This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This is nothing new though. If AI is possible at all, you were always going to get it from a dovetailer. Sure, it takes a lot more compute than current approaches, but those also take a lot more compute than humans.
I can't count the number of times technically literate people, even people smarter than your average ICML speaker and with AI experience, pooh-poohed Transformers (and all DL, and indeed all of the neural network paradigm) by pointing out that «all this math was already known by the end of 19th century» (meaning linear algebra) or something. Others pick other dates and formalisms and levels of abstraction.
In all cases their apparent idea is that a) they know what intelligence is (or can tell when they see it), in some nuanced way not captured by common behavioral definitions or described by any, say, information-theoretic approach, b) the low-level substrate of the computation is strongly predictive of the intelligence of the model implemented on it; c) linear algebra [with basic nonlinear activations but let's ignore that] or whatever else they attack is too boring a substrate to allow for anything human-level, or maybe anything truly biologically equivalent; and all appearances to the contrary merely obscure the Platonic truth that these models are dumb parrots.
In the limit you get someone like Penrose, who makes a high-effort (if perplexing) argument that doesn't amount to demanding respect for his intuition. In the average case it's this Google dude, who I assume is very good at maintaining a poker face: «Machine learning is statistics. Nearly irrelevant to AI». Marcuses are in between.
I don't remember if I've expounded on this, but like @2rafa says, academic big brains are offended by the success of ML. Such palaces of thought, entire realms of ever more publishable and sexy designs of thinking machines, showing off your own ability to juggle abstractions – all made obsolete by matmul plus petabytes of dirty human data and gigawatts of energy.
IMO this is just people not believing AGI is possible, or only believing it in the sense the physicalism requires them to say so.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, it's hilarious and sad that luminaries like Yann LeCun are being so dismissive, above and beyond standard counter-signalling. Although I've also kept my mouth shut about this on Twitter, since I'd sound like a basic bitch if I said "Yes, this is exciting!", although I do say that in person.
Perhaps part of it can be explained by Yann not having lived through the Great Update that most people in ML did when deep learning was unambiguously vindicated around 2013-2016. The rest of us got to learn what it feels like to be unnecessarily dismissive, and maybe learned some humility from that. But Yann was mostly right all along, so maybe he never had to :)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link