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My question is whether someone could fake it and not be caught/fired. (So yes, I meant: "Or work in some random domain?") From the second half of your comment

My question is whether someone could fake it and not be caught/fired. (So yes, I meant: "Or work in some random domain?") From the second half of your comment it seems that the answer is yes? Maybe a comparison would help: someone pretending to be an experienced iOS/Android developer without any qualifications or ability would quickly be caught. Since they couldn't produce any working app or use a compiler, and anyone can judge an app for themselves. You can't really just make it up out of whole cloth, people judge the results. You would have to start actually doing that, and if you couldn't or didn't want to, then unless you outsourced your own job or something the jig would be up pretty much instantly. (Unless you caught up.) So, how about machine learning? Do you think a fraud could land and keep such a job, without any knowledge, qualifications, ability, or even interest in getting up to speed? Just, a pure, simple fraud. What's your guess?

joshvm 7y ago
OK I misinterpreted slightly. Fake it til you make it isn't a terrible strategy. But pure fraud? If you didn't even make an attempt to learn on the job? You'd get caught pretty fast as soon as someone started asking any kind of in depth questions about the models you were supposed to be training. I'm not sure you could land a job knowing nothing. Maybe. Depends how hard you get interviewed and whether they know about machine learning. If you could fake a portfolio and nobody questioned it perhaps? I can see that happening in academia for sure. There are a few problem classes where you could throw stuff into a black box and get great results out. Image classification for example. Fast.ai have made that three lines of code. So maybe there are a bunch of applications where you could fake it, especially if you were willing to Google your way round the answers. Would be harder in industry I think, but you find incompetent people everywhere.
- neuralsp 7y ago
  Yes, now you're addressing my line of questions. >But pure fraud? If you didn't even make an attempt to learn on the job? You'd get caught pretty fast as soon as someone started asking any kind of in depth questions about the models you were supposed to be training. That's just what I mean. It would depend on someone asking you about it, right? (As opposed to being an iOS or Android developer or running microservices on the backend: in those domains nobody has to ask you anything, it's instantly obvious if you're not building and can't build anything.) For machine learning, who is asking these questions? If you throw data into a black box (3 lines of code) and are incompetent, can you please tell me a bit more about where you would get found out? Let's use your example, ecology. I show up, I get a dataset, and I put it into tensorflow using three lines of code I copy from stackoverflow. I lie and bullshit about the details of what I'm doing, by referencing papers from arxiv.org that I don't read, understand, or actually apply. It's just the same 3 lines of code I copied on day 1. I don't do anything on the job. How long could I last? An hour? A day? A week? A month? Assuming I am outputting 0 useful work. I'm not doing any machine learning. Just 0 competence, or I make something up by hand or in excel. I am trying to understand how people are judged.
  - joshvm 7y ago
    As much as I'd like to say you'd get caught quickly, you could probably get away with it for a while in any group that didn't have ML expertise already. If you really wanted to you could fabricate results and in lots of cases nobody would be any the wiser unless you were supposed to be releasing software. Despite emphasis on peer review and repeatability, science relies heavily on etiquette. If you don't release code or a dataset a lot of times it's extremely difficult to repeat paper results, and that also means it's hard to disprove the work. It's quite hard to get rid of incompetent people in academia, so I imagine you could get away with at least a year or two.

joshvm 7y ago

OK I misinterpreted slightly. Fake it til you make it isn't a terrible strategy. But pure fraud? If you didn't even make an attempt to learn on the job? You'd get caught pretty fast as soon as someone started asking any kind of in depth questions about the models you were supposed to be training. I'm not sure you could land a job knowing nothing. Maybe. Depends how hard you get interviewed and whether they know about machine learning. If you could fake a portfolio and nobody questioned it perhaps? I can see that happening in academia for sure. There are a few problem classes where you could throw stuff into a black box and get great results out. Image classification for example. Fast.ai have made that three lines of code. So maybe there are a bunch of applications where you could fake it, especially if you were willing to Google your way round the answers. Would be harder in industry I think, but you find incompetent people everywhere.

neuralsp 7y ago
Yes, now you're addressing my line of questions. >But pure fraud? If you didn't even make an attempt to learn on the job? You'd get caught pretty fast as soon as someone started asking any kind of in depth questions about the models you were supposed to be training. That's just what I mean. It would depend on someone asking you about it, right? (As opposed to being an iOS or Android developer or running microservices on the backend: in those domains nobody has to ask you anything, it's instantly obvious if you're not building and can't build anything.) For machine learning, who is asking these questions? If you throw data into a black box (3 lines of code) and are incompetent, can you please tell me a bit more about where you would get found out? Let's use your example, ecology. I show up, I get a dataset, and I put it into tensorflow using three lines of code I copy from stackoverflow. I lie and bullshit about the details of what I'm doing, by referencing papers from arxiv.org that I don't read, understand, or actually apply. It's just the same 3 lines of code I copied on day 1. I don't do anything on the job. How long could I last? An hour? A day? A week? A month? Assuming I am outputting 0 useful work. I'm not doing any machine learning. Just 0 competence, or I make something up by hand or in excel. I am trying to understand how people are judged.
- joshvm 7y ago
  As much as I'd like to say you'd get caught quickly, you could probably get away with it for a while in any group that didn't have ML expertise already. If you really wanted to you could fabricate results and in lots of cases nobody would be any the wiser unless you were supposed to be releasing software. Despite emphasis on peer review and repeatability, science relies heavily on etiquette. If you don't release code or a dataset a lot of times it's extremely difficult to repeat paper results, and that also means it's hard to disprove the work. It's quite hard to get rid of incompetent people in academia, so I imagine you could get away with at least a year or two.