Very frustrating article to read. The article is setting up a straw man and attacking it. He is acting like everyone else thinks:
1) edges are the only important features in images and
2) line drawings can only represent edges.
Who are these brainless absolutists that he is attacking?
Then he's acting like he is the only one with other bright ideas that nobody will listen to.
I think it is obvious to anyone who thinks about this that:
1) edges are a useful feature for recognizing objects in images but not the only useful feature
2) lines in line drawings can and often do represent edges, but there are a lot of other things they can represent. Light and shading and texture of various kinds.
It would be fine to write an article that goes in to depth on the different nuances, but it is annoying that this author pretends that most other experts have naive and simplistic views, with "uncritical certainty", and "no one seems to question it", and the author "has a hard time convincing them otherwise". It is a very condescending tone that comes off sounding like the author is presenting themselves as some brilliant but misunderstood outcast, and the only one who can see the light of truth.
One of the problems right off the bat is not understanding that the classical "edge detection" algorithm doesn't actually detect edges. It detects rapid change in contrast. To then claim this computer algorithm's flaws are somehow proof that a psychological theory is therefore wrong is itself the categorically wrong thing.
There is a subset of the tech bro that believes everything can be reduced to a problem with clearly defined taxonomy and as such every problem can be solved by an engineer with no subject knowledge. This article very much reads like one of those people wrote it.
My favorited comments on this site are mostly this phenomenon. It’s annoying because there’s a built in default assumption that one is such a great thinker there’s no need to waste time seeing if an expert has already solved the problem. One of my favorite examples is the software engineer that spent significant time testing his shower mixer valve and writing a “manifesto”[1] on how to make a better one. A few minutes of googling would lead him to realize why a mixer valve might have such a wide range (inlet temperatures and pressures are not a given) and also to the actual, existing solution (thermostatic mixing valve).
A manager once told me he'd never hire a PhD because once they complete the specialized work we hire them for, they inevitably get put on something outside their specialty - like your linked xkcd - and then their acceptance as experts along with that behavior causes real problems.
Another time I had an older PhD moved to my area (outside his) where we were trying to meet a number of objectives. He said in a meeting that "it is mathematicaly impossible" to achieve one of our performance goals. I quietly went back to the lab and ran my new control algorithm and documented hitting that goal. Never refuted him, just filed the incident away in my head.
Edit: People being arrogant or know-it-all is probably not especially correlated with having obtained a PhD, but more with overall frame of mind, and I find this comment to be a uselessly negative ad-hominem.
Also people bringing this up remember the one time the PhD was wrong, while discounting the 99 times the PhD was right and kept them from doing a lot of fruitless work.
Sorry, but I think it's correlated in two ways. One is that very bright people, which I think includes most PhD-havers, are especially used to being right. When they have the rare experience of being ignorant and wrong, they may struggle with it much more than others. Two, academia is a bubble. I think that's great; I love that we have a place where people who are deeply interested in something can focus entirely on that. But it necessarily means that they're less likely to know about things outside that bubble.
That's not to say it's a perfect correlation. I know plenty of people with PhDs who don't have the problem in the XKCD cartoon. But I too am careful hiring PhDs in tech jobs. Professional work is just very different than academic work. It takes time to learn it for people whose main focus is the theory. After all, "In theory, theory and practice are the same. But in practice..."
I once worked with a PhD who claimed that basically any novel bit of coding was a "research problem", and thus not worth bothering. Using a hashtable to speed up an algorithm? Research problem. Using raw TCP instead of HTTP for a long running connection? Research problem. Implementing a graph algorithm you could read up on Wikipedia? Research problem. I think it was only when I solved three of those "research problems" in one week that he finally shut up.
But you actually don't have a proof you solved these tasks! Where is the arxiv preprint? Make sure all LaTeX is syntactically correct, and double-check that your chosen citation style is according to its latest edition!
1) edges are the only important features in images and 2) line drawings can only represent edges.
Who are these brainless absolutists that he is attacking?
Then he's acting like he is the only one with other bright ideas that nobody will listen to.
I think it is obvious to anyone who thinks about this that:
1) edges are a useful feature for recognizing objects in images but not the only useful feature 2) lines in line drawings can and often do represent edges, but there are a lot of other things they can represent. Light and shading and texture of various kinds.
It would be fine to write an article that goes in to depth on the different nuances, but it is annoying that this author pretends that most other experts have naive and simplistic views, with "uncritical certainty", and "no one seems to question it", and the author "has a hard time convincing them otherwise". It is a very condescending tone that comes off sounding like the author is presenting themselves as some brilliant but misunderstood outcast, and the only one who can see the light of truth.
we could do without the drama!