Re:Machine learning has become alchemy (2017) [video]
by rwilson4 on Tuesday December 25, 2018 @06:55PM
(#18759693)
I think people end up reaching for straws because a lot of this stuff works well in practice and they’re trying to make sense of it. 20 years from now we’ll have a much clearer picture of why the techniques work! Until then, a lot of the explanations, maybe even some valid ones, may sound like baloney!
the depressing thing about machine learning to me is the many convincing explanations of phenomena, that then turn out not to explain things (all the explanations of why dropout is effective, or why there are adversarial examples, things like that.)
this is where the comparison to alchemy is the sharpest in my opinion. The alchemists had extremely sophisticated theories that they used to provide explanations for the phenomena they observed; just ultimately none of them made any sense.