Re:Spotting a cherry-picked paper
by activatedgeek on Tuesday July 13, 2021 @04:12AM
(#27818620)
> Modern research is incremental.
All research is incremental.
Even though in context it appears to speak to the right idea, I just want to make sure the casual reader doesn't emphasize too much on the "modern" part. This idea of groundbreaking research happening out-of-the-blue is nothing but a pop-sci fantasy.
Every groundbreaking idea, whether it be Newton/Leibniz's calculus, Marx's manifesto, or more recently the deep learning revolution led by Bengio/Hinton/LeCun/Schmidhuber, are only groundbreaking in hindsight.
Ideas take time to come into the shape that appeals to the spirit of the times. Sometimes, they win a lottery (e.g. the Hardware lottery [1]).
All research is incremental.
Even though in context it appears to speak to the right idea, I just want to make sure the casual reader doesn't emphasize too much on the "modern" part. This idea of groundbreaking research happening out-of-the-blue is nothing but a pop-sci fantasy.
Every groundbreaking idea, whether it be Newton/Leibniz's calculus, Marx's manifesto, or more recently the deep learning revolution led by Bengio/Hinton/LeCun/Schmidhuber, are only groundbreaking in hindsight.
Ideas take time to come into the shape that appeals to the spirit of the times. Sometimes, they win a lottery (e.g. the Hardware lottery [1]).
[1]: https://hardwarelottery.github.io