Aren’t they? Are you sure you understand what is the finding?

> they would be interesting enough if they had managed to collect a large enough sample

They did. The grand parent comment failed to read the right paper.

> obviously inflated conclusion that neural nets and human brains are similar in some way

But that is what they find. The human looks at two almost identical looking images of flowers. And yet when they are asked which one is more cat like they pick the one which the neural network thinks is cat-like too.(Or at least they pick it more often than if they were just selecting randomly in this seemingly nonsense task.) That is exactly “similar in some way”. Similar in which image they find more cat-like. That is the similarity.

Yeah, I got it.

> But that is what they find. The human looks at two almost identical looking images of flowers. And yet when they are asked which one is more cat like they pick the one which the neural network thinks is cat-like too.(Or at least they pick it more often than if they were just selecting randomly in this seemingly nonsense task.) That is exactly “similar in some way”. Similar in which image they find more cat-like. That is the similarity.

I'm saying the implication is that there is a not-yet-understood deeper connection illustrated by this discovery. I don't think they tested for that and I don't think it's hinted at. There are lots of reasons why this trick would work on both humans and neural nets that would amount to effectively no similarities in structure or process otherwise. That isn't to say it's not related somehow, just that their experiment simply shows the outcome is the same, but doesn't indicate why it's the same.

Having said all of that, you're definitely correct to imply I haven't read the full study. And I'm happy to admit my original comment contains misunderstandings. Sorry about that.