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Is it survivorship bias? ML attempts that fail are cancelled and never heard from again, those that succeed are publicized. The same approach works with pig en

Is it survivorship bias? ML attempts that fail are cancelled and never heard from again, those that succeed are publicized. The same approach works with pig entrails: a bunch of people make predictions, the ones that fail go away, the ones that happen to succeed a few times "must work". Or in stock market terms, "past performance is no guarantee of future results."

canjobear 9y ago
In a way you're exactly correct and that's exactly why machine learning works. The models specify a huge range of possible input-output mappings and then do a dumb search to find the ones that work; the mappings that don't succeed are discarded. It turns out, surprisingly, this is the best approach we have come up with. > Or in stock market terms, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." Past performance isn't a guarantee, but under mild conditions it is very strong evidence that there will be future results.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
And lets' not forget that one lucky hit with pig entrails is enough to build a career that lasts a couple of decades. I'm trying to remember where I read about this but, allegedly, there used to be a gentleman in New Orleans (if memory serves) who went around handing, at random, sealed envelopes with "boy" or "girl" written on a piece of paper inside, to pregnant women. The idea was that he could expect to hit the right sex of the unborn child a few times and that those lucky hits would make people think he had some sort of gift for seeing the future. As to the misses, the women would be too preoccupied with having just given birth to raise a stink. Note the envelopes were handed out for free. It was his advertisement, see.
pixl97 9y ago
>Is it survivorship bias? ML attempts that fail are cancelled and never heard from again Which is exactly how we got from single cell organisms to human level intelligence. Of course it took 4 billionish years for that to happen. Life, hence intelligence is survivorship, that's the selection mechanism.

canjobear 9y ago

In a way you're exactly correct and that's exactly why machine learning works. The models specify a huge range of possible input-output mappings and then do a dumb search to find the ones that work; the mappings that don't succeed are discarded. It turns out, surprisingly, this is the best approach we have come up with. > Or in stock market terms, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." Past performance isn't a guarantee, but under mild conditions it is very strong evidence that there will be future results.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

And lets' not forget that one lucky hit with pig entrails is enough to build a career that lasts a couple of decades. I'm trying to remember where I read about this but, allegedly, there used to be a gentleman in New Orleans (if memory serves) who went around handing, at random, sealed envelopes with "boy" or "girl" written on a piece of paper inside, to pregnant women. The idea was that he could expect to hit the right sex of the unborn child a few times and that those lucky hits would make people think he had some sort of gift for seeing the future. As to the misses, the women would be too preoccupied with having just given birth to raise a stink. Note the envelopes were handed out for free. It was his advertisement, see.

pixl97 9y ago

>Is it survivorship bias? ML attempts that fail are cancelled and never heard from again Which is exactly how we got from single cell organisms to human level intelligence. Of course it took 4 billionish years for that to happen. Life, hence intelligence is survivorship, that's the selection mechanism.