7 ms·

Man that "Unreasonable Effectiveness of ..." pattern is getting a bit overused. With the original paper [1] you could still say that there really is some deeply

by ngruhn 1y ago

Man that "Unreasonable Effectiveness of ..." pattern is getting a bit overused. With the original paper [1] you could still say that there really is some deeply philosophical mystery. But they now slap that on everything. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectivene...

MeteorMarc 1y ago
What is not unreasonable about intermediate tokens without reason? See the abstract.
- godelski 1y ago
  It's not "unreasonable" if you weren't anthropomorphizing COT, equating it to thinking or "internal dialogue." The results aren't surprising to people in this camp, but I also wouldn't say that makes the work less impactful. But it would also be more unreasonable to dismiss the fact that a significant portion of the research community (and even greater portion of the public) was operating under these beliefs: that COT was akin to thinking (it's literally there in the name...). It is possible to disagree with something but also not believe someone is being unreasonable by coming to different conclusions.
jvanderbot 1y ago
In this case it's probably more a pun (intentional or not I guess) about "reasonless" or "unreason"
godelski 1y ago
It's also worth pointing out that Winger's (position) paper[0] is really about something that would sound silly today. He's arguing that we should use math to drive physics. Today, many people think these are indistinguishable things and you'll get into arguments about math being invented or discovered. But Winger is talking about how mathematics provides us with a framework where we can drive physics forward through theory instead of relying purely upon experimentation to poke and prod the universe. It is rather "unreasonable" to think we can explore the world simply through pen and paper, from the comfort of a chair. You'd think you'd need to go out and touch grass, but incredibly this is not necessary. | The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it. Second, it is just this uncanny usefulness of mathematical concepts that raises the question of the uniqueness of our physical theories. Which is exactly why a lot of these other things are overused. Hamming's seems like an extension or corollary[1] and I even think Norvig's (Halevy's) is highly appropriate[2]. It is "unreasonable" to think these things would be effective. ------------------------------------- With this paper? I think is fine. It is being used in a similar way to Winger, with similar context. I can see two camps. One has always interpreted the COT as analogous to a model's internal dialogue. While the other has always thought there's a much larger gap between the manipulations within latent representations and what has been decoded, not necessarily needing be strongly aligned.[3] To the former, the results here would be shocking, while to the latter it is "yes, and?" Clearly they're addressing the former camp. There were plenty of people that Winger did not need to convince. I'm of the latter camp[4], and I'm happy people are not just asserting and are demonstrating. Honestly, I'm even frequently upset when works get dismissed because they "demonstrate something we already knew" but no one had ever actually demonstrated. The proofs and evidencing is more important than the answer. Quite often we're highly certain about results but they are difficult to even evidence (let alone prove). I mean it would be quite silly to dismiss a proof that P != NP, even though the vast majority of us have long been convinced that this is the relationship we'll end up with. Yet, no one's done it. ------------------------------------- [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210212111540/http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210212111540/http://www.dartmo... [1] https://math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Hamming.html https://math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Hamming.h... [2] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/35179.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... [3] Both camps can be further broken down too. Lots of nuances and opinions here and the lines really get fuzzy as we try to make it more accurate. I don't want to pretend there's a hard defining line, but the distinction helps the discussion and I think is reasonably accurate enough. Let me know if you think it is a gross mischaracterization. [4] I can expand more why this side seems "obvious" to me. But a warning, you can probably guess I'm not good at being terse. [Note]: I'd even go so far as say we should revisit Winger's argument around AI. I'm certain mathematics can be and will be "unreasonably effective." But not enough time has been dedicated to formulate the right type of math to use. We really do have to invent a new kind here. This may sound weird to non-mathematicians, but even physics uses multiple kinds of mathematics. The operations, fields, and algebras you use in one part may not be appropriate in another part. That's okay. But we don't have a TOE yet either, and that's a critical part of finding a TOE, is bringing all this together.
- tim333 1y ago
  >It's also worth pointing out that Winger's (position) paper[0] is really about something that would sound silly today. He's arguing that we should use math to drive physics. I think you misinterpret what it's about. He's pointing out how remarkable it is that the universe obeys laws like E=MC^2 exactly as far as we can tell which is not something you would probably expect just from looking at the world. The pre scientific understanding of the world was it was driven my gods and spirits. The mathematical laws were only discovered by scientific investigation. Or as he puts it: >The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. If he was just saying use maths it would be boring and not a famous paper 65 years on.
  - godelski 1y ago
