5 ms·
We should fund medieval literature well too. Some of the best CTOs are humanities people for whom engineering just isn't fully satisfying at intellectual life s
by chrstphrhrt 8y ago
We should fund medieval literature well too. Some of the best CTOs are humanities people for whom engineering just isn't fully satisfying at intellectual life scale.
Applying symbolic logic, hermeneutics, retroduction, and criticism are higher abstract levels of creative problem solving, via inference to the likely explanation with respect to priors, a.k.a. the scientific method. These kinds of reasoning simply aren't practically doable by math alone yet, not to mention deep learning tools in the field.
The next wave of AI methods will need to go beyond statistics to come full circle, because classification is not reasoning. What else is there? All the GOFAI stuff, prolog, expert systems, knowledge graphs, fuzzy/modal logics. These things were always great at reasoning but the last winter happened because they were bad at dealing with uncertainty. Now the stats methods have solved that problem but they suck at reasoning. It is time for a synthesis.
As a startup I don't want a data science PhD to tinker with an optimal CNN design for a year to eke out that extra 1 or 2 percent of precision and recall. I want an ensemble of specialized models, ideally pre-trained, grafted together in a logically consistent way that is configurable and introspect-able via text/data at runtime.
The economy is misconfigured! That said, humanities people should probably learn how to code as a research skill.
- azhenley 8y agoIf someone with a humanities PhD can market/apply themself the way you just did, they will have no problem finding a high paying position.
- povertyworld 8y agoI like to tell myself that having a humanities or social science background will give me some kind of different insight into AI/ML, but other than knowing what a gerund is without having to look it up, or nodding knowingly when someone drops a Wittgenstein quote, it's really not helping. Then again, I can't be sure that I'm not stupid.
- dx87 8y agoWhen I was doing a training exercise in the military, I was talking to an Air Force General who told us that their best cybersecurity officers had undergrads in non-tech fields. They said that computer science and software engineering undergrads weren't good at thinking outside the box because they were used to questions being provably right or wrong with no middleground. Their officers with political science, philosophy, or other humanities undergrads were better at handling big picture problems that needed a "best" answer, not necessarily a verifiably 100% correct answer. They needed more technical training after graduation, but usually ended up being superior cybersecurity officers.
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