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Yes but they all stood on the shoulders of giants. Alone they couldn't have done it. Intelligence is a collective affair. Ideas are self replicators - usually

Yes but they all stood on the shoulders of giants. Alone they couldn't have done it. Intelligence is a collective affair. Ideas are self replicators - usually by being useful to people, but their lifecycle is different from that of people, they evolve much faster. It's an evolutionary process. Modern man and that of 10,000 years ago are biologically not much different, the difference comes from cultural evolution.

smolder 3y ago
> Ideas are self replicators Maybe it's worth pointing out: That's a core idea of memetics, i.e. the study of memes, in the original sense of that word.
naasking 3y ago
> Alone they couldn't have done it. Intelligence is a collective affair. Yes, but the Gausses and Ramanujans of the world disprove the claim that architecture doesn't matter, and that only training data matters. The long tails that describe human variance I think show that architecture can matter a lot. I think you might be right that architecture for some machine learning algorithms doesn't matter so much given enough data, but the fact that they need so much data to perform well I think implies that there's a better architecture awaiting discovery.
- sdenton4 3y ago
  The gausses and ramanujans still have the same basic architecture though - we're measuring outliers in the same family, not comparing across families.
  - naasking 3y ago
    If by "basic architecture", you mean auditory, visual, and motor centres, sure, but we're clearly talking about higher cognitive abilities here. I'm not at all sure that they have the same architecture given Ramanujan had even less high school math than most American students, yet clearly took the same knowledge much further.
    - sdenton4 3y ago
      If you're saying Ramanujan had a drastically different brain architecture than other humans, it's an extraordinary claim which will require extraordinary evidence. Einstein's brain is well studied, and fundamentally human...

smolder 3y ago

> Ideas are self replicators Maybe it's worth pointing out: That's a core idea of memetics, i.e. the study of memes, in the original sense of that word.

naasking 3y ago

> Alone they couldn't have done it. Intelligence is a collective affair. Yes, but the Gausses and Ramanujans of the world disprove the claim that architecture doesn't matter, and that only training data matters. The long tails that describe human variance I think show that architecture can matter a lot. I think you might be right that architecture for some machine learning algorithms doesn't matter so much given enough data, but the fact that they need so much data to perform well I think implies that there's a better architecture awaiting discovery.

sdenton4 3y ago
The gausses and ramanujans still have the same basic architecture though - we're measuring outliers in the same family, not comparing across families.
- naasking 3y ago
  If by "basic architecture", you mean auditory, visual, and motor centres, sure, but we're clearly talking about higher cognitive abilities here. I'm not at all sure that they have the same architecture given Ramanujan had even less high school math than most American students, yet clearly took the same knowledge much further.
  - sdenton4 3y ago
    If you're saying Ramanujan had a drastically different brain architecture than other humans, it's an extraordinary claim which will require extraordinary evidence. Einstein's brain is well studied, and fundamentally human...