5 ms·

You might as well say it's not worth interviewing anyone who didn't graduate from an Ivy League school, "heuristically speaking". Innovation can come from anyw

You might as well say it's not worth interviewing anyone who didn't graduate from an Ivy League school, "heuristically speaking". Innovation can come from anywhere. Either we can take time to evaluate something on its merits (if you have the competency and resources), or leave it be (if you don't), or we accept to be told what is true by institutions with their own interests, who will use their position to further leverage them. And in this path, knowledge is no longer free. I will read further, but this paper is attacking a real issue with neural nets.

RicoElectrico 5y ago
Still, the choice of journal is pretty weird. Occam's razor: If you have any results that feel significant and not just to bump your publication count (the title would imply former) you'd run with it to present on NIPS, ICLR, ICML or submit to JMLR.
- dchftcs 5y ago
  It's fair point that it's hard to spend time on something if it doesn't carry enough promise. I've seen enough crackpots from good universities that don't get called out enough. They still exist on the likes of NeurIPS/ICML though. However, to me this appears to be serious work (whether or not it's remarkable). Crackpots often obscure their message, but here they state their premise quite clearly, and skimming through the arguments they seem sane and approachable.
hhmc 5y ago
> You might as well say it's not worth interviewing anyone who didn't graduate from an Ivy League school, "heuristically speaking". I know this isn't the point you were going for, but this _is_ a heuristic that is deployed in some companies/institutions (at least the UK variant certainly is).
- exdsq 5y ago
  > I know this isn't the point you were going for, but this _is_ a heuristic that is deployed in some companies/institutions (at least the UK variant certainly is). Which companies/institutions are you thinking of?
kettleballroll 5y ago
Innovation can come from anywhere, but the authors of this paper chose to submit to a venue that is outside the focus of ML research. From what I understand, this paper would've been a great fit for COLT (or even a general/broad ML conference like ICML) and since it wasn't submitted (or wasn't accepted), i think it makes sense to assume that it was written by authors who either chose to circumvent the community, or were rejected by it. I don't find your comparison to ivy league fitting, because while there are still a significant number of great candidates from non ivy leagues, the number of great ML papers that have not been published at top tier ML venues is in the single digits -- most researchers I know would rather just upload their paper to arxiv and move on, rather than publishing in 2nd tier venues. Which should tell you how much of a bad signal the wrong venue can be in ML research. Granted, it could also be that this was authored by people outside of the field who.sont know the rules, but given how much research gets published each day, it's impossible not to rely on heuristics, especially since this paper was.posted without context.

RicoElectrico 5y ago

Still, the choice of journal is pretty weird. Occam's razor: If you have any results that feel significant and not just to bump your publication count (the title would imply former) you'd run with it to present on NIPS, ICLR, ICML or submit to JMLR.

dchftcs 5y ago
It's fair point that it's hard to spend time on something if it doesn't carry enough promise. I've seen enough crackpots from good universities that don't get called out enough. They still exist on the likes of NeurIPS/ICML though. However, to me this appears to be serious work (whether or not it's remarkable). Crackpots often obscure their message, but here they state their premise quite clearly, and skimming through the arguments they seem sane and approachable.

hhmc 5y ago

> You might as well say it's not worth interviewing anyone who didn't graduate from an Ivy League school, "heuristically speaking". I know this isn't the point you were going for, but this _is_ a heuristic that is deployed in some companies/institutions (at least the UK variant certainly is).

exdsq 5y ago
> I know this isn't the point you were going for, but this _is_ a heuristic that is deployed in some companies/institutions (at least the UK variant certainly is). Which companies/institutions are you thinking of?

kettleballroll 5y ago

Innovation can come from anywhere, but the authors of this paper chose to submit to a venue that is outside the focus of ML research. From what I understand, this paper would've been a great fit for COLT (or even a general/broad ML conference like ICML) and since it wasn't submitted (or wasn't accepted), i think it makes sense to assume that it was written by authors who either chose to circumvent the community, or were rejected by it. I don't find your comparison to ivy league fitting, because while there are still a significant number of great candidates from non ivy leagues, the number of great ML papers that have not been published at top tier ML venues is in the single digits -- most researchers I know would rather just upload their paper to arxiv and move on, rather than publishing in 2nd tier venues. Which should tell you how much of a bad signal the wrong venue can be in ML research. Granted, it could also be that this was authored by people outside of the field who.sont know the rules, but given how much research gets published each day, it's impossible not to rely on heuristics, especially since this paper was.posted without context.