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I always find it so difficult to read popsci biographies of my own expert subjects. Hinton did not invent neural networks. Hinton is an amazing researcher and s
by toxik 7y ago
I always find it so difficult to read popsci biographies of my own expert subjects. Hinton did not invent neural networks. Hinton is an amazing researcher and scholar to be sure, but this is clearly hyperbole.
Edit: I turns out I misread the article, it merely suggests his chosen approach was neural networks, rather than that neural networks are his idea. I think honestly it’s written ambiguously by intent.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agoAnd yet we merrily accept stuff they write outside our expertise :)
- anonytrary 7y agoThis is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect[0]. People believe things about stuff they don't know, even if the source is wrong about stuff they do know. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
- notus 7y agoI was reading somewhere that there are evolutionary drivers behind our cognitive biases. I wonder if this is because to cooperate in social settings you have to rely on other people's expertise.
- dEnigma 7y agoIt's amazing how often people mention Gell-Mann Amnesia on Hacker News. Seems like Crichton's strategy of trying to make the term more popular by attaching a famous scientist's name to it paid off.
- anonytrary 7y agoTo be honest, I first learned about it on HackerNews a couple of years ago. Someone apparently reposted a link a few hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20789446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20789446
- coziestSoup 7y agoA lot of such articles exaggerate many of the specifics in favor of a dramatic storyline. I find that I enjoy them most when I treat them like based-on-real-events documentaries - Not taking them too seriously, but picking up interesting little facts and ideas along the way.
- tripzilch 7y agoExcept you won't know which are facts and which are dramatized factoids.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago> In the late ’50s, a Cornell scientist named Frank Rosenblatt had proposed the world’s first neural network machine. It was called the Perceptron, and it had a simple objective—to recognize images. This is right in the article. They don't attribute neural networks to Hinton—they just note that he worked with them.
- TheGrassyKnoll 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron
- inimino 7y agoIt describes how he had the idea as a teenager, inspired by a friend's description of holograms. In the next paragraph, the idea had already been tried as the perceptron, and had been disproven. It's ambiguous because that's how ideas are; the same idea will come to more than one person quite frequently.
- dmix 7y ago> the same idea will come to more than one person quite frequently This seems to happen as often as not. And sometimes the ones in the not category are that way for a reason!