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Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Learning, and AI [video]

lexfridman.com

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Re: Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Learning, and AI [video]

#41

Post by Reedx »

virtuous_signal wrote: post #11
scottlocklin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're well served with this response, as the actual work he did is basically not reproducible. No matter how many best selling books made into movies; it's still bullshit. https://replicationindex.com/category/thinking-fast-and-slow... https://slate.com/technology/2016/12/kahneman-and-tversky-re... https://jasoncollins.blog/2016/06/29/re-reading-kahnemans-th... I read it on advice of a good pal, and it sure seem…

Add to that list "grit" and "fixed vs. growth mindset" -- has any solid, interesting work in sociology or behavioral science been done recently?

What's BS about grit and a growth mindset?

Re: Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Learning, and AI [video]

#42

Post by AlanTuring »

mindcrime wrote: post #32
psv1 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deadpan delivery and lack of personality, the arrogant attitude, the poor quality of the questions that he asks, the fact that he reads questions from a sheet in front of him instead of listening to his guests and having a real conversation with them, the way in which he comes across as disingenuous in most interactions... I could go on (and I know that a lot of this is subjective).

The deadpan delivery and lack of personality, the arrogant attitude, Interesting. I don't see much in the way of arrogance when I watch these. What you call "deadpan delivery and lack of personality" I attribute to his being Russian, and just having a somewhat stereotypically Russian style of delivery.

Lex here. Yep. Russian. Underneath the cold stare and the suit is possibly some personality and a bit of humor. Then again it's like past or present life on Mars. Many astrobiologists believe it was at least once there, but no proof has been found yet.

Re: Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Learning, and AI [video]

#43

Post by AlanTuring »

jmmcd wrote: post #3

Fridman's podcast has to be among the highest concentrations of high-calibre guests ever assembled in this area. Week after week it's another huge name.

Lex here. Thank you. I realize I sometimes miss opportunities for depth or insight with these brilliant folks, but I work hard to improve. The comments on this post, positive and critical, help. So again, thank you.

Re: Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Learning, and AI [video]

#44

Post by mistermann »

joe_the_user wrote: post #40
csallen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is overstated and makes it sound like all of his work is bs, when the majority of the book is just fine. (I could be wrong and would be happy to be proven so. Just not a fan of the all-or-nothing attitude people apply toward this book when that doesn't seem warranted.)

I feel like there are two ways you can take a book like Thinking Slow And Fast; One is that there are variety of mental processes, some faster than others, some more conscious than other, etc. The other is that there's a hard distinction between "the" slow process and "the" fast process. If you take with the first implication, it's plausible, useful as one more datum. But it seems like replication problems make the h…

> The other is that there's a hard distinction between "the" slow process and "the" fast process.

I've yet to read the book, but I've listened to him on several podcasts, and I've never gotten the sense that he wouldn't see it as a continuum, didn't he even say something early in the interview that the "1 & 2" is more of a metaphor? (his answer to that question starts at 9:00). System 1 is trainable, for example, and I can't imagine he'd suggest that isn't highly dimensional.

Re: Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Learning, and AI [video]

#45

Post by mistermann »

Symmetry wrote: post #18
Tomte wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understand it, only a small part of his book is based on distrusted research (and was that even his work or did he just write it up? Cannot remember). Most of the book is still considered correct. Plus, he readily admitted to the faulty parts and made a very strong request to the affected research teams to clean up their act and pretty much re-do all experiments multiple times, by multiple labs, with exte…

The things Kahneman worked on himself all did pretty well out of the replication crisis as far as I can tell. The fact that his findings got so much pushback when introduced probably helped a lot with making them more rigorous. And Kahneman didn't dig in his heels when the crisis hit. But there is an awful lots of stuff that needs to be expunged from his book because it was based on what turned out to be bad science.

> But there is an awful lots of stuff that needs to be expunged from his book because it was based on what turned out to be bad science.

Can you give an example of this? I haven't seen anything he said in here that fundamentally needs to rest on a theory that could be the outcome of some study, but maybe I'm interpreting somehow differently.

Re: Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Learning, and AI [video]

#46

Post by virtuous_signal »

Reedx wrote: post #41
virtuous_signal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add to that list "grit" and "fixed vs. growth mindset" -- has any solid, interesting work in sociology or behavioral science been done recently?

