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Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

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Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#651

Post by auggierose »

erinnh wrote: post #600
ajkjk wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's first thought when they read something is whatever the social norms say you're supposed to think (peer review = good, publishing without peer review = not science somehow?), but shouldn't you stop and wonder why the esteemed scientist wrote that line instead of just dismissing it? Otherwise you are only chiming in to enforce a norm that everyone already knows about, which is pointless. One of the really re…

Im not a scientist and do not know how these things work out, but wouldn't it be possible for scientist to simply publish their papers online without peer review if that is what they want? What's stopping them from doing so?

Their survival instinct.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#652

Post by AlbertCory »

Consider the Nobel in economics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econom...

It was not one of the original five, but it was endowed by a bank.

SO: you tech billionaires, why don't you endow a Prize in Computer Science? That would end the dispute about whether ML is "really" physics?

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#653

Post by naasking »

erinnh wrote: post #600
ajkjk wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's first thought when they read something is whatever the social norms say you're supposed to think (peer review = good, publishing without peer review = not science somehow?), but shouldn't you stop and wonder why the esteemed scientist wrote that line instead of just dismissing it? Otherwise you are only chiming in to enforce a norm that everyone already knows about, which is pointless. One of the really re…

Im not a scientist and do not know how these things work out, but wouldn't it be possible for scientist to simply publish their papers online without peer review if that is what they want? What's stopping them from doing so?

The only for work to have an impact is if it gets exposure. Publishing in journals got you an audience, but that audience is gatekept by peer review, which has its problems.

So sure, you could publish but the chance of having an impact was low. Thankfully that's changed a bit with arxiv.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#654

Post by ajkjk »

ars wrote: post #608
ajkjk wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's first thought when they read something is whatever the social norms say you're supposed to think (peer review = good, publishing without peer review = not science somehow?), but shouldn't you stop and wonder why the esteemed scientist wrote that line instead of just dismissing it? Otherwise you are only chiming in to enforce a norm that everyone already knows about, which is pointless. One of the really re…

That still exists, they just call them pre-prints and put them on the arxiv.

Very true and it's wonderful. But only a thing in some fields, as I understand it. In the past that was the role that a lot of papers played but the conflation of publications and citations with career advancement messes that all up.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#655

Post by famouswaffles »

etiam wrote: post #607
NlightNFotis wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this written a lot, and I don’t get it. What matters for an award is that people recognise it as a prestigious accolade. The economics prize, while not “official”, is still recognised by everyone in economics as the highest honour in the field. Who cares if it’s “official” or not? Awards and prizes derive their value from their social recognition, which it has a solid amount of, at the very least.

The significance is that it's not a Nobel prize. Saying that is simply formally wrong. It's a prize lobbied in (with a hefty donation) almost 70 years after the establishment, trying to raise the status of Economics as a scientific discipline by basking in the reflected glory of the actual Nobel prizes. You may not care about the distinction, and if so that's your prerogative, but this Memorial prize in Economics, de…

The General Public and Economists hold it in the same regard as other Nobel Prizes so appeal to 'formality' is pointless. The social recognition is the point of these awards so if it has that and is also often called the "Nobel Prize in Economics" then it's a Nobel Prize. They're literally announced and awarded together.

Nobody but a few nitpicks care about your distinction because it's not a real one. Might as well say "Money is not valuable because the material it's made up of has little intrinsic value". Well no, Money is valuable because society has decided it is.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#656

Post by Onavo »

hxnamer wrote: post #649
chriskanan wrote: post #386

Here is the reasoning: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/09/advanced-physicsp... I'm surprised Terry Sejnowski isn't included, considering it seems to be for Hopfield Nets and Boltzmann machines, where Terry played a large role in the latter.

Is this a widely accepted version of neural network history? I recognize Rosenblatt, Perceptron, etc., but I have never heard that Hopfield nets or Bolzmann machines were given any major weight in the history. The descriptions I have read were all mathematical, focusing on the computational graph with the magical backpropagation (which frankly is just memoizing intermediate computations). The descriptions also went o…

The deep learning variety of neural networks are heavily simplified, mostly linear versions of biological neurons. They don't resemble anything between your ears. Real life neurons are generally modeled by differential equations (in layman terms, have many levels of feedback loops tied to time), not the simplified ones used in dense layer activation functions.

Here are some examples

https://snntorch.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/tutorial...

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#657

Post by seydor »

Separo wrote: post #235
seydor wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very little to do with neuroscience

Except that the development of deep neural networks took direct inspiration biological neuroscience with neurons and synapses. Neural is even in the name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning

DL did not take 'direct inspiration' from neurosciences. Maybe some ideas were borrowed such as the integrate-and-fire nature of neurons and Hebb's very vague rule, but those are very old ideas. Most of neuroscience research in past decades is in molecular biology , and particularly in the study of neural diseases (that's where all the funding goes). Learning and biological plasticity is notoriously complex and difficult to study, it's still very much undeciphered, and none of that plasticity research has made its way into ANN training.

In fact it is the reverse: the recent success of deep learning has sparked a race in neuroscience to try to find processes in the nervous that might mimic deep learning and in particular to build biologically plausible models about how the brain might implement gradient descent or more generally credit assignment.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#658

Post by ajkjk »

tikhonj wrote: post #629
ajkjk wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's first thought when they read something is whatever the social norms say you're supposed to think (peer review = good, publishing without peer review = not science somehow?), but shouldn't you stop and wonder why the esteemed scientist wrote that line instead of just dismissing it? Otherwise you are only chiming in to enforce a norm that everyone already knows about, which is pointless. One of the really re…

We still have lots of stray thoughts, responses and observations, now they just happen on blog posts, on social media and in other non-peer-reviewed venues. The Internet has driven the cost of publishing to 0, and peer review is the only thing left that makes academic publishing qualitatively different. If anything, publishing your thoughts online is better than publishing a traditional paper in every single way exce…

Well, publishing online also has a reach problem. The nice thing about journals is that they consolidate all the material on a subject. Arxiv does this for some fields (and I guess similar aggregators in other fields) but really it is nice to have the thoughts still be _curated_, like a magazine, without necessarily being to a citeable/publishable standard.

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#659

Post by mmooss »

nickpeterson wrote: post #533
ilya_m wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add to this list Bernard Russel who won the Nobel in literature for being a public intellectual.

I should take up being a public intellectual, instead of a public nuisance.

Most people on the Internet and in a certain orange forum might consider it seriously. (I do think about it myself.)

Re: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]

#660

Post by etiam »

famouswaffles wrote: post #655
etiam wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The significance is that it's not a Nobel prize. Saying that is simply formally wrong. It's a prize lobbied in (with a hefty donation) almost 70 years after the establishment, trying to raise the status of Economics as a scientific discipline by basking in the reflected glory of the actual Nobel prizes. You may not care about the distinction, and if so that's your prerogative, but this Memorial prize in Economics, de…

The General Public and Economists hold it in the same regard as other Nobel Prizes so appeal to 'formality' is pointless. The social recognition is the point of these awards so if it has that and is also often called the "Nobel Prize in Economics" then it's a Nobel Prize. They're literally announced and awarded together. Nobody but a few nitpicks care about your distinction because it's not a real one. Might as well…

It is also my prerogative not to care about your opinion. You claimed you come across this a lot and don't get it. I just told you. Take it or leave it.
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