6 ms·

Grievance scholars isn't a real label. Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar? In the humanities criticism p

by ml3v 8y ago

Grievance scholars isn't a real label. Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar? In the humanities criticism plays a similar role. A researcher criticizing slavery or modern social structures isn't completely now free of any standards. The journal they tricked has an impact factor of 1.1, so im not impressed. Using 'greivence scholars' is stupid, and contributes to the STEM superiority complex.

carbocation 8y ago
A bit of a tangent, but I suspect I'm missing the meat of the Pearl DL debate - any good links? I ask this because I also think of DL as "just" curve fitting that works extremely well for some families of input. Is that far off from the view of most DL people?
- ml3v 8y ago
  Well there are certainly heavyweight researchers who believe the DL can organize and recognize higher principles. Andrew Ng and Geoff Hinton are among them. But DL nets can be very fragile solutions, that only curve fit to the training data. You dont want to recognize the same picture of the puppy, you want to recognize all puppies. Others who disagree are trying to integrate logical approaches with DL into novel archetectures. I see it as more of pendulum moving back and forth. But Pearl's work is in Causal Statistics and is a hard core Bayesian. https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-ma... It's not like his complaints aren't being addressed in the field, they are just not easy problems (transfer learning, world models) In a neural analogy, you don't haven't built a brain, you have a reflex.
  - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
    *Geoff Hinton
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    >> It's not like his complaints aren't being addressed in the field, they are just not easy problems (transfer learning, world models) Machine learning is rapidly losing its ability to innovate as a field and the reason is the extreme focus on deep learning for classification- and secondarily the fact that the billions of corporate funding now attract researchers from the sciences who have no background in computer science or AI and haven't got a clue what the fuss is about that people like Perl are making. Here it is from Hinton himself: One big challenge the community faces is that if you want to get a paper published in machine learning now it's got to have a table in it, with all these different data sets across the top, and all these different methods along the side, and your method has to look like the best one. If it doesn’t look like that, it’s hard to get published. I don't think that's encouraging people to think about radically new ideas. Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who's trying to review too many papers and doesn't understand it first time round and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not going to get accepted. And I think that's really bad. https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-more-like-brains/ https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-...
- Jach 8y ago
  The tldr from my reading is that Pearl thinks you can't ascend the "ladder of causality" with pure DL -- i.e. while you can make associations to answer simple probabilistic questions, you can't create a system that can answer questions like "if this intervention is made at t0, what is the likely outcome at t1?" or consider counterfactuals like "would my mother have lived longer if she didn't drink?" You'd probably be best served by reading Pearl himself, his recent Book of Why is good, this much earlier paper[0] kind of lays out a few things too as for his reasoning that causal inference needs different tools. There's also some stuff in the blogosphere about an earlier dispute you might find fun, i.e. the methods of using causal inference tools. Example[1]. [0] https://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r284-reprint.pdf https://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r284-reprint.pdf [1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2009/07/05/disputes_about/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2009/07/05/disputes_a...
whatshisface 8y ago
>Grievance scholars isn't a real label. What everyone means when they refer to "grievance scholars" is the same group of people that were popularly called S.J.W. (social justice warrior) only a year ago, except with less popular baggage and a more academic tone (which might not last once popular personalities get a hold of it). I don't know what the technical requirements for something to be a real label are, but I can confidently say that it is a real group of people. As reluctant as we all are to admit it, I think the "Jordan Peterson" reactionary movement has made the jump from YouTube personalities to academia, and although they might not want to be associated with their origin story, all of the language and concepts are coming along. >Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar? This is a red herring, because although many off-mainstream scholars have literal grievances, their primary subject of study is not the fact that they do.
- ml3v 8y ago
