My story as a self-taught AI researcher • Hacker News Board

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#91

Post by vector_spaces » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 2:18 AM UTC

> Creating value with your knowledge is evidence of learning. I see learning as a by-product of trying to achieve an intrinsic goal, rather than an isolated activity to become educated.

> Early evidence of practical knowledge often comes from usage metrics on GitHub, or reader metrics from your work blog. Progress in theoretical work starts by having researchers you consider interesting engage with your work.

> Taste has more to do about character development than knowledge. You need taste to form an independent opinion of a field, having the courage to pursue unconventional areas and to not get caught up in self-admiration.

When I study abstract interpretation or lattices, I'm doing so because I find those subjects interesting and beautiful, and studying math relaxes me. I can lie to myself and say that it's improving my problem solving ability and that it's like doing mental yoga and will make me better at my job or some baloney, but that's not why I do it.

I can spend time with a plant in my garden, take a cutting, root it and replant it, and watch it grow, learn the ebbs and flows of its watering needs through the seasons, learn what its seed pods look like, and eventually watch it die through some misstep of my own or otherwise.

And in doing so, I am learning, and building a mental model for this plant and an intuition for it, but I'm not "creating value" in some weird capitalist sense, which I feel always underlies these sorts of opinions about learning and education, and people who self-identify as "makers" in general. It rubs me the wrong way because it encourages a very narrow view of the human experience and what it means to learn and why we should learn.

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#92

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 2:33 AM UTC

jshowa3 wrote: post #81

I don't know why people think getting a credential does nothing or that people "copy and paste" the assignments. Sure it may be possible, but what prevents people from copying and pasting public git repos? Either way, this whole focus on "portfolios are everything and credentials are meaningless" spits in the face of all the work I did to get my university education. And it didn't involve "copying assignments". And y…

[deleted]

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#93

Post by mehrdadn » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:01 AM UTC

JDiculous wrote: post #90

jshowa3 wrote: post #81

I don't know why people think getting a credential does nothing or that people "copy and paste" the assignments. Sure it may be possible, but what prevents people from copying and pasting public git repos? Either way, this whole focus on "portfolios are everything and credentials are meaningless" spits in the face of all the work I did to get my university education. And it didn't involve "copying assignments". And y…

> I don't know why people think getting a credential does nothing Then actually pay attention to the arguments they're making instead of talking about how offended you are because it goes against your self-interest as a degree holder. It's not as if the people bashing modern education are some kind of elusive minority. I've got a master's degree and I've always though our education system is stupid, and at least in t…

> Absolutely nothing you learn in a college education you can't learn yourself for free on the internet.

I don't know who "you" is (perhaps you in particular are very gifted) or what you personally learned in college, but on my end in college I specifically took particular classes to learn topics that I had previously tried and failed to learn on my own, so, if it's meant to be generic, I'm pretty confident your claim is false.

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#94

Post by w4n9r3ntru3 » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:19 AM UTC

JDiculous wrote: post #90

jshowa3 wrote: post #81

I don't know why people think getting a credential does nothing or that people "copy and paste" the assignments. Sure it may be possible, but what prevents people from copying and pasting public git repos? Either way, this whole focus on "portfolios are everything and credentials are meaningless" spits in the face of all the work I did to get my university education. And it didn't involve "copying assignments". And y…

> I don't know why people think getting a credential does nothing Then actually pay attention to the arguments they're making instead of talking about how offended you are because it goes against your self-interest as a degree holder. It's not as if the people bashing modern education are some kind of elusive minority. I've got a master's degree and I've always though our education system is stupid, and at least in t…

For some of the more 'difficult' domains, like computer hardware architechure, resources on the internet is sparce though.

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#95

Post by cossatot » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:21 AM UTC

qntty wrote: post #6

"Many are realizing that education is a zero-sum credential game." Can this silly meme die already? Maybe it's understandable coming from an economist who values education for no other reason than it's economic effects, but it's strange coming from someone who clearly understands the value of personal development.

This statement is proportionally more common in fields where it's challenging to sort truth from bullshit.

If it's easy to see that a piece of output (a paper, code library, machine learning model, whatever) or a job candidate is great, then the credentials behind it don't matter much. However if it's challenging to evaluate quality, then people will shift to looking at secondary signals such as credentials, price, etc.

As to why a lot of economists go with the signaling model of education, well, it might just say something about their field and how much they got out of their own educations.

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#96

Post by w4n9r3ntru3 » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:24 AM UTC

TrainedMonkey wrote: post #5

woah wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the lack of data for independent researchers may encourage the development of low data techniques which is much more exciting in the long term since humans are able to learn with much less data than required by most machine learning techniques

Arguably humans have a lifetime of data which was used to develop a model of the world that is amazingly efficient at interpreting new data.

