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Comment by samvher | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm naive - but I don't get it.

Closing your eyes doesn't make the room empty. And in the same way not programming preconceptions into the neural net doesn't make the preconceptions go away?

I realize explaining a joke or something like this takes away some of the charm (sorry), but would love to get the point :)

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Randomly wiring a neural net doesn't remove preconceptions, it just makes it that you don't know them. Similarly, closing your eyes doesn't make a room empty, it just makes it that you can't see what's there. Minsky is pointing out that Sussman's fundamental assumptions on desiring to remove preconceptions is logically flawed.

Gotcha - I read it as Sussman didn't want to program his preconceptions into the network (for which randomness seemed suitable, which is why I was confused). Your explanation makes more sense.

There's an old series of - stories? jokes? called 'unix koans' [1] which always end with a master answering a question in a very unclear but profound-sounding way, then the line 'Upon hearing this, [someone] was enlightened.'

I never found them laugh-out-loud funny myself.

This is probably a reference to those.

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/

A Koan (公案) is a concept from Zen Buddhism. Zen made its way into pop-culture (or at least the popular counter-culture movement) in the US in the 1960s via several writers of the Beat Generation. Project MAC at MIT was founded in the early 60s (Gerald Sussman started there in '64 I think)? So a number of faux Koans were in circulation in the AI crowd by about 1970.

Unfortunately because it's delivered as a koan we'll never know whether he's talking about the fact that the random weights determine the nearest local minimum or the hyperparameters.

also unfortunately, a "real koan" often relies on conflating expectations+conditioning versus direct experience, where direct experience is shown to invoke an "impossible" result; teaching that the conditioned, subjective mind does not see fundamental aspects of reality, though it thinks it has the answers.

These technical mimics of that structure echo a time when a lot of people, relatively, were experimenting with disregarding personal subjectivity in favor of direct experience and deeper Truth. In the modern tech versions, that is rarely if ever part of the story?

I think you’ve exactly described the point.

I interpret that as Minsky being... an unpleasurable person, to say the least.

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