    > I think you misinterpret what it's about. He's pointing out how remarkable it is that the universe obeys laws like... I apologize for not being clear. But we are talking about the same thing. > The pre scientific understanding of the world was it was driven my gods and spirits. Winger's paper was written in 1960. I do not think such claims need have been said. Those arguments were prolific and had been made for centuries. He did not need to convince anyone in the scientific community that the laws of nature were not driven by gods and spirits. By the 1960s the scientific age was already mature and it was well established in the community that the laws of nature are not the domain of gospel. | "Well, now you are pushing your joke too far," said the classmate, "surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle." The point is made here. It is surprising that math describes reality. It is surprising that a circle has anything to do with a population. I really did mean it when I said "about something that would sound silly today". We take this for granted now, with 60 years of working under this framework, but this wasn't always so. It seems silly now because much of the math we learn is in science classes and even outside we have a particular focus of teaching math most relating to science, but this is a small portion of a much larger field. Fwiw, I am not saying this as a complete outsider, I have a degree in physics. It is also worth paying attention to the fact that Wigner helped create Mathematical Physics[0]. "Mathematical Physics" is not a pleonasm. Don't take it just on my word! The Wiki page says something extremely similar! | In it, Wigner observes that a theoretical physics's mathematical structure often points the way to further advances in that theory and to empirical predictions. Mathematical theories often have predictive power in describing nature. [1] | Wigner argues that mathematical concepts have applicability far beyond the context in which they were originally developed[1] > The mathematical laws were only discovered by scientific investigation. I should make sure this is clear though (unsure which interpretation you intend). Math and science aren't interchangeable. Physics uses the language of math as its main method for developing theories and logic. But it is also important to stress that it doesn't use the same mathematical language throughout. The frameworks that those working in relativity use are not useful for those that work in quantum mechanics. If the math was uniform, we would not be dedicating so much time to bridge these. Nor is math absolute here, as it is a map, and we still rely heavily on the language of experimental evidence. Yes, he was saying "use maths". Yes, it sounds silly today, but so do a lot of things that needed be said in the past. I see no reason that the (now) obvious claim by Copernicus would make him any less famous. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_physics [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
gipp 1y ago
Engineering blogger's love of parroting the titles of famous papers/articles (unreasonable effectiveness..., all you need is..., ... Considered harmful, etc) has always been lightly annoying to me
- airza 1y ago
  It’s just not that common for the same person to have serious engineering chops and writing abilities.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- jorvi 1y ago
  With software engineering, every single thing in the 2010s had "syntactic sugar" and "sane defaults". I still get a slight blood pressure spike whenever someone uses either of those terms.
  - joe_the_user 1y ago
    I guess those are overused but at least they have some meaning. "Unreasonable Effectiveness..." is essentially pure meaninglessness.
    - tim333 1y ago
      It was meaningful in the original paper.
  - ruuda 1y ago
    "modern"
  - nine_k 1y ago
    Fine. "The unreasonable effectiveness of syntactic sugar considered harmful: all you need is sane defaults." Now, in comparison, nothing in this thread is going to annoy you!
EGreg 1y ago
Would you go further, and say that Unreasonable Effectiveness… is considered harmful?
- kevindamm 1y ago
  Indeed, considering unreasonable effectiveness harmful is all you need
  - lareter77 1y ago
    Thank you, I have had a few beers but that really made me laugh good.
dkga 1y ago
TIL. I am not from an engineering/physics background so for me the original Unreasonable Effectiveness paper was Karpathy’s blog post about RNNs.
- godelski 1y ago
  (Karpathy's might be more a call back to Halevy, Norvig, and Pereira's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data"[0].) But I think is a good example that fits the OP's critique (I don't think the critique fits to the arXiv paper. Even though I expected the main results, see my main comment). The "unreasonableness" in Karpathy's post[1] is using sequencing to process non-sequential data. But the reason this isn't unreasonable is that we explicitly expect non-sequential processes to be able to be reformulated as sequential ones. The SVHN (hose numbers) he shows is actually a great example of this. We humans don't process that all at once. Our eyes similarly dart around, even if very fast. Or we might think about how to draw a picture. We don't do everything at once, but we work in sections, building up, and have layers that end up being ordered even though this technically isn't a requirement. I'm actually struggling to think of things that cannot be broken down into sequences. He says as much here | an important point to realize is that even if your inputs/outputs are fixed vectors, it is still possible to use this powerful formalism to process them in a sequential manner. So really the question is: what part of this was unreasonable? Or what part was unexpected? Honestly, we should be expecting this as the nature of neural nets is itself sequential, data being processed layer by layer. Hell, every computer program has a trace, which is sequential. I can give tons of examples. So it is quite reasonable that sequential processing should work. [0] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/35179.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... [1] https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mensetmanusman 1y ago
All you need is unreasonable effectiveness.

