroke, since it’s taught along with the language. People who learn a first language recognize its grammar (i.e. they can tell you whether or not something is grammatical) but don’t understand it, because they picked the language up “naturally.”
Often a master will come to a sophomore student and ask them to explain a concept to the juniors (after checking their explanation for not having any faults the master can find), because a usual master’s explanation (presuming the master isn’t also a master of education) is far less useful to a junior’s understanding than a sophomore’s is. The master is aware of nuances that greatly affect the end result, but aren’t so relevant at first; while the sophomore is aware mostly of things in the order they’ve managed to absorb them so far—which likely reflects the order of least-to-most difficult to absorb, and so reflects the things the juniors would be most likely to be struggling with.
"Sophomore" is a term for second-year students (not even halfway done) that means "wise fool" referring to how they're at a level where they think they're smarter than they are, and they don't yet know what they don't know.
> I have noticed a certain phenomenon where people who are bad at something read books about it to compensate, and then having read books on the subjects start considering themselves experts on it and preach to others, closing the loop from descriptive to prescriptive.
A motivating way to learn is to teach or re-iterate what you know, you learn new things that way. Going overboard or thinking you are a genius on the topic suddenly is annoying but sometimes it is how that person is motivated.
As far as sharing what people know through learning, that they previously didn't know and is interesting and fresh to their mind, that is part of their learning process.
Spaced Learning [1] + Spaced Repetition [2] are very effective learning/memory techniques, revisiting a topic many times over time.
Even commenting on topics you are into or researched on, simply restating them sometimes leads to learning more about it, at a minimum it sets it into your knowledge through repetition or spaced learning.
There is a fun spaced learning game using Spaced Repetition called How To Remember Anything Forever-ish [3].
Really both techniques just pattern-ize already existing techniques how people learn things through repetition and time. It is really just revisiting a topic in intervals that will put it in memory and make it important, which the brain will spend more cycles on, and new ideas and uses for that knowledge come up.
Talking or sharing what you know about what you just learned is part of that unstructured spaced learning/repetition that helps learn. It plays into presentation as well, when you are teaching a topic you start by summarizing, then get to the details, then resurface with the summary while hitting key points multiple times throughout. A teacher or presenter will learn more and more the more they repeat that topic/lesson etc that is impossible to get to on early iterations or draft/sketch phases.
could also just be misguided (or even genuine) passion. think the loudmouth is common among the activist types too. e.g. people we sometimes say in retrospect "must have felt like a Cassandra" etc
I think the problematic thing here is seeing alone isn't feeling+seeing but making assumptions that it is.
I think everyone to some extent learns to hack some aspect or another of the social fabric by something close to simulating patterns which come more or less natural to another person. But there are introspective lessons in coming to terms with these obstacles in the first place that are maybe the things of truer value and which could be lost in artificial reward games.
I thought about this at one point in my life. We don't get to experience the pain and suffering that medieval people or cavemen experienced. I think their pain and suffering was much more brutal than what most of us experience. I mean, the child mortality rate was a lot higher, people died younger and you couldn't fix ailments easily.
I figured that it gives such people a mentality in which they are simply accepting live as it is, because you kind of have to by force (in a sense). I think the introspection from that would also be really valuable. But the issue here is: the price is too high.
And I also think that's the case for the autistic group that has trouble with integrating themselves in society in the way they want to. Yes, resilience gained from introspection, for example, is amazing. But the cost might be to live with almost no close friends.
Obviously, this is a sketched scenario and doesn't apply to everyone. But I can imagine that the cost is too high for quite a few people who have issues with social skills. Unfortunately, we still live in a time where we pay a fairly high cost for integrating into the social fabric of society when you're not able to do that by yourself.
I recognize the phenomenon. I once had a roommate who changed his major to communications and then bragged that it was his life's calling and he was the best at communication. He fought with us over stupid stuff and never learned to listen. Drove us totally insane. He used to say that we were going to be bad husbands in the future because we didn't mention things that bothered us as aggressively as he did. Another friend who studied communications very seriously said that many communications professors had marital issues because of their belief in their own abilities. Totally anecdotal, of course.
It is worth noting that difficulties in recognising emotions in faces are by no means unique to ASD; they also occur in ADHD [1], anxiety disorders [2], schizophrenia [3], and probably other psychiatric/neurodevelopmental disorders as well. So, if this technology has value, its value would be a lot broader than only ASD.