  >Grievance scholars isn't a real label I agree essentially, its a meme created to debase the humanities. And I'm not too worried about the legitimacy of this viewpoint from within the academic community. What is dangerous is that people who are only marginally invested form a dangerous and disingenuous opinion of large fields of research on the basis of "SJWs are annoying". > On Pearl Obviously a counterexample within the context of STEM. What this guy hates about the humanities is that it challenges the status quo. The point I'm trying to make with this relates to communities and the perception of criticism. Foulcaut would say all the humanities are capable of is to criticize modern institutions. > I'm just talking about the modern context. When we say "greivence studies", This is a phrase this guy came up with, to obviously target a subset of the humanities with a left leaning adgenda (i.e. womens studies, african american studies, and whatever gay studies is called), and target a low quality journal to confirm his preheld belifes. It's not a useful idea to try to understand discourse or solve any problem within the humanities, but an disrespectful attempt to mar whole departments. The choice of the label Grievence scholar is deliberate. If to critically understand anything is impossible, all you're doing is complaining. > Marring whole fields of study This is the intended response. Not to expose flaws in the paper to publication pipeline. So people could point and laugh. It doesn't help that STEM people love to do this anyway. Until you bring up research fraud in their respective field, and how dumb did that made them all look. In bio this happens all the time, most often at the top of the research hierarchy.
nonbel 8y ago
>"Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar?" Deep learning? It is curve fitting (ie pattern recognition), is there supposed to be something wrong with that?
- leggomylibro 8y ago
  Only if you want to market it as 'AI'.
  - nonbel 8y ago
    Humans do similar though. You know a chair when you see it, but you wouldm't easily come up with the perfect definition of a chair.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - antidesitter 8y ago
      The criticism isn’t that it’s unnecessary, but that it’s insufficient: https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-ma....
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
Oh, for fuck's sakes! You damn well know that the kind of "criticism" in "critical theory" or "grievance studies" is normative polemic. It is not open to re-evaluating its normative conclusions, but instead to inventing and evaluating arguments for those conclusions. Moral norms are baked in, and should therefore be acknowledged as part of the intellectual foundations of those fields and subfields, open to question and disagreement. This is really, genuinely different from both STEM fields and from "non-grievance" humanities fields. You are not expected to hold particular moral views, for instance, to be a moral philosopher -- in fact, the field is all about evaluating which such views can be supported without postulating them as beyond question. This applies all the more so in the famously "harder" fields of physics or mathematics, in which we are usually (not always) so far removed from needing to make morally deep decisions that we can pick up and put down ethical frameworks as appropriate to the particular application in mind (power plant, weaponry, civil engineering, etc), without ever needing to bake in moral or political goals as an intrinsic part of what it means for a paper or a textbook to be good physics, leaving good physics a matter of epistemic goals, which are explicated, evaluated, and questioned in the philosophy of science.
buboard 8y ago
> The journal they tricked has an impact factor of 1.1, so im not impressed. What are the high impact journals of their fields? My understanding is that Hypatia is a leading journal.
memeograph 8y ago
You seem to be either unaware of the details of the Grievance Studies project or are deliberately minimizing it. They didn't target one journal, they targeted multiple. 7 papers were published and 5 others were in the process of being iterated on, all taken seriously. They cited numerous existing papers to jump off of and build their ridiculous premises. Such as the idea that white students should be chained up in class to understand privilege or that obesity is great. These papers were lauded as exciting contributions and one was singled out with an award. This work is nearly indistinguishable from real papers in the field, and was constructed to justify ridiculous conclusions, working backwards to find precedent in the fields in question. That's what makes them qualify as Grievance Studies. There are no real hypotheses being tested, it's just the academic laundering of ideology. Do you seriously think someone could spend a year just learning the lingo of a real STEM discipline and get similarly farcical work published? With no real results required? This isn't about real sociology, linguistics, literature or psychology. The fact that these disciplines are actively trying to break into STEM by claiming a necessity for feminist geography or astronomy really says enough. They're not happy to just sit in their own departments, doing "research" and producing an inbred body of work, they want to compel the hard sciences to take them seriously. Remember the C+equality parody that went around a few years ago and which ticked off enough gender activists to get it banned from github? Well, they were just lampooning a real thesis someone had written, about how feminism could enrich logic and coding, because masculinity focused too much on rigid categories. This empress already has no clothes.
- gdy 8y ago
  "Do you seriously think someone could spend a year just learning the lingo of a real STEM discipline and get similarly farcical work published?" As a matter of fact, yes. Google scigen, mathgen - you will find the stories of how computer-generated nonsensical papers were accepted by conferences and low quality journals. For example: http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/185 http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/185
  - js8 8y ago
    Have the authors of these non-sensical papers consulted the ethical panel, whether to conduct the experiment? It seems to me (as was actually pointed out by the hoaxing authors themselves) that either you can take what they did seriously, or not, but not both.