by ngruhn 1y ago

MeteorMarc 1y ago

What is not unreasonable about intermediate tokens without reason? See the abstract.

godelski 1y ago
It's not "unreasonable" if you weren't anthropomorphizing COT, equating it to thinking or "internal dialogue." The results aren't surprising to people in this camp, but I also wouldn't say that makes the work less impactful. But it would also be more unreasonable to dismiss the fact that a significant portion of the research community (and even greater portion of the public) was operating under these beliefs: that COT was akin to thinking (it's literally there in the name...). It is possible to disagree with something but also not believe someone is being unreasonable by coming to different conclusions.

jvanderbot 1y ago

In this case it's probably more a pun (intentional or not I guess) about "reasonless" or "unreason"

godelski 1y ago

It's also worth pointing out that Winger's (position) paper[0] is really about something that would sound silly today. He's arguing that we should use math to drive physics. Today, many people think these are indistinguishable things and you'll get into arguments about math being invented or discovered. But Winger is talking about how mathematics provides us with a framework where we can drive physics forward through theory instead of relying purely upon experimentation to poke and prod the universe. It is rather "unreasonable" to think we can explore the world simply through pen and paper, from the comfort of a chair. You'd think you'd need to go out and touch grass, but incredibly this is not necessary. | The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it. Second, it is just this uncanny usefulness of mathematical concepts that raises the question of the uniqueness of our physical theories. Which is exactly why a lot of these other things are overused. Hamming's seems like an extension or corollary[1] and I even think Norvig's (Halevy's) is highly appropriate[2]. It is "unreasonable" to think these things would be effective. ------------------------------------- With this paper? I think is fine. It is being used in a similar way to Winger, with similar context. I can see two camps. One has always interpreted the COT as analogous to a model's internal dialogue. While the other has always thought there's a much larger gap between the manipulations within latent representations and what has been decoded, not necessarily needing be strongly aligned.[3] To the former, the results here would be shocking, while to the latter it is "yes, and?" Clearly they're addressing the former camp. There were plenty of people that Winger did not need to convince. I'm of the latter camp[4], and I'm happy people are not just asserting and are demonstrating. Honestly, I'm even frequently upset when works get dismissed because they "demonstrate something we already knew" but no one had ever actually demonstrated. The proofs and evidencing is more important than the answer. Quite often we're highly certain about results but they are difficult to even evidence (let alone prove). I mean it would be quite silly to dismiss a proof that P != NP, even though the vast majority of us have long been convinced that this is the relationship we'll end up with. Yet, no one's done it. ------------------------------------- [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210212111540/http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210212111540/http://www.dartmo... [1] https://math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Hamming.html https://math.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Hamming.h... [2] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/35179.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... [3] Both camps can be further broken down too. Lots of nuances and opinions here and the lines really get fuzzy as we try to make it more accurate. I don't want to pretend there's a hard defining line, but the distinction helps the discussion and I think is reasonably accurate enough. Let me know if you think it is a gross mischaracterization. [4] I can expand more why this side seems "obvious" to me. But a warning, you can probably guess I'm not good at being terse. [Note]: I'd even go so far as say we should revisit Winger's argument around AI. I'm certain mathematics can be and will be "unreasonably effective." But not enough time has been dedicated to formulate the right type of math to use. We really do have to invent a new kind here. This may sound weird to non-mathematicians, but even physics uses multiple kinds of mathematics. The operations, fields, and algebras you use in one part may not be appropriate in another part. That's okay. But we don't have a TOE yet either, and that's a critical part of finding a TOE, is bringing all this together.

