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It’s weird how this headline and article makes it sound like Hawkins is being coy about his theories, or preferring to work in secret than explain them. But On
by stupidcar 8y ago
It’s weird how this headline and article makes it sound like Hawkins is being coy about his theories, or preferring to work in secret than explain them. But On Intelligence was published years ago, and contained a section on testable predictions. Likewise, Numenta has published papers, and made source code available.
So it doesn’t seem to me that the problem is that Hawkins has been uncommunicative, it’s that the wider academic and research community just hasn’t been interested. Perhaps that’s simply because his theories don’t have merit, but it’s also hard to shake the feeling that’s it more because his career, and therefore his theories, hasn’t fit the standard academic mould.
It seems to me that, if you want to be an influential theorist, you’re expected to study at a prestigious university, work with an older, respected researcher while getting your PhD, then become a professor, setup a research lab, mentor some PhD students of your own, then finally maybe spin off your research into some startups, or take a high-paying research position at a big company.
Hawkins hasn’t followed this path, so he has no network of peers and former students to evangelise his work and carry it forward. He’s done research and published it, like the scientific ideal says you should, but he’s missing the structure necessary to make it land in the research world.
It’s like a sort-of reverse cargo cult. He’s done the work of constructing a real airstrip and working planes, but he can’t persuade anybody to fly, because they’ve never seen or heard of air travel before.
- CogDisco 8y agoDo you feel it's likely that he's created something that works and rather than using or elaborating upon his work, and thus bettering their own career, everyone has thought, "Wait a second, isn't this the Palm Pilot guy?" and discarded the idea? Instead of just cutting out the middle bit of getting a PhD, becoming a professor, setting up a research lab, and mentoring students for decades, and leaping straight to "make a startup from an idea that works", every single person decided to go the hard road because it seems proper? Your cargo cult idea works - he's arranged all the trappings of being an influential theorist - funding and research labs and media coverage - except perhaps for the one thing that lets him fly: a worthwhile idea.
- buboard 8y agoIt's not always like that. If his ideas worked, or somehow led to better understanding , his models would be adopted (like how neuroscientists are now diving into deep-learning). But he hasn't for decades, and at some point people just stop listening.
- mathewsanders 8y agoIt’s been a while since I read ‘On Intelligence’ but I think I remember it containing a pretty good primer of his ideas, and references to open source implementation of his predictive algorithm with the invitation to apply it to specific domains because his team had no chance of exploring all the applications. If tweets were searchable, I was really taken reading this book and I think I made a pretty grand statement that future generations would compare this book to work like The Origin of Species. Now I’m interested to dig up my copy and read again :)
- jbenner-radham 8y agoI just finished my first read through of that book last night after having had it in my “backlog” for years. I’m kicking myself for not reading it earlier. It really was a fantastically intriguing read and definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the subject matter.