I was replying to wting, but HN doesn't let me reply to a reply by the same author as a way to combat back-and-forth style arguments, I guess.
He said that experts doing that is "trained pattern matching gained through experience, i.e. machine learning."
But that's backwards: machine learning in this style is a model of something we observe in ourselves. The thing that's in us is the pipe, the machine learning algorithm is the picture.
Machine learning is a model of this thing we observe in ourselves. Don't mistake a picture of a pipe for the pipe itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)