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From the article: > Here’s an exercise: The next time you see someone talking about algorithms, replace the term with “God” and ask yourself if the sense chang

by gjm11 12y ago

From the article: > Here’s an exercise: The next time you see someone talking about algorithms, replace the term with “God” and ask yourself if the sense changes any. This comes immediately after a paragraph that lists four instances of people saying things about "algorithms" ... not one of which would have meant the same thing if it had said "God" instead. Most of the recent occasions when I have used the word "algorithm" it's been in contexts like "We can probably come up with an algorithm to distinguish this case from that case" and "I spend a lot of my time designing and tweaking algorithms". Replacing "algorithm" with "God" doesn't make much sense there, either. I suppose the author isn't really thinking about people who actually work with algorithms every day, but about the general public. I would hazard a guess that at least 75% of the general public have no idea what "algorithm" even means, are not familiar with (e.g.) the fact that Google's search engine is (kinda) executing one, and as a consequence don't have an attitude to "algorithms" that remotely resembles that of religious people towards their gods. The sentence I quoted seems like the kind of thing people say to sound clever and insightful, without actually paying too much attention to whether it makes any sense. There are (I think) some good points in the article, but having such overblown bullshit so prominent so early in it really doesn't encourage me to read it with the care the author presumably thinks it deserves.

anapparition 12y ago
I agree. However, your use of "algorithms", while more technically correct than the average usage, is also in the minority. The article seems to focus on the culture that lauds algorithms. In that context, the interchangability of "God" and "algorithm" converges. Here are a few remarks from that angle, supplementary to your comment. I think the mainstream use of the term "algorithm" (or nearly any buzzword) is at the mercy of myriad competing forces seeking to impose their interpreation on the phrase. At least one of those forces is marketing, which has incentive to offer parapharsed, sugar-coated snippets of what something is. This plays on a common aspect of human nature, which is to feel more secure in a situation in which one feels confident that things are accounted for. There are remarkable similarities in what priests, scryers, prophets, and oracles once did, and what, presently, the media, marketers, investors, fans, geeks philosophically abstracting from their technical work, and advocates of theories do-- namely, a presentation of truth from a limited set of the inititated to the mass public. While it is true that algorithms have their place, it is also true that much of what is said about "algorithms" is part aggrandization, part embellishment, part over-simplifcation by marketers, media, non-technical users, or technical users who have a divergent system of beliefs, and invest much thought and effort into a potential future which may or may not occur, and which is not directly related to their technical work (e.g. technological singularity, etc.). It's always good to (in theory) maintain perspective on such things, and not get carried away by an over-application of a singular idea.
andrewla 12y ago
I also found that point very off-putting for the same reason. If, for a more technical audience, we replace "algorithm" with "ranking heuristic", then I think the religious comparison makes more sense. All of the "algorithms" that he references in the article are of this form, and the comments do not apply to more generalized algorithms; nobody is going to claim that "the QuickSort God is a fast sorting God" (though that does have a certain poetry). Really, though, these heuristics and people's reaction to them harks back to earlier roots than religion in the modern sense; things like shamanism and magic (or "cargo-cult science"): the leap from "there are more birds in the sky before it rains" to "you there -- go into the forest to scare some birds, we need rain".
ForHackernews 12y ago
I think you're understating the degree to which modern machine learning algorithms are completely opaque, yes, to the everyday person, but also to the developers and researchers that use them. Check out this section from Caltech's machine learning lectures about neural networks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih5Mr93E-2c&hd=1#t=63m25s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih5Mr93E-2c&hd=1#t=63m25s "...sorry, we denied credit because lambda is less than 0.5. The fact that you are not able to interpret what happens in machine learning is very, very common."
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  This opacity is a huge deficit in machine learning. A seriously vast amount of work has been done attempting to address it, and machine learning algorithms that are persistently uninterpretable (neural nets being the poster-child for this problem) will always have very limited use. We understand in principle what any given neural net is doing, but our lack of understanding of the specifics makes it impossible to trust them for anything interesting. We can't tell when they might fail. For this reason a lot of people are busy solving problems that "machine learning" might one day handle, but we are doing it with relatively conventional algorithms that fall outside the "machine learning" envelope because the areas we work in (computer assisted surgery, say) aren't amenable to the application of things we don't understand. To go back to his comparison with god: the incomprehensibility of gods is generally considered a feature by religious people. The incomprehensibility of machine learning algorithms is unquestionably a bug to those of us who have hard problems that need to be solved reliably. Most of the algorithms you use in everyday life are not machine learning algorithms (and certainly not neural nets) for precisely this reason.
  - pixl97 12y ago
    > but our lack of understanding of the specifics makes it impossible to trust them for anything interesting. We can't tell when they might fail. Sounds like we're making 'people 2.0'.
    - qu4z-2 12y ago
cbd1984 12y ago
> "I spend a lot of my time designing and tweaking algorithms" "I spend a lot of my time designing and tweaking Gods." sounds like the first line to a good Charlie Stross short story.
- joshmarlow 12y ago
  Man, that would be a good read.
- Kalium 12y ago
  Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence is a lot like this.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
The article is mostly gibberish. If he had simply talked about the social consequences of an algorithmically dominated society he might have had something interesting to say. The comparison between algorithms and god is particularly egregious. If you don't understand god, it's because god doesn't exist. If you don't understand algorithms, it's because you haven't bothered to educate yourself (which is not an option for everyone, but the author is writing on the topic for a national magazine, so it isn't an unreasonable expectation.)

