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Comment by canjobear | Hacker News Reader

That's some nice snarkiness about how modern machine learning works. But let's not forget that this apparently "dumb" approach has beaten out much more intelligent seeming systems on many tasks. To me, this means we shouldn't be so confident that we know what an intelligent system looks like. Maybe effectiveness in AI doesn't have much to do with human interpretability, and even less to do with whether humans find the approach intellectually satisfying.

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Is it survivorship bias? ML attempts that fail are cancelled and never heard from again, those that succeed are publicized.

The same approach works with pig entrails: a bunch of people make predictions, the ones that fail go away, the ones that happen to succeed a few times "must work".

Or in stock market terms, "past performance is no guarantee of future results."

In a way you're exactly correct and that's exactly why machine learning works. The models specify a huge range of possible input-output mappings and then do a dumb search to find the ones that work; the mappings that don't succeed are discarded. It turns out, surprisingly, this is the best approach we have come up with.

> Or in stock market terms, "past performance is no guarantee of future results."

Past performance isn't a guarantee, but under mild conditions it is very strong evidence that there will be future results.

And lets' not forget that one lucky hit with pig entrails is enough to build a career that lasts a couple of decades.

I'm trying to remember where I read about this but, allegedly, there used to be a gentleman in New Orleans (if memory serves) who went around handing, at random, sealed envelopes with "boy" or "girl" written on a piece of paper inside, to pregnant women.

The idea was that he could expect to hit the right sex of the unborn child a few times and that those lucky hits would make people think he had some sort of gift for seeing the future. As to the misses, the women would be too preoccupied with having just given birth to raise a stink. Note the envelopes were handed out for free. It was his advertisement, see.

>Is it survivorship bias? ML attempts that fail are cancelled and never heard from again

Which is exactly how we got from single cell organisms to human level intelligence. Of course it took 4 billionish years for that to happen. Life, hence intelligence is survivorship, that's the selection mechanism.

Like other tech fads, there is a reasonable basis of useful stuff underneath a much larger lather of big, frothy bubbles. Almost every idiot is running around talking about using "machine learning" for their new system without understanding what this means, just as they're doing with "containerization", "orchestration", and so on.

The rule of thumb is that if Google or Facebook releases some toolkit for something, the next 3-5 years are going to be a hellscape of idiots clogging up the channels for the relatively small number of people who may have an actual, legitimate use for these tools. But since the idiots are bored at work and can tell their bosses, "Well, Google does it this way, so it must be the best! We're important just like Google, right?", we have to languish through their tiresome drivel, and watch as they drag their companies through a quagmire, only to propose the next fad as the savior a couple of years later.

Human intelligence is rapidly becoming obsolete.

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