(As an aside, a lot of people tend to have this narrow focus on just ASD to the exclusion of other psychiatric/neurodevelopmental disorders, despite the fact that all these disorders have lots of overlap and rather fuzzily defined boundaries. None of the symptoms of ASD are unique to ASD; they all occur in other conditions also; given that all treatments for ASD are treating symptoms rather than the unknown underlying causes, any therapy for any ASD symptom is very likely to also work for other disorders in which the same symptom is expressed.)
That makes good sense. ASD is a catch all term for those with certain symptoms that are unexplained by other factors. Schizophrenia and anxiety disorders would be some of those other factors. Not sure about ADHD.
There is substantial comorbidity with ASD and ADHD. ADHD occurs in ~4.4% of the general population, but with ASD that goes up to ~45% (the margin of error is massive on the latter)
Some of the symptoms of ADHD, like RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria), sound very much like ASD traits rather than ADHD traits.
In the future I think we'll find a lot more underlying commonalities of all of these conditions. OCD, GID (gender identity disorder), misophonia, tourettes and more are also strikingly comorbid within ASD.
Yeah, that was my initial reaction (though without your knowledge of the topic): there are a lot of people who could benefit from this, not just those with autism.
Such studies, papers and news always makes me cringe.
It seems overly engineered with limited usefulness.
Superpower glass … really?
As background I work in public research and have no background in Autism research.
Yet, due to a mutual friend, I was lucky to meet Kelly Hunter, and attend one of her workshops (together with several other researchers working on helping autistic children).
I knew the Stanford project, mentioned it and got just strange looks:
“This does not really solve any of the problems we are facing”
It seems detecting facial emotions are not the main problems of the autistic children they are dealing with ...
The system itself can just help children with very mild symptoms.
One colleague who works on wearable sensing for them mentioned that even head bands and wrist watches cannot be used
as children commonly take them off and throw them around.
Autism is a spectrum disorder, which means there is a wide range of afflictions, and the afflictions range from very, very mild to debilitating.
Conducting research for something that is spectrum based is frustrating because researchers can only target one small area. The approach is necessary in order to tackle the problem because the problem is so large, we'll need a lot of researchers working on a lot of very focused areas in order to move forward in a broad fashion.
Completely agree, yet I think this should be reflected in the article.
From the limited exposure I had with children on the spectrum, I didn’t see many that could actually wear a google glass to use it as described in the article. I also don’t understand the benefit of the device itself.
It’s not designed for autism, the interventions seem simplicstic ,battery life is highly limited, it‘s very fragile ... if it’s for short interactions and games (like they describe in the papers) I wonder what the advantage of the head mounted display is compared to other setups. they don’t do any comparisons.
It turns out that people with autism do have difficulty detecting emotions. A classic task in the lab is the "reading the mind in the eyes" task (http://socialintelligence.labinthewild.org/mite/), whereby individuals need to identify the emotion someone is expressing by looking at a picture of their eyes. People with autism consistently show lower scores than healthy controls.
Would a therapy like the one you described be better than a technology like this? Maybe. But therapy also very expensive, time consuming, and prohibitive for people who don't have time to take their kid to it every week. We are always looking for new approaches. Even if technology like this doesn't work out, learning why it doesn't work will be helpful for developing future treatments which are better. Remember that this is active research, not an established methodology. (Don't be put off by the "breakthrough therapy" designation mentioned in the article, which is a bureaucratic technical term used by the FDA.)
The paper you linked to is about monitoring, and is not useful by itself without a therapist to interpret it and evaluate it. There is not yet established methodology on how to use this kind of data.
On a related note, there has been a lot of interest recently in real-time feedback for enhanced therapy and treatment. There is a growing literature on neurofeedback in particular, such as reducing depression symptoms by training someone to control their neural activity (e.g. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb7bgNo3sUs). Exciting stuff!
Therapists that worked 10 -20 years in the field are maybe better than some tech that's not even thoroughly evaluated? Sorry that made me chuckle. Check some of the videos.
The children I saw in the workshops (who played Shakespeare at the end), would have just taken the Google glass and threw it to the ground as soon as they would have been angry. There were a lot of dangerous situations in the workshops, that therapists could just avert due to their training ... The article and the research paper oversimplify the problem. This is just useful for a very small minority of autistic children. Autism is a spectrum and it is very complicated.
What's the point of knowing someone is angry if you do not know why he is angry? Detecting emotions doesn't strike me as particularly useful. Manipulating emotions of others on the other hand,...
Knowing someone is angry allows you to act accordingly.