by gjm11 12y ago

anapparition 12y ago

I agree. However, your use of "algorithms", while more technically correct than the average usage, is also in the minority. The article seems to focus on the culture that lauds algorithms. In that context, the interchangability of "God" and "algorithm" converges. Here are a few remarks from that angle, supplementary to your comment. I think the mainstream use of the term "algorithm" (or nearly any buzzword) is at the mercy of myriad competing forces seeking to impose their interpreation on the phrase. At least one of those forces is marketing, which has incentive to offer parapharsed, sugar-coated snippets of what something is. This plays on a common aspect of human nature, which is to feel more secure in a situation in which one feels confident that things are accounted for. There are remarkable similarities in what priests, scryers, prophets, and oracles once did, and what, presently, the media, marketers, investors, fans, geeks philosophically abstracting from their technical work, and advocates of theories do-- namely, a presentation of truth from a limited set of the inititated to the mass public. While it is true that algorithms have their place, it is also true that much of what is said about "algorithms" is part aggrandization, part embellishment, part over-simplifcation by marketers, media, non-technical users, or technical users who have a divergent system of beliefs, and invest much thought and effort into a potential future which may or may not occur, and which is not directly related to their technical work (e.g. technological singularity, etc.). It's always good to (in theory) maintain perspective on such things, and not get carried away by an over-application of a singular idea.

andrewla 12y ago

I also found that point very off-putting for the same reason. If, for a more technical audience, we replace "algorithm" with "ranking heuristic", then I think the religious comparison makes more sense. All of the "algorithms" that he references in the article are of this form, and the comments do not apply to more generalized algorithms; nobody is going to claim that "the QuickSort God is a fast sorting God" (though that does have a certain poetry). Really, though, these heuristics and people's reaction to them harks back to earlier roots than religion in the modern sense; things like shamanism and magic (or "cargo-cult science"): the leap from "there are more birds in the sky before it rains" to "you there -- go into the forest to scare some birds, we need rain".

ForHackernews 12y ago

I think you're understating the degree to which modern machine learning algorithms are completely opaque, yes, to the everyday person, but also to the developers and researchers that use them. Check out this section from Caltech's machine learning lectures about neural networks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih5Mr93E-2c&hd=1#t=63m25s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ih5Mr93E-2c&hd=1#t=63m25s "...sorry, we denied credit because lambda is less than 0.5. The fact that you are not able to interpret what happens in machine learning is very, very common."

tjradcliffe 12y ago
This opacity is a huge deficit in machine learning. A seriously vast amount of work has been done attempting to address it, and machine learning algorithms that are persistently uninterpretable (neural nets being the poster-child for this problem) will always have very limited use. We understand in principle what any given neural net is doing, but our lack of understanding of the specifics makes it impossible to trust them for anything interesting. We can't tell when they might fail. For this reason a lot of people are busy solving problems that "machine learning" might one day handle, but we are doing it with relatively conventional algorithms that fall outside the "machine learning" envelope because the areas we work in (computer assisted surgery, say) aren't amenable to the application of things we don't understand. To go back to his comparison with god: the incomprehensibility of gods is generally considered a feature by religious people. The incomprehensibility of machine learning algorithms is unquestionably a bug to those of us who have hard problems that need to be solved reliably. Most of the algorithms you use in everyday life are not machine learning algorithms (and certainly not neural nets) for precisely this reason.
- pixl97 12y ago
  > but our lack of understanding of the specifics makes it impossible to trust them for anything interesting. We can't tell when they might fail. Sounds like we're making 'people 2.0'.
  - qu4z-2 12y ago

cbd1984 12y ago

> "I spend a lot of my time designing and tweaking algorithms" "I spend a lot of my time designing and tweaking Gods." sounds like the first line to a good Charlie Stross short story.

joshmarlow 12y ago
Man, that would be a good read.
Kalium 12y ago
Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence is a lot like this.

tjradcliffe 12y ago

The article is mostly gibberish. If he had simply talked about the social consequences of an algorithmically dominated society he might have had something interesting to say. The comparison between algorithms and god is particularly egregious. If you don't understand god, it's because god doesn't exist. If you don't understand algorithms, it's because you haven't bothered to educate yourself (which is not an option for everyone, but the author is writing on the topic for a national magazine, so it isn't an unreasonable expectation.)