tim333 1y ago
>It's also worth pointing out that Winger's (position) paper[0] is really about something that would sound silly today. He's arguing that we should use math to drive physics. I think you misinterpret what it's about. He's pointing out how remarkable it is that the universe obeys laws like E=MC^2 exactly as far as we can tell which is not something you would probably expect just from looking at the world. The pre scientific understanding of the world was it was driven my gods and spirits. The mathematical laws were only discovered by scientific investigation. Or as he puts it: >The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. If he was just saying use maths it would be boring and not a famous paper 65 years on.
- godelski 1y ago
  > I think you misinterpret what it's about. He's pointing out how remarkable it is that the universe obeys laws like... I apologize for not being clear. But we are talking about the same thing. > The pre scientific understanding of the world was it was driven my gods and spirits. Winger's paper was written in 1960. I do not think such claims need have been said. Those arguments were prolific and had been made for centuries. He did not need to convince anyone in the scientific community that the laws of nature were not driven by gods and spirits. By the 1960s the scientific age was already mature and it was well established in the community that the laws of nature are not the domain of gospel. | "Well, now you are pushing your joke too far," said the classmate, "surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle." The point is made here. It is surprising that math describes reality. It is surprising that a circle has anything to do with a population. I really did mean it when I said "about something that would sound silly today". We take this for granted now, with 60 years of working under this framework, but this wasn't always so. It seems silly now because much of the math we learn is in science classes and even outside we have a particular focus of teaching math most relating to science, but this is a small portion of a much larger field. Fwiw, I am not saying this as a complete outsider, I have a degree in physics. It is also worth paying attention to the fact that Wigner helped create Mathematical Physics[0]. "Mathematical Physics" is not a pleonasm. Don't take it just on my word! The Wiki page says something extremely similar! | In it, Wigner observes that a theoretical physics's mathematical structure often points the way to further advances in that theory and to empirical predictions. Mathematical theories often have predictive power in describing nature. [1] | Wigner argues that mathematical concepts have applicability far beyond the context in which they were originally developed[1] > The mathematical laws were only discovered by scientific investigation. I should make sure this is clear though (unsure which interpretation you intend). Math and science aren't interchangeable. Physics uses the language of math as its main method for developing theories and logic. But it is also important to stress that it doesn't use the same mathematical language throughout. The frameworks that those working in relativity use are not useful for those that work in quantum mechanics. If the math was uniform, we would not be dedicating so much time to bridge these. Nor is math absolute here, as it is a map, and we still rely heavily on the language of experimental evidence. Yes, he was saying "use maths". Yes, it sounds silly today, but so do a lot of things that needed be said in the past. I see no reason that the (now) obvious claim by Copernicus would make him any less famous. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_physics [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

gipp 1y ago

Engineering blogger's love of parroting the titles of famous papers/articles (unreasonable effectiveness..., all you need is..., ... Considered harmful, etc) has always been lightly annoying to me

airza 1y ago
It’s just not that common for the same person to have serious engineering chops and writing abilities.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
jorvi 1y ago
With software engineering, every single thing in the 2010s had "syntactic sugar" and "sane defaults". I still get a slight blood pressure spike whenever someone uses either of those terms.
- joe_the_user 1y ago
  I guess those are overused but at least they have some meaning. "Unreasonable Effectiveness..." is essentially pure meaninglessness.
  - tim333 1y ago
    It was meaningful in the original paper.
- ruuda 1y ago
  "modern"
- nine_k 1y ago
  Fine. "The unreasonable effectiveness of syntactic sugar considered harmful: all you need is sane defaults." Now, in comparison, nothing in this thread is going to annoy you!

EGreg 1y ago

Would you go further, and say that Unreasonable Effectiveness… is considered harmful?

kevindamm 1y ago
Indeed, considering unreasonable effectiveness harmful is all you need
- lareter77 1y ago
  Thank you, I have had a few beers but that really made me laugh good.

dkga 1y ago

TIL. I am not from an engineering/physics background so for me the original Unreasonable Effectiveness paper was Karpathy’s blog post about RNNs.

godelski 1y ago
(Karpathy's might be more a call back to Halevy, Norvig, and Pereira's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data"[0].) But I think is a good example that fits the OP's critique (I don't think the critique fits to the arXiv paper. Even though I expected the main results, see my main comment). The "unreasonableness" in Karpathy's post[1] is using sequencing to process non-sequential data. But the reason this isn't unreasonable is that we explicitly expect non-sequential processes to be able to be reformulated as sequential ones. The SVHN (hose numbers) he shows is actually a great example of this. We humans don't process that all at once. Our eyes similarly dart around, even if very fast. Or we might think about how to draw a picture. We don't do everything at once, but we work in sections, building up, and have layers that end up being ordered even though this technically isn't a requirement. I'm actually struggling to think of things that cannot be broken down into sequences. He says as much here | an important point to realize is that even if your inputs/outputs are fixed vectors, it is still possible to use this powerful formalism to process them in a sequential manner. So really the question is: what part of this was unreasonable? Or what part was unexpected? Honestly, we should be expecting this as the nature of neural nets is itself sequential, data being processed layer by layer. Hell, every computer program has a trace, which is sequential. I can give tons of examples. So it is quite reasonable that sequential processing should work. [0] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/35179.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... [1] https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

mensetmanusman 1y ago

All you need is unreasonable effectiveness.