> I'm not criticising the authors at all Maybe I'm being oversensitive about my field, but it comes across as dismissive of the field itself. Especially with

> I'm not criticising the authors at all Maybe I'm being oversensitive about my field, but it comes across as dismissive of the field itself. Especially with "how do these people stay motivated?" > there's a limited number of operations that go into a neural network and the justification for the best architectures is that they have the best performance. There are a limited number of ways to put ink on a page, but the 'rest of the owl' meme is all about how there's a lot more to it than that. And the justification of best performance is because it's an unsolved problem that is being incrementally solved. Over the last decade you can see tons of tasks go from 20% accuracy being an achievement to 24% to 30% to 31% to 32% to 38%... eventually to 90%. The motivation is that these little changes on a 'does it do the job' metric add up. It's very motivating to see things slowly move from impossible for computers to pip installable.