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How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

cs.purdue.edu

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Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#61

Post by stcredzero »

mattkrause wrote: post #52
tralarpa wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can attack them even if you have no idea what they are doing. Just look at the plots in the report and mumble something about "missing confidence intervals", "unrealistic workload", and "it's not even heavy tailed".

"Missing confidence intervals" is my (IMO) legit pet peeve. People fit frighteningly complicated models with millions-to-billions of parameters. They throw in hairy regularization schemes justified by fancy math. When it comes time to evaluate the output, however: "Our model is better because this one number is bigger than their number [once, on this one test set]."

As an undergrad, my circle had this drinking game called "Big Number." It came about because two of the biggest wastoids were the last people awake in the wee hours of Sunday, and one of them said to the other, "I'm too drunk to deal. Let's just roll dice, and the one with the biggest number drinks."

Of course, over the years, the game developed dozens of other rules.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#63

Post by 908B64B197 »

oliverobscure wrote: post #4
rapjr9 wrote: post #2

As an engineer supporting researchers I ran into a peculiar problem. If I suggested an idea they often HAD to ignore it, because they couldn't claim it as their own. Especially the grad students who were trying to get a PhD by coming up with a unique idea of their own, but also the profs because it would be an admission that they "the experts" didn't understand what they were doing. So I had to lead them to come roun…

My degree course is split across my university’s Computer Science and Engineering departments, so I often get to hear both of the discussions you described. I would say that CS supervisors talking to their students are more direct in saying that the ideas that they come with won’t work or that their mathematics is incorrect, whereas engineering professors seemed to be a bit more subtle and guiding where their student…

> whereas engineering professors seemed to be a bit more subtle and guiding where their students falter, as though they perhaps had the exact same ideas when they were younger and want to gently discourage the same mistakes.

It's because once something fails, in engineering the work doesn't stop. You have to root cause it and understand the failure. That's a valuable exercise in itself.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#64

Post by dfee »

hn8788 wrote: post #44
miklosme wrote: post #17

> In fact, this is merely an extension of a ploy used by children on a playground: "Oh yeah? I could have done that if I wanted to." Or by adult professionals on Hacker News.

I had an insufferable coworker who doubled down on that attitude. If he hadn't thought of something, instead of just saying he could have done it, he'd start rambling about why it was a bad idea, and that he was smart for choosing not to do it. His whole attitude was "I know everything, and if I don't know it, it's because it's not worth knowing". Worst part was the non-technical management ate it up because he was s…

So how do you productively deal with this? There’s got to be a way, I just don’t know what it is.

The worse form of this is when they: 1) make poor choices faster than you can catch up

2) have a less senior team (in ability, not title) that can’t see more than a couple commits ahead to keep the damage in check.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#65

Post by titzer »

bogwog wrote: post #35
ntechau wrote: post #18

Criticism should not be insulting. The primary title of this document is a thinly veiled attempt of shrouding the author's true intent. It's clear from their final words on the topic that they mean to insult, not criticize.

The full title: > How To Criticize Computer Scientists > or > Avoiding Ineffective Deprecation And > Making Insults More Pointed Am I missing something? Isn't your failure to read the full title a result of your desire to insult the author, rather than to criticize them? Wasn't this done already at Xerox PARC?

Despite the seemingly original nature of your comments, is there a deep satirical result here that I am missing? Did you decide to try a second approach because you had insufficient results from the first?

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#66

Post by cwadaniels »

I particularly like this because it applies across STEM disciplines. One could easily apply this in behavioral neuroscience (my field) and get quality results. Although as both a theoretician and experimentalist I’m not sure which would hurt me more: isn’t your reinforcement learning model just a recapitulation of Pavlovian conditioning? Or isn’t your experimental design problematic because it doesn’t make use of [insert favored alternative methods of insulter]. Probably the former. Ego often gets involved with theory.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#67

Post by navbaker »

ntechau wrote: post #18

Criticism should not be insulting. The primary title of this document is a thinly veiled attempt of shrouding the author's true intent. It's clear from their final words on the topic that they mean to insult, not criticize.

The author's primary field is Applied Criticism, so this is to be expected.

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#68

Post by 908B64B197 »

rapjr9 wrote: post #2

As an engineer supporting researchers I ran into a peculiar problem. If I suggested an idea they often HAD to ignore it, because they couldn't claim it as their own. Especially the grad students who were trying to get a PhD by coming up with a unique idea of their own, but also the profs because it would be an admission that they "the experts" didn't understand what they were doing. So I had to lead them to come roun…

> If I suggested an idea they often HAD to ignore it, because they couldn't claim it as their own. Especially the grad students who were trying to get a PhD by coming up with a unique idea of their own, but also the profs because it would be an admission that they "the experts" didn't understand what they were doing.

That's what authorship is for. What's the point in supporting academia if you can't get authorship?

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#69

Post by graderjs »

This is pretty awful, as in mean. Why would you deliberately want to insult someone who hasn't done anything to you? If it's getting them back sure, but as sport? Just cruel.

  Despite all the equations, it seems to me that your work didn't require any real mathematical sophistication. Did I miss something? (This is an especially good ploy if you observe others struggling to understand the talk because they will not want to admit to that after you imply it was easy.)
  Isn't this just a straightforward extension of an old result by Hartmanis? (Not even Hartmanis remembers all the theorems Hartmanis proved, but everyone else will assume you remember something they have forgotten.)
  Am I missing something here? Can you identify any deep mathematical content in this work? (Once again, audience members who found the talk difficult to understand will be unwilling to admit it.)

  Wasn't all this done years ago at Xerox PARC? (No one remembers what was really done at PARC, but everyone else will assume you remember something they don't.)
  Have you tested this on the chip Intel got running last week in their lab? (No one knows what 
  chip Intel got running last week, but everyone will assume you do.)
  Am I missing something? Isn't it obvious that there's a bottleneck in the system that prevents scaling to arbitrary size? (This is safe because there's a bottleneck in every system that prevents arbitrary scaling.)
Reminds me of low effort "comments" on Show HNs. Now I'm thinking that maybe people were deliberately trying to be insulting. But why...? Especially when people are being vulnerable sharing their work....

Re: How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

#70

Post by dan-robertson »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #12

This is great fun, but did anyone else think the suggested insults for experimentalists were very weak? The Xerox Parc one is good but most experimentalists would love a question about bottlenecks! And who cares about testing on Intel's latest chip? I suggest a proper insult would suggest an easily avoided bottleneck or unnecessary point of failure.

I feel like experimentalists have changed quite a bit in 20 years as big distributed systems have become more common. A good question might be “Sure your performance scales better than other systems but how does it compare to a single core, or a single big machine?”
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