If you don't know someone is sad how do you console them?
There's a great comedy on Netflix called Atypical, one of the things the main character deals with in this show is his inability to read peoples emotions.
It's a start. You're unlikely to learn why somebody is angry unless you know that somebody is angry. And humans are very good correlators. If me doing X repeatedly leads to immediate anger, I'll learn not to do it even if I don't understand why.
It sounds to me like you could do a lot more to just educate the parents.
You don't get mad and shout at a young child who has decided to put the silverware away. You talk to them about the process of making and serving dinner. He could have been shown that one way to make the silverware more orderly is set the table for everyone while Mom cooks.
That was my response to my then five year old being impatient with dinner not being ready. I taught him he was allowed to set the table to keep himself occupied and help me get dinner ready faster.
He wasn't required to set it. He was empowered to do so if he chose rather than being a pain in the butt for me.
The example is just one example. For some parents, it's this but all the time with different things.
ASD* kids don't learn like neurotypical kids and if you treat them the same you will quickly get exhausted. As someone who has had classes on this, you can't "educate" the kid out of being autistic, and many have tried. This technology is just an adaptive tool, and a great one if it works.
Honestly seems like you just read the first two paragraphs and stopped. As a father of two autistic children, it's more than just how to speak, or even explaining things if you are lucky enough that your children are verbal. This isn't about wearing the glasses long term, it's about a tool used to teach the children social skills. About recognizing facial expressions, an issue many autistics have.
This isn't about educating parents on how to talk to their children. It's about educating autistics on how to interpret faces in different people.
> Children are expected to quickly learn how to detect the emotions of their social partners and then, after they’ve gained social confidence, stop using the glasses.
It's a lousy assumption then. Ick. Expect better of parents.
I yelled at my special-needs son for opening the oven door and using it as a stepping stool to see what I was cooking. I wasn't mad. I was scared he would climb on it while the oven was hot.
Because I wasn't mad and he heard me yell "no!!!" at full volume, he thought that's just how you pronounced the word and yelled it the first two weeks he began using it. I would look at him funny and he would look funny like "Did I pronounce it wrong?" After two weeks, he stopped yelling the word.
The point is that autistic people may not possess a theory of mind. They do not understand or anticipate the desires and intentions of others, and may not be aware that other people even have desires and intentions. You can't explain dinner to them if they are unable to comprehend that you intend to make it and that you desire the space and time to do so efficiently.
After having interacted with a person with autism daily for a few years (and parts of their social groups which include others with autism) I wonder if there's any truth to that at all.
It almost seems as the opposite was true where telling of intention and desire is _extremely accurate_, to a scary degree, if it's interpreted through text or speech. But where body language and weird social norms/white lies that are important social queues for me go completely unnoticed.
If people not on the spectrum actually understand others intentions and desires more, and not just have the ability to read it from social queues people on the spectrum don't pick up, what does that say about so many people acting in selfish and mean ways if it benefits them?
I don't believe this to be the case, I don't think autistic people as a rule lack theory of mind. I think autistic people lack the model to link desires to actions and so have a maladapted or vague theory of mind instead.
If I'm with people who's emotional responses I've learned, I can understand somewhat their desires and intentions are. I've found listening to their breathing gives me a big head start on understanding their current wellbeing and I go from there.
With strangers and in scenarios where the communication protocol changes then it becomes enough of a task to decode the emotional exchanges happening that I'm sure I'd fail a test for theory of mind. I can't read what strangers want, I know that they do have intentions and desires but I can't map them until I understand that person's emotional language.
There's a definite distinction between lacking a theory of mind entirely and not having the tools available to build a reliable one. I think a lot of autistic people have a rudimentary theory of mind but understand desires and intentions perfectly when told explicitly ahead of time.
If you put in 'some' or even 'most' you might be right. Not saying I agree but it's theoretically possible. But it's too deep a theory to fit all cases of such a broad category because it is not consistent with diagnostic criteria. I for example definitely have a theory of mind. But my diagnosis merely says that I do not have the same level of social success as others of my level of general development. And that's absolutely correct.
Most likely, both my sons qualify as somewhere on the autism spectrum. They were never formally diagnosed and I used to routinely give advice to parents whose children did have a formal diagnosis when I was involved with an educational organization.
Edit: I left out the critical part. I gave them advice and routinely said for the longest time "I don't have any ASD kids, but when my kid does that..." It happened so much, I began to wonder if maybe I did, actually, have ASD kids. (It was later somewhat confirmed by unofficial professional feedback.)
