I enjoyed this video.
I find Destin’s reasoning a little suspect. Not a lot, just a little. He talks about how knowledge isn’t understanding: I agree. He talks about having to unlearn a skill to re-learn a related but opposite skill: I mostly agree. I think he forgets how long it took him as a child to learn to ride a bicycle in the first place, and makes some assumptions about learning that aren’t completely supported by his experiment.
Long ago, I read (I think in Godel, Escher, Bach, but maybe not) about an experiment where people were given glasses that inverted the world. After a while (I forget how long, a few hours or a few days), their brain adjusted, and flipped the inputs, and the world then looked right-side-up. But only while they still wore the glasses. If they took the glasses off, then suddenly the world was upside down again, and it took them another while to re-adjust. So that was one neat thing. The other was, their brain only adjusted if they were free to interact with the world. If they were motionless in a chair, the world was upside down forever.
I think this experiment with a backwards bicycle is very much like that. You don’t learn an algorithm to ride a bike. You train a neural network. Those are two very different things.
So it was definitely a neat video, and it definitely highlighted some interesting cognitive problems (e.g. bias), but I don’t know that I’d agree that the experiment in question actually supported all of the conclusions being drawn.
On the other hand, of course, what the hell, I’m not a cognitive scientist, I could be wrong. Just my two cents. 🙂