All articles tagged with #experimental design
The Clever Hans episode revealed that the horse’s math-like responses were actually cues from its trainer, not true arithmetic ability, which prompted scientists like Pfungst to uncover the Clever Hans effect and catalyze the adoption of randomization and stricter controls in experiments, helping end the era of widespread psychical research at universities.
Quanta’s interview with Melanie Mitchell argues AI cognition isn’t human-like thinking but alien intelligence that requires new testing methods borrowed from developmental and comparative psychology; she outlines six principles to assess machine cognition, warns against overreliance on benchmarks and anthropomorphism, discusses transfer and 'task tyranny', uses Clever Hans as a cautionary tale, and champions mechanistic interpretability to reveal how AIs work and where they fail, shaping safe deployment and the future of science.
AI is increasingly used in physics to design novel experiments, optimize detectors like LIGO, and discover patterns in complex data, leading to potential breakthroughs such as improved gravitational wave detection and new quantum experiments, although it still requires human interpretation and oversight.