I have questions...
Is the author aware of the toxic communities and their use of the meme or is the author a member of these toxic communities? Is it the authors intent to exclude you in anyway when using the meme?
And if there a bunch of "no" answers above: Why is it the authors responsibility to keep track with your associations with this meme?
If you feel validated by people that think the same thing go ahead, but I think is that the 'meme policing' was unnecessary on a technical response of the content.
> it's a bit frustrating as it actively causes rifts that make it harder for me to do professional work.
My comments that you are taking that I'm being aggressive is that you have made your professional frustration about your feelings. These issues isn't who else uses the meme, but that the meme spreads a bad idea that makes your professional life harder.
I bring it up because I'd like to bring light on it if it's sorta seeping into the mainstream, a lot of people adjacent to it sort of just ignore it and leave it be. Like, I've actively seen this meme used in the main AI servers where it's used to push down people who do question blind scaling, for example (which is not what Sutton was talking about). It silences conversation and halts diversity, and it's an actual problem unfortunately.
Thankfully there are other spaces where it's not as much a problem, but since it's pretty well-tied and trickling into HN, felt appropriate to share my 2c. And people may well say what they want (including brr) in response. :)
It's just a meme. No need to read too much into it.
In this case, the meme came from https://gwern.net/scaling-hypothesis. I doubt that Gwern was making fun of any particular group, except perhaps those that disagree with the bitter lesson.
Is there any resource that makes legible how to go about this? Or shares insights into the process of iterative learning through experiments, more broadly?
If you write your codebases to minimize the expected time to make a particular change (fewer files, simpler proxy problem [as long as it transfers to your larger-scale problem!], more 'flat' structure, simple dataloaders, etc), then that is extremely valuable as well. What you are optimizing is the average time from idea-to-answer.
What is nice is that experiments go from strongly-planned, biased (from human beliefs, etc) things to a more high-variance process where there isn't as much requirement to double-and-triple check everything before running it. There is often an _extremely_ poor mismatch between the very first impression of what many of us think will work and will not and what actually works when the dust settles. Sorta like how SGD bounces around the loss landscape before settling in.
One thing that also is easier with fast experiments is to make the 'opposite' change if a planned change doesn't work out well, just to see how it goes. A tiny thing, but if you're going sequentially instead of batched (in terms of batched experiments) it can be useful.
I use as few libraries as possible. A lot of the bulky monitoring solutions can be good for some enterprise things, I don't find they're good for innovating, but instead, integrating. You innovate on small test problems that are appropriately representative. When done, you integrate and see what difference it makes.
Doing dumb things is one of the best ways to learn. Having access to everything to be able to print it out/log it/look at it in a chart is great too.
But everything is bottlenecked by speed. Increase your experiment speed, where (critically!) your speed includes the time from idea to first answer coming back (and not just plain ol' runtime), and you'll find oftentimes it's easy to get 5-10x research speed improvements. We just don't do research all that efficiently these days, I don't think. But we can. And I'm sure we will, eventually. :3
There are a few things like scaling that can be difficult, but math is still math, and if you pick your proxies right, it should be an explored-translation-step after the proxy problem behaves as well as it is reasonably able. And if you have a secondary, slightly larger proxy problem, that's an even better thing in my experience, since it prevents the sticker shock of broken graphs and things failing for an unknown reason. All about how well you can pass the peach from one person to another. :')))) <3 <3 :')))) :'D :'D
I do love how he continues to spin out new potential modalities for Deep Learning. While underrecognized due to the hype today, I think we darn well need far more of it these days! :D :))))
I thought it meant to involuntary shiver...