My first website was a homeschooling blog. It grew out of the seeming popularity of my emails on a homeschooling list with a lot of parents of special-needs kids.
I know quite a lot about autism and related issues.
My oldest was such a pill, he was nicknamed demon child when he was little. He was an adolescent before he understood what I meant because I absolutely wasn't vilifying him, though he was hugely challenging to deal with.
Humans aren't just born with social skills. There is a huge component of being raised right that I think is currently given short shrift by a society too quick to medicalize every parenting challenge, as if there weren't any socially awkward or shy kids before we had fancy labels for them.
On one hand, I really welcome technologies like this that empower people in a huge way. On the other hand, I really dread that in this case it comes from the company that wants to know everything about you.
The example where Google hid a microphone in Nest makes me believe they will do anything to get more information from people. I think it's not beyond Google to use people's handicaps to improve the image of Google Glass. Sorry to put it like that...
Alexithymia (this inability to recognise emotion in yourself or others) is common in autistic people, but it's neither sufficient nor required for the diagnosis. (It's not even part of the diagnosis).
I mention this because autistic people often wait a long time for a diagnosis, and part of that is this idea that all autistic people are unable to recognise emotion.
I imagine that there are nuances to facial expression that might be difficult to extract from an image or video, depending on the parameters to your ML model.
For example, if someone looks into my eyes, furrows their brows, and shakes their head slowly back and forth, this could mean that they are intensely sympathetic with me (when I am talking), or it could mean that they are disgusted with what I have said (when I have stopped talking), or many other things. If you add sound input to your model then maybe it can figure out how to incorporate that dimension into its results.
Very cool though. Maybe you could have something like this to help colorblind people see colors, deaf people see sounds, the possibilities are exciting.
I assume there are potential users who can’t easily perceive furrowing of brows, but who could infer its context-dependent meaning if it were made more obvious when it’s happening.
I've wanted something exactly like this, i can read emotions when iam putting close effort into the activity however it's exhausting to do so, reducing the mental toll on myself and other in social interaction is appreciated. Less meltdowns and misunderstandings would a upgrade.
while it sounds too good to be true at this moment i worry that the black box that tells the user the emotion gives no feedback to why it did so, transparently to the user to make a good judgement is essential.
this becomes the heading aid to the autistic it will be same problem the hearing impaired deal with then people find issue with the different.
Readit News
I have noticed a certain phenomenon where people who are bad at something read books about it to compensate, and then having read books on the subjects start considering themselves experts on it and preach to others, closing the loop from descriptive to prescriptive.
Edited: Added second paragraph
I had a bad case of this, I did it a lot. Fortunately, some people made me aware of this tendency. Now a lot of those things I've learned are natural as if they've always been part of me. To be fair, there's 10 years in between both points.
People who learn a second language understand its grammar from the first stroke, since it’s taught along with the language. People who learn a first language recognize its grammar (i.e. they can tell you whether or not something is grammatical) but don’t understand it, because they picked the language up “naturally.”
Often a master will come to a sophomore student and ask them to explain a concept to the juniors (after checking their explanation for not having any faults the master can find), because a usual master’s explanation (presuming the master isn’t also a master of education) is far less useful to a junior’s understanding than a sophomore’s is. The master is aware of nuances that greatly affect the end result, but aren’t so relevant at first; while the sophomore is aware mostly of things in the order they’ve managed to absorb them so far—which likely reflects the order of least-to-most difficult to absorb, and so reflects the things the juniors would be most likely to be struggling with.
A motivating way to learn is to teach or re-iterate what you know, you learn new things that way. Going overboard or thinking you are a genius on the topic suddenly is annoying but sometimes it is how that person is motivated.
As far as sharing what people know through learning, that they previously didn't know and is interesting and fresh to their mind, that is part of their learning process.
Spaced Learning [1] + Spaced Repetition [2] are very effective learning/memory techniques, revisiting a topic many times over time.
Even commenting on topics you are into or researched on, simply restating them sometimes leads to learning more about it, at a minimum it sets it into your knowledge through repetition or spaced learning.
There is a fun spaced learning game using Spaced Repetition called How To Remember Anything Forever-ish [3].
Really both techniques just pattern-ize already existing techniques how people learn things through repetition and time. It is really just revisiting a topic in intervals that will put it in memory and make it important, which the brain will spend more cycles on, and new ideas and uses for that knowledge come up.
