What's Up with All These Viral Illusions?

I&#x27;ll bite.<p>Here&#x27;s whats up with all the illusions. I wrote in a previous comment that things go viral when each person exposed to a piece of content (sound, image, whatever) on average exposes it to more than one person. To steal from one of the replies I got, information virality can be understood in the same terms of biological virality Eg the SIR model: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Compartmental_models_in_epidem...</a><p>The answer to the question &quot;why is X viral&quot; comes down to &quot;why do people feel compelled to share this&quot;. Optical&#x2F;auditory illusions hit the sweet spot of causing universal disagreement without the disagreement falling along the tired lines of politics, demographics, and other pre-existing tribial lines. The disagreement is both universal and palatable.<p>What do two people do when they have a friendly disagreement? They seek a third opinion. And then the losing side seeks out two more opinions to prove their not crazy. Bam! virality. Eventually it gets to the point where random strangers on the subway are showing you their phone and asking what color is the dress.

The &quot;Brainstorm &#x2F; Green Needle&quot; illusion is a huge mindfuck.<p>I especially loved this line, because it&#x27;s the exact question I immediately thought:<p>&gt; Am I experiencing a hundred micro-yannys and laurels every day without knowing it? Joe Toscano, who studies auditory perception at Villanova University, couldn’t answer that question, perhaps because he, like everyone, is trapped in the prison of his own mind

&gt;<i>What color is a tennis ball? Her subsequent investigation revealed yet another nexus of fierce division over what our senses tell us about the world we live in. Some said green; Roger Federer said yellow, and Marina concluded: “The color of a tennis ball is, and would remain, in the eye of the beholder.”</i><p>This isn&#x27;t remotely comparable to the rest of the illusions, because it&#x27;s not an illusion. People were asked to choose between yellow and green to describe something that is, spectrally, about halfway between the two words. Everyone is seeing the same color (unlike the dress), but they&#x27;re choosing different words to describe it.

The twitter version of the <i>yanny&#x2F;laurel</i> audio clip is severely distorted, and the original audio from vocabulary.com is not. [0,1]<p>Given this fact, the whole thing is twitter click bait, over almost nothing at all. One may as well argue over the correct spelling of “<i>yanny</i>” and whether it should have two N’s or not.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;CloeCouture&#x2F;status&#x2F;996218489831473152" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;CloeCouture&#x2F;status&#x2F;996218489831473152</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vocabulary.com&#x2F;dictionary&#x2F;laurel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vocabulary.com&#x2F;dictionary&#x2F;laurel</a>

We&#x27;re amazing at pattern matching. This has been known for ages visually, with optical illusions and art (^_—), but I guess technology has caught up enough to make auditory illusions much easier to create&#x2F;capture&#x2F;spread than ever before.

The &quot;Bill bale pale mayo&quot; video is my second favorite after this one <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JATjMZJuX1c" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JATjMZJuX1c</a>

&gt; His lab will often create micro-versions of these kind of illusions for their research—putting an ambiguous sound in front of “ark,” for example, such that it might sound like “bark” or “park.” Then, if people are primed with images of a dog, say, they’ll be more likely to interpret it as “bark.”<p>There was a Flash animation from about 2001 done as a tribute to MAME. It is set to the tune of Irene Cara singing the theme to &quot;Fame&quot;; and every time the word &quot;fame&quot; is sung, the MAME logo is flashed on the screen. Given the low quality of Flash audio during those days, our ears wwre tricked and we all heard Irene Cara sing &quot;MAME&quot;.

An interesting take on this these illusions is that they also highlight the difficulties of machine learning. An AI might classify the sound as 100% sure it heard laurel, while another human is 100% sure he heard yanny. As both humans and AI have been proven to make such mistakes now, who would you trust? Can we trust AI to take decisions on its own?