> Hacker News still seems to have a deeply skeptical culture with regard to machine learning
Is... that a bad thing? Skepticism is good. When it's about something as hyped as "deep learning", even more so.
Is... that a bad thing? Skepticism is good. When it's about something as hyped as "deep learning", even more so.
Yes, when it is there for no valid reason, or ridiculous reasons. Skepticism is not a default position you can take like a toddler refusing to eat their vegetables. You need some informed (and non-fallacious) intelligent reasoning behind that. "I'm skeptic about this thing using X because X is so hyped these days" is not such reasoning.
Similarly, I've read too many people hyping up glorified chatbots as one step below AGI (see the :o reactions to GPT3), so I'm now extra skeptical about claims about machine learning.
I don't know what skepticism has to do with ridiculous toddlers - they are almost universally incapable of grasping the nuances of epistemology.
There's skepticism and then there's being a non-expert in a field and talking with high confidence. How do you differentiate these? Conspiracy theorists use the same logic. You're right that skepticism is good, but it is easy to go overboard.
So sure, you are right, but in the context of this discussion you're implying that the vast majority of ML researchers (myself included) are charlatans. I'm not sure what the meaningful difference here is. We're publishing results, people are actively reproducing them, and then some person on the internet that doesn't understand the subject comes along and says "you're full of shit." We can even disprove the claims being made (e.g. I've explained why the network can't be memorizing the game in another comment). That is literally happening in this thread (GAN Theft Auto is in fact a replication/extension effort). Is that meaningfully different from the anti-vaxxers?
Not been too long on HN but the top comments on most threads are a contrarian one (and one which I truly appreciate because it provides a different POv) but sadly because it is encouraged through the high upvotes, the crowd tendency is to regress towards this approach, even if sometimes the rigour of the critique is lacking
It can be, but its certainly not an unmitigated good. Especially when it leads to aspersions of fraud and conspiratorial thinking (e.g. rasz's comment thread below).