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Self-Classifying MNIST Digits Using Neural Cellular Automata

distill.pub

11–20 of 27 posts

Re: Self-Classifying MNIST Digits Using Neural Cellular Automata

#11

After looking at the authors and other commentators and realizing they were real people, I feel bad, but apparently I can't delete this

Thanks for your comment! I'm one of the editors of Distill.

I understand the task to be different from regular pixel segmentation in that it's set up in the cellular automata context and message passing is only allowed between neighbors. I think this is what the authors intend by "each pixel in the digit needs to coordinate locally".

With that said, you bring up a good point that it could be misread. I bet the authors would be happy to update the paper and clarify if you wanted to engage!

Re: Self-Classifying MNIST Digits Using Neural Cellular Automata

#12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opinion aside. You should be more polite!

After looking at the authors and other commentators and realizing they were real people, I feel bad, but apparently I can't delete this

Hello! I'm one of the editors of Distill. I'm certainly open to the possibility that we could have helped the authors differentiate their contribution more.

It seems like it's important to you to call Distill out on what you see as an institutional failure. I think you could actually do that more effectively and credibly if you wrote your comment differently.

Putting myself in the author's shoes, it feels pretty hard to engage with your comment. When you swear, it gives the sense you don't wish for people to engage with you. When you say "who the fuck reviewed this paper, a 25 year old fresh professor", it feels like you're implying that people who are young are intrinsically not knowledgable. When you don't leave open space for more charitable interpretations, it makes productive conversation a lot harder.

I appreciate your dedication to improving scientific discourse. I'd love to see if we can turn this into a productive conversation.

Re: Self-Classifying MNIST Digits Using Neural Cellular Automata

#13
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opinion aside. You should be more polite!

After looking at the authors and other commentators and realizing they were real people, I feel bad, but apparently I can't delete this

The problem is that HN is an internet forum, not scientific discourse. When you vent what looks like garden-variety bile into an internet forum, all we get is a shittier internet forum, not better science.

No doubt a colloquium of colleagues in a scientific department can handle much more blunt and even ferocious feedback than a large broadcasting channel like this place. It is a question of what each medium is good for, what sort of conversation it can sustain. Whether a message has a good signal/noise ratio depends on the medium.

Put another way: you need to know which game you're playing. In some games, knocking an opponent to the ground with maximal force is understood by everyone to be a great move—including by the person you tackled—while in other games, the same action can get you thrown out of the game, or out of the league, or sent to jail, or even killed. It can also destroy the game itself.

In the game here, things like vitriol and snark are associated with low-quality messages, because so many people do it all the time, and eagerly take others doing it as license to do worse. Usually it is quite off topic and devolves into repetitive brawls. In such a context, you can't communicate interesting information that way. The baseline of noise will drown out your signal.

To communicate effectively here, you need to take a different approach: when you know more, share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. If something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is, but don't be gratuitously negative. Don't punish or shame anyone for being wrong; instead, provide correct information neutrally. If someone is learning, help them learn more. These are strategies that work for high-signal communication here, and they have the beneficial side effect of building up the context for successful future conversation, rather than breaking it down.

The cost of doing this is a certain blandness in communication which is regrettable, but I don't know how we can avoid that.

It's clear from your now-deleted comment upthread that you have real knowledge in this area and I hope you will continue to contribute it. Please feel welcome to post another comment if you still want to, and no need to feel bad. We're all trying to figure out together how to have an internet forum, in the long run, that doesn't suck.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Self-Classifying MNIST Digits Using Neural Cellular Automata

#14
post #11

After looking at the authors and other commentators and realizing they were real people, I feel bad, but apparently I can't delete this

Thanks for your comment! I'm one of the editors of Distill. I understand the task to be different from regular pixel segmentation in that it's set up in the cellular automata context and message passing is only allowed between neighbors. I think this is what the authors intend by "each pixel in the digit needs to coordinate locally". With that said, you bring up a good point that it could be misread. I bet the author…

[deleted]

Re: Self-Classifying MNIST Digits Using Neural Cellular Automata

#15
post #2

[Disclosure: I'm involved in Distill, so a little biased.] Firstly, make sure you click through to the invidudal articles and try the interactive demos at the top of each one: * https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ * https://distill.pub/2020/selforg/mnist/ I really enjoy how quirky Alex, Ettore, et al's experiments are. It isn't going after benchmarks. It has a very "what would happen if we tried this?" feel to it. I…

Hi there! Like this line of work. As an enthusiast of Alife-ish things, CAs (and NKS-style computational systems generally), and also an author of an ML library, I was looking forward to jumping on the slack and just having a chat with likeminded folk, but I'm having trouble finding how to actually make an account on https://distillpub.slack.com

Re: Self-Classifying MNIST Digits Using Neural Cellular Automata

#16
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After looking at the authors and other commentators and realizing they were real people, I feel bad, but apparently I can't delete this