What's BS about grit and a growth mindset?

The effects of both were greatly overhyped by books and news articles when they first came out. Replications found much smaller effects, e.g., https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/03/gr...

Re: Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Learning, and AI [video]

#47

Post by krick »

AlanTuring wrote: post #35
krick wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is too harsh in my opinion, but I agree that he isn't really a good host. I don't find him off-putting at all (actually the opposite, he seems to be a nice guy), but I really dislike the questions he asks. This clearly is a podcast for quite technical people. His guests most of the time (like, almost always, except the cases he invites somebody because he was on a JRE) are people notable for their technical cont…

Thanks for the comment and the kind words about me being nice. I'll try to live up to that. On the technical depth point, I agree. A lot of folks tell me they love the "meaning of life" questions. I love both the technical and the philosophical. My hope is to more and more try to go deep technically with the ML, CS, math, physics folks on the topic of their expertise, and find productive points of passionate disagree…

Thank you for your work, I hope I didn't offend you and I really wish you luck at improving (for obvious reasons).

The problem with being way too philosophical is that it restricts discussion to sharing opinions, which is totally ok, but the problem with opinions is that every single person on the planet has an opinion, but it's way more rare thing to have some knowledge. So, it may be really interesting to hear somebody's opinion about something, but as far as learning goes, I don't really gain anything from them: the more abstract and complicated the question, the less difference from asking a random person on the street. But when you have somebody in front of you, who has some knowledge that your audience (or you) doesn't have (be it technical, or an experience of making a wildly successful infotainment youtube channel, or anything else), you can learn so much more from every single conversation.

Re: Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Learning, and AI [video]

#48

Post by AlanTuring »

tobrien6 wrote: post #19
psv1 wrote: post #6

The quality of the guests is amazing but the host is extremely off-putting and difficult to listen to.

Interesting, I find Lex to be one of the best podcast hosts I've listened to. I like his mix of philosophical and technical conversation. Most of his guests seem to genuinely enjoy and engage in the conversation.

Thank you for the kind words. Some people love the philosophy, some the technical details. I try to mix it up, and have fun with it. But it's good to know that people have more patience for technical depth than I realized. So I'll try to do more of it in the future.

Re: Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Learning, and AI [video]

#49

Post by mindcrime »

AlanTuring wrote: post #42
mindcrime wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deadpan delivery and lack of personality, the arrogant attitude, Interesting. I don't see much in the way of arrogance when I watch these. What you call "deadpan delivery and lack of personality" I attribute to his being Russian, and just having a somewhat stereotypically Russian style of delivery.

Lex here. Yep. Russian. Underneath the cold stare and the suit is possibly some personality and a bit of humor. Then again it's like past or present life on Mars. Many astrobiologists believe it was at least once there, but no proof has been found yet.

Underneath the cold stare and the suit is possibly some personality and a bit of humor.

I have a close friend who is Russian, and I've found that, at least in his case, there definitely is a sense of humor there, despite the stereotypes. I just find his Russian humor to be very subtle and even after all these years I don't always pick up on when he's joking and when he isn't. From watching your interviews, I get a very similar vibe. I suspect you have a fine sense of humor, but that not all Americans will appreciate or recognize it easily.

Re: Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Learning, and AI [video]

#50

Post by joe_the_user »

henriquemaia wrote: post #34
csallen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is overstated and makes it sound like all of his work is bs, when the majority of the book is just fine. (I could be wrong and would be happy to be proven so. Just not a fan of the all-or-nothing attitude people apply toward this book when that doesn't seem warranted.)

If some data is wrong and you can't tell which is which, how can you trust just some parts of this book? Are we to fact-check bit by bit until everything gets sorted out and we know for sure what parts of the book to trust? Besides, why go through all that trouble if there are heaps of good psychology books out there that aren't plagued with errors as this one? Since our time is so limited, I think it is a good heuri…

If some data is wrong and you can't tell which is which, how can you trust just some parts of this book?

That's kind of the same problem that a psychology researcher faces; some of their data is going to be wrong.

The question winds-up being how "robust" your claim is, can you survive having some points being wrong? For Thinking Slow And Fast, the robustness of the claims is kind of a mixed bag imo.

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