Humans learn efficiently, but that has nothing to do with having a lifetime of data I believe. Humans have a lifetime of data, but you can easily parallelize the model such that it takes in more data than a human can in his/her lifetime, and still humans are still the state of the art.

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#97

Post by Reelin » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:33 AM UTC

AlexCoventry wrote: post #58

ineedasername wrote: post #50

I think in these sorts of discussions two concepts with the same name tend to get conflated, so I think it's important to make a distinction between: 1) AI Research as applying/tweaking known ML/DL methods to a novel problem. I would term these something like "AI Engineering Research" 2) AI Research as examining the theoretical frameworks & approaches to ML/DL in a way that may itself lead to shifts in the understand…

Is AlphaFold 1 or 2?

According to at least one expert in the field, it's a bit of both. (https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp...)

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#98

Post by analbumcover » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:39 AM UTC

deepnotderp wrote: post #33

K0SM0S wrote: post #29

This was a great read (and great nuggets, like that paper on Intelligence by Chollet). I wonder: — Is math a problem for non-academic researchers? Most papers strike me as requiring a non-trivial knowledge of linear algebra, for instance; and topology sits right behind; the bold seem to take it one up on category theory as we speak, and geometric algebra is quickly gaining traction too. Lots of math, cool math but ma…

To be honest, linear algebra is not that difficult to learn on your own, and plenty of people do. Gilbert Strang's course on OCW has made introductory linear algebra quite accessible. Things like topology (e.g. TDA, persistent homology, etc.) aren't really mainstream yet, but even then most of it isn't really "hardcore" math in the sense that you can get away with a basic understanding, e.g. what a Vietoris-Rips comp…

Linear algebra can be straightforward to learn on your own, if sufficiently motivated. But homology seems altogether different. The math undergrads who see it often have a tough enough time, I can't imagine an autodidact managing.

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#99

Post by pmiller2 » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:47 AM UTC

w4n9r3ntru3 wrote: post #94

JDiculous wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know why people think getting a credential does nothing Then actually pay attention to the arguments they're making instead of talking about how offended you are because it goes against your self-interest as a degree holder. It's not as if the people bashing modern education are some kind of elusive minority. I've got a master's degree and I've always though our education system is stupid, and at least in t…

For some of the more 'difficult' domains, like computer hardware architechure, resources on the internet is sparce though.

Not only mention those fields that require lab work, practical field work, and/or specialized equipment or facilities to learn. This site is far too CS and math specific sometimes.

Re: My story as a self-taught AI researcher

#100

Post by throwawayjava » Tue, Jan 21, 2020, 3:55 AM UTC

mehrdadn wrote: post #93

JDiculous wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know why people think getting a credential does nothing Then actually pay attention to the arguments they're making instead of talking about how offended you are because it goes against your self-interest as a degree holder. It's not as if the people bashing modern education are some kind of elusive minority. I've got a master's degree and I've always though our education system is stupid, and at least in t…

> Absolutely nothing you learn in a college education you can't learn yourself for free on the internet. I don't know who "you" is (perhaps you in particular are very gifted) or what you personally learned in college, but on my end in college I specifically took particular classes to learn topics that I had previously tried and failed to learn on my own, so, if it's meant to be generic, I'm pretty confident your clai…

> ...or what you personally learned in college

I went to a bad No-Name University for undergraduate and then Top Tier University for phd school, so I have an unusually representative view here.

I do agree that, for CS, the no-name university was... bad. Fortunately, I realized this early and did a lot of self-study. I probably learned more reading taocp and going through MIT open courseware courses in the library during the evenings than I learned in my actual undergraduate courses.

The mathematics courses, even at No Name, definitely provided me with a better education than I could have ever gotten on my own. I'm pretty bad at math, it was my worst subject in high school. So I double-majored in it during undergraduate. This dovetails with your advice to use university as a time to learn things you already tried and failed to learn on your own, or which you otherwise know will be difficult to learn on your own.

The CS education that undergraduates get at Top Tier University is far better than what I got, even though I worked through that Top Tier University's online courseware/lecture notes/exercises during undergraduate on my own.

My hot take: college is always worth it, but only if you intentionally invest in "leveling-up" past your previous potential.

That will happen almost by default at Top Tier unless you're a genius (...but you'll pay a lot for it). But not if you're going to university at No Name. So, in that case, students should definitely a) minor or even double-major in something they're not good at, and b) heavily supplement their CS courses during evenings/weekends.

Also, this is all highly specific to very self-motivated learners -- the sort for whom "self-taught" is a reasonable route. I'm one of those people. Over time, I've realized that we're a very small minority. Our perceptions of what others are capable of learning on their own, and prescriptions for how others should learn, are typically quite warped. Most people probably do need something like a 4 year college degree to become a competent programmer.