> There's this thing that machine learning research papers do where they propose Algorithm A, say in words it works, and then prove Theorem T. The problem is t

> There's this thing that machine learning research papers do where they propose Algorithm A, say in words it works, and then prove Theorem T. The problem is that Theorem T is often completely disjoint from whether or not Algorithm A works at all. Lipton and Steinhardt call these spurious theorems. Is this unique to, or particularly common in, machine learning? If so, that is scary - what on earth is going on?