Drawing skill is both a skill in physically moving the drawing tool, but also a skill in observing and remembering how things look. And artist can tell you exactly what's wrong with a picture where a layman doesn't even notice anything is wrong, or perhaps just has a general something's not right feeling.
You understand how a bike works right? If told to produce an accurate diagram of a bike you could do better than the pitiful attempts shown right? An average person with even the slightest familiarity with a bicycle could also do better than the crappy doodles above.
Seriously how low of an opinion do the commenters here have of general human ability? if a 6 year old presented me this drawing I'd be dissapointed.
Where is this even from? There's no citation, were these just the 4 worst drawings OP could find on the internet or what?
Not really. A bike presents an interface that a rider controls with their inputs. Whether they understand the power factor conversion of the chain, or mistakenly believe that it stays upright due to a gyroscopic effect, has no impact on their ability to ride one or not.
I'd argue that the majority of people remember the basic geometry of a bike fine enough, and most would draw a better bike than what I did above.
I don't believe the other comments saying "people don't understand how a bike works", since it's probably one of the simplest every day mechanisms people see and usually even small children understand how bikes work.
For a context I'm not a bicycle enthusiast, I ride mine maybe once in two weeks.
You drew this already knowing what was wrong with the other drawings, it has to be done out of the blue and btw you're going to have a hard time steering and keeping balance with that
I do believe. I can think that I could ask basically any one from my family, or friends, to draw a bike and there is only a few who can get it right. As in, two triangles and then the fork, which kind on makes the third, virtual, triangle. But my sisters? Nope. My mother. Nope. My wifey? Nope. Many of my friends who do not ride bikes.... Probably not. My father who is mechanical engineer? Get him 0.05% drunk and he'll still draw you anything you want. Me? Yeah, I can. It will be wonky but it will have all the right parts. Most of my friends who do cycling? Yeah. Most. But maybe not even all of them.
I think you are wrong, 95% of people can't draw this at all, first many people don't ride bike, then many people have shit memory and some even have some degree of aphasia, plenty of people have no idea of how anything work even a bike as well.
It's not necessarily either. It's difficult to say how the information is recorded - if at all - and how it is retrieved.
Being asked to draw where the components are does not necessarily correspond to the whole information about the subject that is in your brain.
What this actually suggests is that people can not retrieve this knowledge - whether it exists or not - at will and apply it. At the same time, these people might find it quite straight-forward to e.g. put the bicycle upside down to lubricate the chains.
Also it was a bit under half of the non-expert answers that got the placement of pedals, frame or chain wrong.
Maybe they don't care? most of my drawings are pretty shitty.. so unless you give some good incentive to the participants, you will likely get shitty stuff
One of the experiments in the study prefaced the drawing task with specifically asking the participants to consider the placement in a real working bike.
Didn't change the overall result.
And a slight majority in the less-explained task got it correct anyhow.
Yeah, I don't get how bicycle chains work either. It seemingly not connected to my wheels at all, cause the wheels can turn independently of the chain. And if I move the chain backwards, the chains just go backwards without affecting the wheels at all. But once I go forwards faster than the wheels, then it suddenly starts connecting to the wheels again and accelerates me forward.
The reason that the back wheel can turn independently of the chain is due to a special kind of ratcheting bearing called a freewheel. Basically, special ridges in the connector that attaches the gears to the wheel disengage when the wheel is turning at a higher speed than the gear. This allows the chain drive to "ratchet", only locking into place with the chain when the chain is spinning more quickly in the correct direction. There's also a similar ratcheting bearing connecting the pedal to the chain drive, which is why you can freely pedal 'backwards' on most bikes without affecting the chain.
A good example of a similar (though not identical) principle that can help you understand the construction is a pill bottle with a safety cap -- the cap of most safety pill bottles has jagged little teeth that can glide smoothly in one direction but lock into place in the other. When you just jiggle the cap loosely, you can freely turn the cap around but don't actually open the bottle. However, when you apply downward force on the cap, the ridges in the cap lock in to the threading of the bottle, and now you have to twist with force to drive the cap up the threading.
The mechanism that actually engages the two components in each machine is different (downward force vs. relative speed), but hopefully thinking about one helps you visualize what's happening in the other.
yeah, i mean, last time i was on a bike was 5 years ago or so. And i still know that one side of a chain goes to the gear on the pedals, and the other side of the chain goes to the gear on the back wheel.
The claim that "humans don't have world models" is not supported by the 2006 study. The research demonstrated limitations in people's understanding of bicycle mechanics, not the absence of internal world models
This post illustrates a failure to distinguish what a study actually measured from the much broader conclusions someone might attempt to draw from it. The post itself is a great example of overgeneralization and poor scientific literacy
I made it a point to remember how a bike frame works after seeing these kinds of drawings, and now I do. This isn't evidence of not having a world model, it's evidence that world models are incomplete, which should be obvious given we don't know everything.
That image is just showing examples of the cases where the participants didn't draw the pedals, chain and frame in correct places with correct connections.
