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Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

I keep being surprised that anyone takes Gary Marcus seriously. As far as I know he hasn’t contributed anything meaningful to deep learning (or any other modern AI methods) but is always somehow there to criticize, waving his arms and shouting “but it’s not actually reasoning!” Baffling.

Edit: removed reference to Gary being a psychologist. It was distracting from the actual point.

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I'm surprised anyone in psychology would take machine learning researchers seriously when they continually spout that they are "solving intelligence" or any other such nonsense. I see Gary as a necessary antidote to hype and hyperbole.

And he is going against a lot of money, hype driven startups and arguably inflated paychecks... It is expected to have people misinterpreting and criticizing him.

While I don't necessarily agree with a lot of Gary Marcus' arguments re: AI, I don't think it's fair to gate-keep based on what you perceive his background is. AI is an incredibly multi-disciplinary field, and it's a little silly to imply that people coming from a psychology background cannot contribute meaningfully to the discussion.

If his background were in selling used cars, would his opinion receive any traction at all? I think it's fair to question the relevance of somebody's background if their background is the root of their supposed relevance.

Or you could, you know, evaluate things on the technical merits

You mean like the rebuttal the article gives? There is little more to Gary Marcus's position to rebut because his position is so weak. If he had a more relevant background then perhaps his opinions would have more substance and, consequently, warrant more substantial responses.

It's not that he is a psychologist, it's that he doesn't have any idea about what he's talking about in ML. It's important to have results when you want to change other people's opinions, he has only opinions. Let him do better than GPT-3 and show us how it's done.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has zero credentials and has contributed nothing of note on the practical side, and yet I frequently see him touted as an "AI expert" (here and elsewhere on the internet).

There's no barrier to entry to posting your opinions on the internet, and (to the degree possible) it's usually better to judge the post on its own merits, rather than the author's.

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