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I assume from the title that this is either written by Gary Marcus or quotes him extensively. (I just checked and was correct.) It would be nice to hear this so

by dfan 7y ago

I assume from the title that this is either written by Gary Marcus or quotes him extensively. (I just checked and was correct.) It would be nice to hear this sort of critique from more than one person.

ycombinete 7y ago
Is he a good source of critique? Sincere question, I don’t know anything about the field.
- high_derivative 7y ago
  He is rather controversial in machine learning circles. I would say he is essentially right about the fact that a lot of ml work is crap. Like most of anything is crap, so that is not a groundbreaking insight and it comes off as somewhat grandstanding to keep saying that. He has however really turned this into a personal brand which many suspect he is using to advertise his startups. Many people feel he is sort of disingenuous about the actual progress being made in computer vision and NLP, even if there is many ways to go. To answer your question: You can read a single piece of his and maybe get some value from that, but he keeps rehashing the same points to sh*t over different new work, and there is not much to be learned from that after a while. Disclaimer: I did not read the above article in full, I am just familiar with Gary Marcus + work in ML industry. Edit: Keep expanding this but it got me thinking. Earlier in my career, I was also eager for the 'gotchas', for being able to point out why something is crap, exaggerated, cannot do what it promises, and so forth. As I outgrew this impulse to focus more on what is good about some work, I began spotting it on new students a lot. They would come into seminars and smugly crap all over recent papers. I have since come to the conclusion that it is useful to have realistic internal assessment of progress in your field, but that sharing your harshest criticisms is not necessarily a good way to look smart or make progress. It often turns out that while feeling clever about realizing limitations of some work, the field just moves forward. The people you just criticized leapfrogged while you were busy thinking about how to one-up them.
  - t_serpico 7y ago
    It's easy to critique a paper but hard to pinpoint its value in the broader context of a field.
- dfan 7y ago
  He is a smart and thoughtful person, and any given article by him is worth reading (as long as you balance it with other people's takes as well), but he has quite strong opinions on the subject, which is one reason he's always quoted. The main danger in my opinion is that it's not hard to read five separate articles about how AI is overhyped and think you are getting five independent data points from domain experts, when in fact you are really getting the same data point five times.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  I kind of agree with his worldview but the tone of his articles is so polemical that it's not an effective critique of the field. It just puts peoples' backs up. Someone definitely needs to stick machine learning's nose into its own dirt, for its own good first of all, but it must be done in a very serious, stick-up-its-arse manner, focusing only on the practical aspects and leaving any emotion aside, and all in a calm and erudite voice, otherwise it won't have any effect. Of course, now that I say this, there has been one such critique and it was ignored roundly, probably because Noam Chomsky Doesn't Tweet. This is what I mean: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PinkerChomskyMIT.html http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PinkerChomskyMIT.html Sorry, I can't find the edited interview (and the transcript doesn't quite get the "calm and erudite" voice across, what with all the uhs it transcribes). And I'm half-wrong about the reaction because there was a reaction, from a certain Peter Norvig, oh yes sirree there was: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html But I'm still with Chomsky on this.
high_derivative 7y ago
hah, I made a bet with myself too that this was a Gary Marcus article. He is really riding that brand..
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  He has a book out with the co-author of this piece, Ernest Davis. This is probably part of the promotion of the book. The book title and subject is listed at the end of the article and the two authors of the article are listed as the book's authors.

by dfan 7y ago

ycombinete 7y ago

Is he a good source of critique? Sincere question, I don’t know anything about the field.

high_derivative 7y ago
He is rather controversial in machine learning circles. I would say he is essentially right about the fact that a lot of ml work is crap. Like most of anything is crap, so that is not a groundbreaking insight and it comes off as somewhat grandstanding to keep saying that. He has however really turned this into a personal brand which many suspect he is using to advertise his startups. Many people feel he is sort of disingenuous about the actual progress being made in computer vision and NLP, even if there is many ways to go. To answer your question: You can read a single piece of his and maybe get some value from that, but he keeps rehashing the same points to sh*t over different new work, and there is not much to be learned from that after a while. Disclaimer: I did not read the above article in full, I am just familiar with Gary Marcus + work in ML industry. Edit: Keep expanding this but it got me thinking. Earlier in my career, I was also eager for the 'gotchas', for being able to point out why something is crap, exaggerated, cannot do what it promises, and so forth. As I outgrew this impulse to focus more on what is good about some work, I began spotting it on new students a lot. They would come into seminars and smugly crap all over recent papers. I have since come to the conclusion that it is useful to have realistic internal assessment of progress in your field, but that sharing your harshest criticisms is not necessarily a good way to look smart or make progress. It often turns out that while feeling clever about realizing limitations of some work, the field just moves forward. The people you just criticized leapfrogged while you were busy thinking about how to one-up them.
- t_serpico 7y ago
  It's easy to critique a paper but hard to pinpoint its value in the broader context of a field.
dfan 7y ago
He is a smart and thoughtful person, and any given article by him is worth reading (as long as you balance it with other people's takes as well), but he has quite strong opinions on the subject, which is one reason he's always quoted. The main danger in my opinion is that it's not hard to read five separate articles about how AI is overhyped and think you are getting five independent data points from domain experts, when in fact you are really getting the same data point five times.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
I kind of agree with his worldview but the tone of his articles is so polemical that it's not an effective critique of the field. It just puts peoples' backs up. Someone definitely needs to stick machine learning's nose into its own dirt, for its own good first of all, but it must be done in a very serious, stick-up-its-arse manner, focusing only on the practical aspects and leaving any emotion aside, and all in a calm and erudite voice, otherwise it won't have any effect. Of course, now that I say this, there has been one such critique and it was ignored roundly, probably because Noam Chomsky Doesn't Tweet. This is what I mean: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PinkerChomskyMIT.html http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PinkerChomskyMIT.html Sorry, I can't find the edited interview (and the transcript doesn't quite get the "calm and erudite" voice across, what with all the uhs it transcribes). And I'm half-wrong about the reaction because there was a reaction, from a certain Peter Norvig, oh yes sirree there was: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html But I'm still with Chomsky on this.

high_derivative 7y ago

hah, I made a bet with myself too that this was a Gary Marcus article. He is really riding that brand..

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
He has a book out with the co-author of this piece, Ernest Davis. This is probably part of the promotion of the book. The book title and subject is listed at the end of the article and the two authors of the article are listed as the book's authors.