Talking or sharing what you know about what you just learned is part of that unstructured spaced learning/repetition that helps learn. It plays into presentation as well, when you are teaching a topic you start by summarizing, then get to the details, then resurface with the summary while hitting key points multiple times throughout. A teacher or presenter will learn more and more the more they repeat that topic/lesson etc that is impossible to get to on early iterations or draft/sketch phases.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_learning
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
[3] https://ncase.me/remember/
I think the problematic thing here is seeing alone isn't feeling+seeing but making assumptions that it is.
Sounds just like a previous team leader of mine.
I figured that it gives such people a mentality in which they are simply accepting live as it is, because you kind of have to by force (in a sense). I think the introspection from that would also be really valuable. But the issue here is: the price is too high.
And I also think that's the case for the autistic group that has trouble with integrating themselves in society in the way they want to. Yes, resilience gained from introspection, for example, is amazing. But the cost might be to live with almost no close friends.
Obviously, this is a sketched scenario and doesn't apply to everyone. But I can imagine that the cost is too high for quite a few people who have issues with social skills. Unfortunately, we still live in a time where we pay a fairly high cost for integrating into the social fabric of society when you're not able to do that by yourself.
(As an aside, a lot of people tend to have this narrow focus on just ASD to the exclusion of other psychiatric/neurodevelopmental disorders, despite the fact that all these disorders have lots of overlap and rather fuzzily defined boundaries. None of the symptoms of ASD are unique to ASD; they all occur in other conditions also; given that all treatments for ASD are treating symptoms rather than the unknown underlying causes, any therapy for any ASD symptom is very likely to also work for other disorders in which the same symptom is expressed.)
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Da_Fonseca/public...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher_Monk2/publi...
[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...
Some of the symptoms of ADHD, like RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria), sound very much like ASD traits rather than ADHD traits.
In the future I think we'll find a lot more underlying commonalities of all of these conditions. OCD, GID (gender identity disorder), misophonia, tourettes and more are also strikingly comorbid within ASD.
Superpower glass … really?
As background I work in public research and have no background in Autism research. Yet, due to a mutual friend, I was lucky to meet Kelly Hunter, and attend one of her workshops (together with several other researchers working on helping autistic children). I knew the Stanford project, mentioned it and got just strange looks: “This does not really solve any of the problems we are facing” It seems detecting facial emotions are not the main problems of the autistic children they are dealing with ...
https://flutetheatre.co.uk/changing-lives-of-people-with-aut...
Here’s work from a friend on the topic: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/grand-challenges/sites/grand-challenge...
The system itself can just help children with very mild symptoms. One colleague who works on wearable sensing for them mentioned that even head bands and wrist watches cannot be used as children commonly take them off and throw them around.
Kelly also runs a fundraiser right now in case somebody wants to help out. In my personal opinion much more useful than the solution described in the ieee article: https://www.facebook.com/donate/574661226469627/101582037614...
Conducting research for something that is spectrum based is frustrating because researchers can only target one small area. The approach is necessary in order to tackle the problem because the problem is so large, we'll need a lot of researchers working on a lot of very focused areas in order to move forward in a broad fashion.
From the limited exposure I had with children on the spectrum, I didn’t see many that could actually wear a google glass to use it as described in the article. I also don’t understand the benefit of the device itself. It’s not designed for autism, the interventions seem simplicstic ,battery life is highly limited, it‘s very fragile ... if it’s for short interactions and games (like they describe in the papers) I wonder what the advantage of the head mounted display is compared to other setups. they don’t do any comparisons.
Will improving the ability to detect emotions improve clinical outcomes? We don't know, but their initial evidence looks promising: take a look at the JAMA Pediatrics paper (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...) and the Nature Digital Medicine paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-018-0035-3), which are both linked to in the article:
Would a therapy like the one you described be better than a technology like this? Maybe. But therapy also very expensive, time consuming, and prohibitive for people who don't have time to take their kid to it every week. We are always looking for new approaches. Even if technology like this doesn't work out, learning why it doesn't work will be helpful for developing future treatments which are better. Remember that this is active research, not an established methodology. (Don't be put off by the "breakthrough therapy" designation mentioned in the article, which is a bureaucratic technical term used by the FDA.)
The paper you linked to is about monitoring, and is not useful by itself without a therapist to interpret it and evaluate it. There is not yet established methodology on how to use this kind of data.
On a related note, there has been a lot of interest recently in real-time feedback for enhanced therapy and treatment. There is a growing literature on neurofeedback in particular, such as reducing depression symptoms by training someone to control their neural activity (e.g. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb7bgNo3sUs). Exciting stuff!
