3 ms·

Sorry to veer slightly off-topic, but can anyone familiar with academia explain why such a literary exercise gets published on Arxiv as a research paper? What

Sorry to veer slightly off-topic, but can anyone familiar with academia explain why such a literary exercise gets published on Arxiv as a research paper? What is scientific or research-driven about it? How is this different from a long-form opinion or literary essay except for the fact that it's written with a paper-like style and voice? I'm baffled. Is this just because humanities professors need to show they're published as well and they need to get a score for tenure, or something like that?

gwern 3y ago
Leon Bottou isn't a humanities professor, but a ML researcher. In fact, not just any ML researcher but arguably one of the ML researchers who most anticipated the current DL scaling era. Bottou was arguing for the virtues of SGD on the grounds of "CPUs [GPUs] go brrr" literally 2 decades ago in 2003: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2003/file/9fb7b048c96d44a0337f049e0a61ff06-Paper.pdf https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2003/file/9fb7b048c96d44a0337f0... or here he is in 2007/2012 explaining why larger models/data can scale and keep getting better: https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/2012-bottou.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/2012-bottou.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/2013-bottou.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/2013-bottou.pdf Which is not to say that he necessarily has anything worthwhile to say about 'Borges and AI' but I'm going to at least give it a read to see if there's something I might want to know 20 years from now. :)
- camillomiller 3y ago
  Well the point stands, though, considering that the two papers you linked clearly read like papers. My question was mostly candidly naive and quite honest: what makes a paper a paper, when the content is something merely akin to a literary essay? I guess the answer is "the author". :D
bangkoksbest 3y ago
arXiv is for researchers in different science and mathematics subcommunities to post pre-prints, surveys, reviews, lecture notes, manuscripts, documentation, etc... but also historical/archival research, philosophy papers, and meta-essays, as long as they are relevantly targeted to the subcommunity.

gwern 3y ago

Leon Bottou isn't a humanities professor, but a ML researcher. In fact, not just any ML researcher but arguably one of the ML researchers who most anticipated the current DL scaling era. Bottou was arguing for the virtues of SGD on the grounds of "CPUs [GPUs] go brrr" literally 2 decades ago in 2003: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2003/file/9fb7b048c96d44a0337f049e0a61ff06-Paper.pdf https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2003/file/9fb7b048c96d44a0337f0... or here he is in 2007/2012 explaining why larger models/data can scale and keep getting better: https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/2012-bottou.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/2012-bottou.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/2013-bottou.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/ai/scaling/2013-bottou.pdf Which is not to say that he necessarily has anything worthwhile to say about 'Borges and AI' but I'm going to at least give it a read to see if there's something I might want to know 20 years from now. :)

camillomiller 3y ago
Well the point stands, though, considering that the two papers you linked clearly read like papers. My question was mostly candidly naive and quite honest: what makes a paper a paper, when the content is something merely akin to a literary essay? I guess the answer is "the author". :D

bangkoksbest 3y ago

arXiv is for researchers in different science and mathematics subcommunities to post pre-prints, surveys, reviews, lecture notes, manuscripts, documentation, etc... but also historical/archival research, philosophy papers, and meta-essays, as long as they are relevantly targeted to the subcommunity.