by ml3v 8y ago

carbocation 8y ago

A bit of a tangent, but I suspect I'm missing the meat of the Pearl DL debate - any good links? I ask this because I also think of DL as "just" curve fitting that works extremely well for some families of input. Is that far off from the view of most DL people?

ml3v 8y ago
Well there are certainly heavyweight researchers who believe the DL can organize and recognize higher principles. Andrew Ng and Geoff Hinton are among them. But DL nets can be very fragile solutions, that only curve fit to the training data. You dont want to recognize the same picture of the puppy, you want to recognize all puppies. Others who disagree are trying to integrate logical approaches with DL into novel archetectures. I see it as more of pendulum moving back and forth. But Pearl's work is in Causal Statistics and is a hard core Bayesian. https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-ma... It's not like his complaints aren't being addressed in the field, they are just not easy problems (transfer learning, world models) In a neural analogy, you don't haven't built a brain, you have a reflex.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  *Geoff Hinton
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  >> It's not like his complaints aren't being addressed in the field, they are just not easy problems (transfer learning, world models) Machine learning is rapidly losing its ability to innovate as a field and the reason is the extreme focus on deep learning for classification- and secondarily the fact that the billions of corporate funding now attract researchers from the sciences who have no background in computer science or AI and haven't got a clue what the fuss is about that people like Perl are making. Here it is from Hinton himself: One big challenge the community faces is that if you want to get a paper published in machine learning now it's got to have a table in it, with all these different data sets across the top, and all these different methods along the side, and your method has to look like the best one. If it doesn’t look like that, it’s hard to get published. I don't think that's encouraging people to think about radically new ideas. Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer who's trying to review too many papers and doesn't understand it first time round and assumes it must be nonsense. Anything that makes the brain hurt is not going to get accepted. And I think that's really bad. https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-more-like-brains/ https://www.wired.com/story/googles-ai-guru-computers-think-...
Jach 8y ago
The tldr from my reading is that Pearl thinks you can't ascend the "ladder of causality" with pure DL -- i.e. while you can make associations to answer simple probabilistic questions, you can't create a system that can answer questions like "if this intervention is made at t0, what is the likely outcome at t1?" or consider counterfactuals like "would my mother have lived longer if she didn't drink?" You'd probably be best served by reading Pearl himself, his recent Book of Why is good, this much earlier paper[0] kind of lays out a few things too as for his reasoning that causal inference needs different tools. There's also some stuff in the blogosphere about an earlier dispute you might find fun, i.e. the methods of using causal inference tools. Example[1]. [0] https://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r284-reprint.pdf https://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r284-reprint.pdf [1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2009/07/05/disputes_about/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2009/07/05/disputes_a...

whatshisface 8y ago

>Grievance scholars isn't a real label. What everyone means when they refer to "grievance scholars" is the same group of people that were popularly called S.J.W. (social justice warrior) only a year ago, except with less popular baggage and a more academic tone (which might not last once popular personalities get a hold of it). I don't know what the technical requirements for something to be a real label are, but I can confidently say that it is a real group of people. As reluctant as we all are to admit it, I think the "Jordan Peterson" reactionary movement has made the jump from YouTube personalities to academia, and although they might not want to be associated with their origin story, all of the language and concepts are coming along. >Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar? This is a red herring, because although many off-mainstream scholars have literal grievances, their primary subject of study is not the fact that they do.

ml3v 8y ago
>Grievance scholars isn't a real label I agree essentially, its a meme created to debase the humanities. And I'm not too worried about the legitimacy of this viewpoint from within the academic community. What is dangerous is that people who are only marginally invested form a dangerous and disingenuous opinion of large fields of research on the basis of "SJWs are annoying". > On Pearl Obviously a counterexample within the context of STEM. What this guy hates about the humanities is that it challenges the status quo. The point I'm trying to make with this relates to communities and the perception of criticism. Foulcaut would say all the humanities are capable of is to criticize modern institutions. > I'm just talking about the modern context. When we say "greivence studies", This is a phrase this guy came up with, to obviously target a subset of the humanities with a left leaning adgenda (i.e. womens studies, african american studies, and whatever gay studies is called), and target a low quality journal to confirm his preheld belifes. It's not a useful idea to try to understand discourse or solve any problem within the humanities, but an disrespectful attempt to mar whole departments. The choice of the label Grievence scholar is deliberate. If to critically understand anything is impossible, all you're doing is complaining. > Marring whole fields of study This is the intended response. Not to expose flaws in the paper to publication pipeline. So people could point and laugh. It doesn't help that STEM people love to do this anyway. Until you bring up research fraud in their respective field, and how dumb did that made them all look. In bio this happens all the time, most often at the top of the research hierarchy.

