1,745 karma · joined June 11, 2017
Aside from the nonsensical performance numbers:
Theano, Neon, Torch, really?
No mention of PyTorch, Theano actually being discontinued..
First, discuss your idea on reddit machine learning. It will be shot down quickly if there is a gaping flaw or something you overlooked.
You can combine this with second, write a blogpost on what you got.
Third, write a preprint, link to it on the blogpost so there is no risk of you not getting credit.
Overall, the effort for each step increases significantly, you might be tempted to go straight for the preprint but let me tell you that this is most likely a waste of your time because you (very likely) don't know how to write with a certain ML flavour, how to present certain ideas, and how to design the right experiments or contextualise your arguments.
If you write a good blogpost, you have a nice starting point to find someone to help you formalise your ideas.
Everything comes at a price.
'Manchin was the only Democrat to vote in confirmation of controversial Trump cabinet appointees Jeff Sessions[87] and Steven Mnuchin,[88] one of two Democrats who voted to confirm Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator, and one of three who voted to confirm Rex Tillerson.'
and politically well connected. Would be surprised if anything would happen, at all. Just like the last pricing scandal, which was barely a year ago:
Especially for research-heavy positions, the amount of nonsense exercises really makes or breaks a company impression for me.
case 1) Have a serious technical conversations with questions testing my understanding, asking about my projects, ideas and interests.
case 2) 3 minutes of smalltalk while the interviewer reads out some points from my CV so I can repeat them back. Then 'alright, let's do a coding exercise'. Learn nothing about the team, their process, their vision in the phone rounds.
I'd say not testing your ideas and instead spending forever overthinking/planning them is actually a leading cause of procrastination for PhDs.
There is just no way around grinding out the experiments. You literally have to will something to work in multi-month long pushes where you iterate again and again until you figure it out.
Deep work is good and nice for the theoretical parts, but all the academic superstars/upcomers I know work super long AND super hard to make conference deadlines all the time.
Of course, if you just want to graduate without stressing all that much or much ambition, this might work.
Why is being young a good reason not to be sceptical?
Wouldn't being young in a healthcare startup be all the more reason to be sceptical?
Assuming that there is a distribution wherein some industries and products are simply better tackled by founders with substantial experience, e.g. by conducting research in the area, practising medicine, consulting on healthcare, ..
That is not to say you cannot successful being young in healthcare, I just don't see any prior reason why being young would be an advantage here, unlike in e.g. social media.
'Gawker began as a crusade to save journalism'. Sure.
When even outlets which like to think of themselves as flag-bearers for critical journalism can barely go a week without severely misrepresenting content, I have little compassion left (example: Guardian calling the Google memo an 'anti-diversity' memo https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/08/google-fi...).
In recent months, I have felt that any HN discussion has more editorial integrity than even the 'best' newspapers. Users call each other out. Nobody seems to call each other out on substandard work in professional newsrooms. Only after the shitstorm passes, the same people who made it happen like to talk about how 'the media' overreacted.
In my experience, committing to this lifestyle meant being socially crowded out. Some people were unpopular to begin with and sort of found refuge in the computer world out of necessity, some of us accepted being unpopular/uncool because we did not care.
One possible explanation, but potentially an offensive one, and only based on personal experience: fewer women were willing to make this sacrifice, at least in school. Interestingly, this was not because boys would be unwelcoming but because other women would judge them harshly for stepping out.
On a related anecdote, I frequently observed girls in school downplaying their math abilities in front of their friends - not because men judged them, but because they did not want to stand out in front of their friends.
I suppose the interesting question is why they felt this way, and I would not wager to answer it. I just think the theory 'men are not letting women into tech' simply does not hold up in the formative school years.
Only very recently (since the social network movie) there has been this glorification of tech in combination with the startup lifestyle.
All the issues someone with no familiarity of the code base or the problem could typically uncover are things that are prone to be automated away by software in the long run (or are already in the process of being automated).
Let's take a moment to change perspective:
Imagine you worked for years on something and finally uploaded it on ArXiv, waiting for the community to weigh in. The following characters appear:
1. Someone known in the field does not bother reading it but says you are probably wrong, bets money on you being wrong and says he does not want to be bothered with it. How would you feel?
2. Someone else known in the community starts collating information/comments to help verify the proof or find instructive mistakes.
3. Another mathematician also believes Blum is wrong just because it is statistically likely, and does not want to spend time on something that will most likely lead nowhere. She keeps this opinion to herself and simply does not engage with the material. If approached, she declines to comment because she says he did not have time to check the proof.
Aaronson went for option 1 and in my highly personal opinion, it's the worst of the ones listed. It's standing at the sidelines being snarky. Just because he may as well be right does not make this behaviour any better.
It is the equivalent of laughing in an undergrad lecture when someone asks a naive question.
I think Aaronson's dismissive attitude is unbecoming and disrespectful amongst colleagues.
'Unrelated Update: To everyone who keeps asking me about the “new” P≠NP proof: I’d again bet $200,000 that the paper won’t stand, except that the last time I tried that, it didn’t achieve its purpose, which was to get people to stop asking me about it. So: please stop asking, and if the thing hasn’t been refuted by the end of the week, you can come back and tell me I was a closed-minded fool.'
Quick-copy pasting a Facebook comment as reason not to want to deal with it, betting a large sum of money almost tauntingly is not good scholarship.
A serious researcher made a serious effort to solve a problem. Say you have not verified it and don't want to comment.
It almost seems like he does not want P/NP to be proven because he has made a reputation by becoming an authority on dismissing attempts.
https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/38803/where-is-...
In particular someone claimed to have found a flaw (which I can not comment on, not a complexity theory person):
'Tardos' function is a monotone function which is 1 on k-cliques and 0 on complete (k-1)-partite graphs. As far as I can tell, Berg and Ulfberg use ONLY these properties in their CNF-DNF approximation proof for CLIQUE, which hence prove that Tardos' function has exponential monotone complexity. Blum's Theorem 6 says that monotone complexity lower bounds by CNF-DNF approximation for monotone functions, give the same NON-monotone lower bound. Hence, Tardos' function have exponential complexity according to Theorem 6 (which is false)'
They are most toxic to an organisation's culture in the long run.
It is a failure of management that people fuelling the outrage cycles via public shaming, virtue signalling and grandstanding feel empowered to exercise mob justice.
Debatable, the shareholders might not be happy that Google might now become a political target for oppressing views.
However, I agree that given potential liability issues from hostile workplace lawsuits almost forced his hand, which is very unfortunate.
Please state the specific passages where he:
- argues for affirmative action specifically benefiting conservatives
- calls women genetically inferior
http://services.choruscall.com/links/snap170810AfkYZvWT.html
A threat is never just an opinion in authoritarian thinking. It's outside of what constitutes an opinion, it's outside the system.
Hence, for the greater good, it must be not just be rejected, it must be destroyed as a moral necessity.
If you go down this road, there is only one destination.
I can sympathise with your view point. Of course I can. That is my whole point. It takes incredibly mental expenditure to not follow that style of thinking.
I would wager that none of the people calling for this person to be personally ruined, expelled from society, terminated from their job and forever vilified as an outcast would view themselves as authoritarian.
Not the Tweeters shaking with anger and demanding for him to get fired.
Not the Ex-Google guy with his medium rant about how people would punch him in the face and he would understand.
Not the diversity officer reaffirming the commitment to diversity in a dystopian way.
It is scary, it really is. We have all grown up learning about regimes like this, we are all aware, yet seemingly nobody can help themselves.