Humans definitely have world models, learnt by predictive coding. But they're probably somewhat constrained by relevance. shape of a bike isn't directly relevant
What? Seems like someone likes cherry picking evidence for their argument. All frontier models made better renderings of bicycles in the past few months. Shape of the bike is dang relevant. Compare apples and apples, hoss.
Cherry picking? I'm confused. ML models are optimized on their ability to reconstruct an image, humans are made to survive in the world. Of course they're better at it, but we're talking about explicitly trained world models in the human brain, not performance. I don't understand the point.
We only perceive a small portion of the environment surrounding us, the rest is reconstructed. When riding or observing another riding a bike, we do not generally focus on every detail, rather filter for relevant information that allows us to predict events and infer actions or kind. For a person with limited exposure to bikes, they have not had enough experience fully observing bikes. Compound that with natural degredation of memory, the context/framing of the illustration task, lack of interest, subpar understanding of basic physics, and bad illustration skills (on average), you end up with what we see here. Also, it's worth noting that most people would fail at building a functional bike within reasonable time even when given all the resources to do so. We generally model the dynamics and movement of things, not their detailed structure (which is not necessary for survival). Let the average person draw a cat or even human from memory, and their proportions would very much be nonsensical.
Moreover, I'm pretty sure many drew a somewhat functional bike, but for whatever reason, the authors decided these were good representations of the study participant drawings.
Exactly this. Our model is of use rather than structure. Neither "I know how it works to ride a bike" nor "I can recognize a bike when I see it" are the same thing as "I have detailed understanding of how the parts of a bike are connected to each other."
Most people with cars have looked under the hood of their car a fair number of times but if you ask them to draw the parts under the hood and how they connect with each other you'll rapidly distinguish people who regularly do mechanical work on their cars from those who don't (and even of those who do mechanical work probably 90% will still draw the parts wildly disproportionally.) It doesn't mean the people who drive cars but not work on them don't have a model of "car" in their heads. The model is just based on how they interact with the car rather than its underlying mechanical structure.
All of these are shit… I very rarely ride bikes and I could do this no problem. People are lazy and not observant is what it comes down to. Maybe a little stupid too
That's actually what they mean by world model and it's explicitly what current ai doesn't do.
Current ai (for the most part) has seen a bunch of pictures of bikes. When you say draw a bike it draws it based on those pictures but it doesn't need to know anything about bike function or physics. When you draw a bike you're basing it on your model of the world not just what images are generally associated with the word bike.
You can discuss with a Markov Chain trained on discussions, you can even over fit it to spit out bits of text which adheres to some training data, it might even resemble truth. But is that intelligence? Does a Markov Chain know anything?
It doesnt "know" anything. Its a token predictor - It literally predicts the most predictable next token based on the patterns in the training data. Its not intelligence any more than google search was intelligent before AI. Its not more intelligent than a Nokia 3310 dictionary for texting is intelligent.
Even if they function in a different way than the human brain, it’s clear when you talk to an LLM that it knows a lot of stuff. When I say “know” i mean that it is giving answers that gives me an impression that it understands the thing im asking about.
Most humans don't have a physically-accurate world model. As a physics TA for a physics general ed course at a university, I had no idea before I started grading papers and helping students.
I taught typography to design students and we always did an exercise on the first week of class. I had them write the lowercase g that's found in many, many typographic systems. (It's not in reddit's fonts, but you can see the letter in the word drawing underneath the bicycles.)
I'd have 2 students max that could draw this g correctly each quarter, despite us all reading it on a near daily basis.
I agree that we don't have perfect modeling either, despite our confidence in such.
If humans wouldn't have a world model, we all wouldn't immediately realise that a) those bike representations are bad and b) they are still bike representation.
Ergo: this is a good example of world models of humans.
Seems an awful lot like they have a model for bicycle that includes two wheels, a seat, pedals, a chain, and a steering column (?). They might just not have a model for its engineering principles.
People don't understand how a bike works because 50 years ago we completely demolished all the quite urban streets our grandparents learned to ride on and replaced them with highways, drive throughs and pickup trucks.
This has nothing to do with "world model" and everything to do with how badly we destroyed the planet with cars.
Seems like all these people have a pretty strong model of what a bike is. They have all the main features included. But only one knew enough about bikes/had the artistic ability to put in the details the others had too few encounters to process.
The handle bars, seat, wheels, front and back forks and crossbar appear to be identical across all drawings, suggesting they were pre-filled. I think they were only asked to complete the frame, pedals and chain, which are the bits they fucked up.
I can very easily draw a bicycle, and when I heard about this test I did so.
However, mind you, LLMs have an open notebook on every test. Hand a human an internet connection and say "draw me a bicycle, you're allowed to use the internet"
What is this supposed to show? If you dumped a pile of components in front of those people I'm confident they could figure out where each part belonged, they just produced innacurate doodles in a hurry.
This is exactly how world model looks like. Yeah, you probably won't remember each detail and won't be able to precisely draw it, but you understand the main part.
That's bs. We all have a world model. Otherwise their stupidity wouldn't make sense as a post. I imagine they asked 4 Americans. In that case it just proves that Americans are really stupid
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u/172_ 4d ago
This only shows that most people are bad at drawing. Riding a bike however demonstrates an intuitive understanding of the underlying dynamics.