Hello! I'm one of the editors of Distill. I'm certainly open to the possibility that we could have helped the authors differentiate their contribution more. It seems like it's important to you to call Distill out on what you see as an institutional failure. I think you could actually do that more effectively and credibly if you wrote your comment differently. Putting myself in the author's shoes, it feels pretty hard…

I took my other comments down, because I realized I was being ignorant to the real people who wrote the paper/operate the journal, and I apologize for that. I think other's have criticized Distill much more aptly then I ever could, so I don't think I have much to contribute to the conversation

Re: Self-Classifying MNIST Digits Using Neural Cellular Automata

#17
post #2

[Disclosure: I'm involved in Distill, so a little biased.] Firstly, make sure you click through to the invidudal articles and try the interactive demos at the top of each one: * https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ * https://distill.pub/2020/selforg/mnist/ I really enjoy how quirky Alex, Ettore, et al's experiments are. It isn't going after benchmarks. It has a very "what would happen if we tried this?" feel to it. I…

Hi there! Like this line of work. As an enthusiast of Alife-ish things, CAs (and NKS-style computational systems generally), and also an author of an ML library, I was looking forward to jumping on the slack and just having a chat with likeminded folk, but I'm having trouble finding how to actually make an account on https://distillpub.slack.com

Thanks for pointing this out! The slack invite link expires periodically and I need to replace it. It should work as soon as changes propagate! In the mean time, you can also join here: https://join.slack.com/t/distillpub/shared_invite/zt-grg499d...

Re: Self-Classifying MNIST Digits Using Neural Cellular Automata

#18
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello! I'm one of the editors of Distill. I'm certainly open to the possibility that we could have helped the authors differentiate their contribution more. It seems like it's important to you to call Distill out on what you see as an institutional failure. I think you could actually do that more effectively and credibly if you wrote your comment differently. Putting myself in the author's shoes, it feels pretty hard…

I took my other comments down, because I realized I was being ignorant to the real people who wrote the paper/operate the journal, and I apologize for that. I think other's have criticized Distill much more aptly then I ever could, so I don't think I have much to contribute to the conversation

Thanks for the response! Your apology makes me feel more positive about conversations on the internet. :)

I genuinely appreciate you giving feedback. Running Distill is hard, and there's lots of places we make mistakes or could do things better.

From my perspective, Distill has to balance a lot of equities. I see one of our major roles as trying to explore new visions of what an academic journal can be, so I put a lot of weight towards us doing weird and unusual things, like these threads. But we also need to take care around process and quality. And sometimes we screw up.

Distill is also entirely volunteer run. Everyone involved has full time jobs, and runs Distill on top of that. And honestly, we're often quite exhausted. So sometimes we make mistakes that a better version of ourselves with more time for Distill would not.

Re: Self-Classifying MNIST Digits Using Neural Cellular Automata

#19
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took my other comments down, because I realized I was being ignorant to the real people who wrote the paper/operate the journal, and I apologize for that. I think other's have criticized Distill much more aptly then I ever could, so I don't think I have much to contribute to the conversation

Thanks for the response! Your apology makes me feel more positive about conversations on the internet. :) I genuinely appreciate you giving feedback. Running Distill is hard, and there's lots of places we make mistakes or could do things better. From my perspective, Distill has to balance a lot of equities. I see one of our major roles as trying to explore new visions of what an academic journal can be, so I put a lo…

I really appreciate the idea of a place where code and paper can be intertwined, it's a cool idea for a journal! I also really enjoy journals doing weird unusually things! I just have a penchant for people defining novel terms and not fully exploring existing literature in a field. In my opinion, it creates a very disorienting effect where those who have useful tools to contribute (typically neural network researchers) immediately start on the worst footing.

Everyone is constantly playing catch-up in understanding and can't follow the evolution of an idea/methodology over time.

I was under the impression that Distill was funded by Google, is this not the case?

Re: Self-Classifying MNIST Digits Using Neural Cellular Automata

#20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the response! Your apology makes me feel more positive about conversations on the internet. :) I genuinely appreciate you giving feedback. Running Distill is hard, and there's lots of places we make mistakes or could do things better. From my perspective, Distill has to balance a lot of equities. I see one of our major roles as trying to explore new visions of what an academic journal can be, so I put a lo…

I really appreciate the idea of a place where code and paper can be intertwined, it's a cool idea for a journal! I also really enjoy journals doing weird unusually things! I just have a penchant for people defining novel terms and not fully exploring existing literature in a field. In my opinion, it creates a very disorienting effect where those who have useful tools to contribute (typically neural network researcher…

Nope. There's money committed if we ever run the Distill Prize ($10K prizes recognizing outstanding scientific communication), but that's tied up in legal issues.

For regular Distill, all the costs (several thousand dollars a year) come out of volunteer pockets, and all the time is volunteered.

Edit: There was a period of 6 months where Firebase (which is connected to Google?) gave us free hosting, reducing our expenses.

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