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Comment by xor99 | Hacker News Reader

Title of the Metamers paper (which sounds really interesting) referenced in the text: "Model metamers illuminate divergences between biological and artificial neural networks".

This is literally the opposite of the main editorial push in this article and headline. Misrepresenting researchers in this way to beef up a silly mainstream narrative about ML/DL is definitely uncritical STEM worship-type territory.

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I don't think it's misrepresenting researchers. The article chiefly focuses on Richards' research, which shows correlation between a self-supervised model and parts of a human brain, hence the title, but also takes the space to talk about metamers. Pretty sure two things can be similar in some ways and different in others, so the two conclusions are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

It doesn't misrepresent the researchers. It mentions the "metamers" paper specifically to say that "Not everyone is convinced" and has a subsection titled, "Uncured Pathologies" to tell about the research works with opposing view from the main work talked about in the article.

The headline is declaring that "self-taught" (digital) AI shows similarities to how the brain works and as a result misrepresents research in this field because this is not scientific fact. It's a metaphor, literally. Overstating results misrepresents the balance of opinion in a field and therefore the value of the metamers research. Metamers is treated fairly in its own right but these issues remain because the headline and most of the copy are promoting one narrative.

You need to re-read that section. They quoted the authors of the metamers paper as holding a view opposed to main subjects of this article.

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