nonbel 8y ago

>"Judea Pearl thinks that DL is nothing more than curve fitting. Is he a greivence scholar?" Deep learning? It is curve fitting (ie pattern recognition), is there supposed to be something wrong with that?

leggomylibro 8y ago
Only if you want to market it as 'AI'.
- nonbel 8y ago
  Humans do similar though. You know a chair when you see it, but you wouldm't easily come up with the perfect definition of a chair.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - antidesitter 8y ago
    The criticism isn’t that it’s unnecessary, but that it’s insufficient: https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-machines-teach-them-cause-and-effect-20180515/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-ma....

eli_gottlieb 8y ago

Oh, for fuck's sakes! You damn well know that the kind of "criticism" in "critical theory" or "grievance studies" is normative polemic. It is not open to re-evaluating its normative conclusions, but instead to inventing and evaluating arguments for those conclusions. Moral norms are baked in, and should therefore be acknowledged as part of the intellectual foundations of those fields and subfields, open to question and disagreement. This is really, genuinely different from both STEM fields and from "non-grievance" humanities fields. You are not expected to hold particular moral views, for instance, to be a moral philosopher -- in fact, the field is all about evaluating which such views can be supported without postulating them as beyond question. This applies all the more so in the famously "harder" fields of physics or mathematics, in which we are usually (not always) so far removed from needing to make morally deep decisions that we can pick up and put down ethical frameworks as appropriate to the particular application in mind (power plant, weaponry, civil engineering, etc), without ever needing to bake in moral or political goals as an intrinsic part of what it means for a paper or a textbook to be good physics, leaving good physics a matter of epistemic goals, which are explicated, evaluated, and questioned in the philosophy of science.

buboard 8y ago

> The journal they tricked has an impact factor of 1.1, so im not impressed. What are the high impact journals of their fields? My understanding is that Hypatia is a leading journal.

memeograph 8y ago

You seem to be either unaware of the details of the Grievance Studies project or are deliberately minimizing it. They didn't target one journal, they targeted multiple. 7 papers were published and 5 others were in the process of being iterated on, all taken seriously. They cited numerous existing papers to jump off of and build their ridiculous premises. Such as the idea that white students should be chained up in class to understand privilege or that obesity is great. These papers were lauded as exciting contributions and one was singled out with an award. This work is nearly indistinguishable from real papers in the field, and was constructed to justify ridiculous conclusions, working backwards to find precedent in the fields in question. That's what makes them qualify as Grievance Studies. There are no real hypotheses being tested, it's just the academic laundering of ideology. Do you seriously think someone could spend a year just learning the lingo of a real STEM discipline and get similarly farcical work published? With no real results required? This isn't about real sociology, linguistics, literature or psychology. The fact that these disciplines are actively trying to break into STEM by claiming a necessity for feminist geography or astronomy really says enough. They're not happy to just sit in their own departments, doing "research" and producing an inbred body of work, they want to compel the hard sciences to take them seriously. Remember the C+equality parody that went around a few years ago and which ticked off enough gender activists to get it banned from github? Well, they were just lampooning a real thesis someone had written, about how feminism could enrich logic and coding, because masculinity focused too much on rigid categories. This empress already has no clothes.

gdy 8y ago
"Do you seriously think someone could spend a year just learning the lingo of a real STEM discipline and get similarly farcical work published?" As a matter of fact, yes. Google scigen, mathgen - you will find the stories of how computer-generated nonsensical papers were accepted by conferences and low quality journals. For example: http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/185 http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/185
- js8 8y ago
  Have the authors of these non-sensical papers consulted the ethical panel, whether to conduct the experiment? It seems to me (as was actually pointed out by the hoaxing authors themselves) that either you can take what they did seriously, or not, but not both.