If you don't know someone is sad how do you console them?
There's a great comedy on Netflix called Atypical, one of the things the main character deals with in this show is his inability to read peoples emotions.
You don't get mad and shout at a young child who has decided to put the silverware away. You talk to them about the process of making and serving dinner. He could have been shown that one way to make the silverware more orderly is set the table for everyone while Mom cooks.
That was my response to my then five year old being impatient with dinner not being ready. I taught him he was allowed to set the table to keep himself occupied and help me get dinner ready faster.
He wasn't required to set it. He was empowered to do so if he chose rather than being a pain in the butt for me.
ASD* kids don't learn like neurotypical kids and if you treat them the same you will quickly get exhausted. As someone who has had classes on this, you can't "educate" the kid out of being autistic, and many have tried. This technology is just an adaptive tool, and a great one if it works.
This isn't about educating parents on how to talk to their children. It's about educating autistics on how to interpret faces in different people.
> Children are expected to quickly learn how to detect the emotions of their social partners and then, after they’ve gained social confidence, stop using the glasses.
Deleted Comment
I yelled at my special-needs son for opening the oven door and using it as a stepping stool to see what I was cooking. I wasn't mad. I was scared he would climb on it while the oven was hot.
Because I wasn't mad and he heard me yell "no!!!" at full volume, he thought that's just how you pronounced the word and yelled it the first two weeks he began using it. I would look at him funny and he would look funny like "Did I pronounce it wrong?" After two weeks, he stopped yelling the word.
I had plenty of uses for simple hands off first person recording. Sports and school events would have benefitted from video recording.
Seeing their enterprise use, I'm thinking other people had a similar idea.
It almost seems as the opposite was true where telling of intention and desire is _extremely accurate_, to a scary degree, if it's interpreted through text or speech. But where body language and weird social norms/white lies that are important social queues for me go completely unnoticed.
If people not on the spectrum actually understand others intentions and desires more, and not just have the ability to read it from social queues people on the spectrum don't pick up, what does that say about so many people acting in selfish and mean ways if it benefits them?
If I'm with people who's emotional responses I've learned, I can understand somewhat their desires and intentions are. I've found listening to their breathing gives me a big head start on understanding their current wellbeing and I go from there.
With strangers and in scenarios where the communication protocol changes then it becomes enough of a task to decode the emotional exchanges happening that I'm sure I'd fail a test for theory of mind. I can't read what strangers want, I know that they do have intentions and desires but I can't map them until I understand that person's emotional language.
There's a definite distinction between lacking a theory of mind entirely and not having the tools available to build a reliable one. I think a lot of autistic people have a rudimentary theory of mind but understand desires and intentions perfectly when told explicitly ahead of time.
Well, that claim is frequently made, but not everyone agrees that it has been sufficiently demonstrated. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959478/
Edit: I left out the critical part. I gave them advice and routinely said for the longest time "I don't have any ASD kids, but when my kid does that..." It happened so much, I began to wonder if maybe I did, actually, have ASD kids. (It was later somewhat confirmed by unofficial professional feedback.)
My first website was a homeschooling blog. It grew out of the seeming popularity of my emails on a homeschooling list with a lot of parents of special-needs kids.
I know quite a lot about autism and related issues.
My oldest was such a pill, he was nicknamed demon child when he was little. He was an adolescent before he understood what I meant because I absolutely wasn't vilifying him, though he was hugely challenging to deal with.
Humans aren't just born with social skills. There is a huge component of being raised right that I think is currently given short shrift by a society too quick to medicalize every parenting challenge, as if there weren't any socially awkward or shy kids before we had fancy labels for them.
The example where Google hid a microphone in Nest makes me believe they will do anything to get more information from people. I think it's not beyond Google to use people's handicaps to improve the image of Google Glass. Sorry to put it like that...
I mention this because autistic people often wait a long time for a diagnosis, and part of that is this idea that all autistic people are unable to recognise emotion.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092493381...
For example, if someone looks into my eyes, furrows their brows, and shakes their head slowly back and forth, this could mean that they are intensely sympathetic with me (when I am talking), or it could mean that they are disgusted with what I have said (when I have stopped talking), or many other things. If you add sound input to your model then maybe it can figure out how to incorporate that dimension into its results.
Very cool though. Maybe you could have something like this to help colorblind people see colors, deaf people see sounds, the possibilities are exciting.