>> Research often requires venturing into the unknown and unexplored. Oh, in that sense I'm clueless too. We all are. What I'm pointing out though is that many

>> Research often requires venturing into the unknown and unexplored. Oh, in that sense I'm clueless too. We all are. What I'm pointing out though is that many people in machine learning research don't really understand what's the point of research, or even what's the point of a research paper. They copy each other's writing style and produce the same kind of low-information-content paper. There's been a huge influx of new people to machine learning research in recent ish years. I think it started around 2012 and the ImageNet results. I did my Master's in 2014-15 (part-time) and I was surprised by the number of people in the machine learning class I took, and how many of them had nothing to do with computer science or AI, and were instead coming from backgrounds in business or more rarely science. At least I'd expect the people with the science backgrounds to know how to write a paper, but it seems most people who come to machine learning from, say, physics or biology, bring with them a facility with calculus and continuous mathematics, but not much in terms of scientific methodology. Hinton hints at that in the rest of his comment I didn't quote: What we should be going for, particularly in the basic science conferences, is radically new ideas. Because we know a radically new idea in the long run is going to be much more influential than a tiny improvement. That's I think the main downside of the fact that we've got this inversion now, where you've got a few senior guys and a gazillion young guys. Well I guess the "gazillion young guys" need a bit of time to figure out how to write good papers, and review them. >> I do want to add one thing though. A good paper is hard to recognize. A bad paper is easy, but a good paper may be indistinguishable from a bad paper. This is the "paradox" of research and something people need to take to heart. That is if we want to align our job descriptions with our actual jobs. That's true, and part of the reason why reviewing is hard work. I still find it very hard to reject a paper. What if I'm the one who doesn't get it?