Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)

#121

Post by coldtea » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 8:06 PM UTC

>The problems of theory-free statistical inference go far beyond hallucinating faces in the snow. Anyone who’s ever taken a basic stats course knows that “correlation isn’t causation.” For example, maybe the reason cops find more crime in Black neighborhoods because they harass Black people more with pretextual stops and searches that give them the basis to unfairly charge them, a process that leads to many unjust guilty pleas because the system is rigged to railroad people into pleading guilty rather than fighting charges. (...)

Being able to calculate that Inputs a, b, c… z add up to Outcome X with a probability of 75% still won’t tell you if arrest data is racist, whether students will get drunk and breathe on each other, or whether a wink is flirtation of grit in someone’s eye.

Except if information about what we consider racist etc. also passes through the same inference engine (feeding it with information on arbitrary additional meta levels).

So, sure, an AI which is just fed crime stats to make inferrences, can never understand beyond that level.

But an AI which if fed crime stats, plus cultural understanding about such data (e.g. which is fed language, like a baby is, and which is then fed cultural values through osmosis - e.g. news stories, recorded discussions with people, etc).

In the end, it could also be through actual socialization: you make the AI into a portable human-like body (the classic sci-fi robot), and have it feed its learning NN by being around people, same as any other person.

Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)

#122

Post by coldtea » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 8:08 PM UTC

bhntr3 wrote: post #74

jstx1 wrote: post #16

> I am an AI skeptic. I am baffled by anyone who isn’t. I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) ‘machine learning’ field that leads to a general AI - I share the skepticism towards any progress towards 'general AI' - I don't think that we're remotely close or even on the right path in any way. - That doesn't make me a skeptic towards the current state of machine learning thoug…

> I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) ‘machine learning’ field that leads to a general AI > I share the skepticism towards any progress towards 'general AI' - I don't think that we're remotely close or even on the right path in any way. This isn't how science works though. Quoting the wikipedia page for Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" ( https://en.w…

>I think this is the accepted model in the philosophy of science since the 1970s.

Perhaps, but "philosophy of science" has never been something the majority practicing scientists consider relevant, care about, or are influenced by, since forever.

Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)

#123

Post by 3gg » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 8:10 PM UTC

username90 wrote: post #102

3gg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like applying the technology with caution and accountability when you already know beforehand that the output is not error-free.

They never promised that the output would be error free, having output with errors is still useful for many applications. And the issues you are talking about got fixed as soon as it was discovered and since then Google has made sure to always diversify their datasets by race. Nowadays that is common knowledge that you need to do it, but back then it wasn't obvious that a model wouldn't generalize across human races…

It was discovered by others, not them; they fixed the issue only retroactively when it was called out in public. This lack of oversight is part of what I mean with applying things with caution.

And why would they have assumed in the first place that the model _would_ generalize across human races, or any other factor for that matter?

Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)

#124

Post by shreyshnaccount » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 8:23 PM UTC

skohan wrote: post #110

spockz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about “data derived algorithm”? The algorithm itself isn’t really driven by data after it has been designed anymore.

I mean if we want to be really accurate, we could say something like "highly dimensional data-derived function"

why stop at that? 'high dimensional matrix parameterised data derived non linear function optimisation and unique hypothesis generation' just rolls off the tongue doesn't it xD

Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)

#125

Post by out0fpaper » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 8:24 PM UTC

foobiekr wrote: post #46

3gg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I also don't think the engineers working in this space are as out to lunch as the author seems to imply. Are you at all close to this space? It sounds you may be underestimating corporate politics and the lack of rigour and ethical thought with which these systems are applied. The example Cory puts on policing -- and the many other examples you can find in Evgeny Morozov's book or "The End of Trust" -- are soli…

There are three entirely different groups at work here. The deepmind team etc type of group who actually know what they’re doing and the boundaries of what they are working with the “AI-washing” startups, corporate groups who know they are faking it and that what they’re doing is extremely limited the corporate project team types who are just doing random tool play and honestly don’t understand what they are doing or…

The same this is happening in the academics.

Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)

#126

Post by version_five » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 8:24 PM UTC

atty wrote: post #70

Unfortunately it’s pretty clear from the article that Cory does not have much familiarity with the research going on in the field of machine learning, and is creating a straw man. Quite a lot of work is being done on causal inference, out-of-distribution generalization, fairness, etc. Just because that is not the focus of the big sexy AI posts from Google et al does not mean that the work isn’t being done. I’d also p…

I'm not sure what issue others had with your comment. You're quite correct that he ignores vast swaths of current ML art and attacks a narrow conception of what ML is. Many of his criticism are legit with the right caveats, but he leaves out a lot of information that could lead to a different thesis.

My read of the discussion here is that there is lots of idle speculation by people who don't have any real experience with ML research / engineering, that overwhelms a minority who actually know what they are talking about and are calling CD out on this, or at least challenging aspects of his arguments.

Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)

#127

Post by mgraczyk » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 8:28 PM UTC

cratermoon wrote: post #116

jstx1 wrote: post #16

> I am an AI skeptic. I am baffled by anyone who isn’t. I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) ‘machine learning’ field that leads to a general AI - I share the skepticism towards any progress towards 'general AI' - I don't think that we're remotely close or even on the right path in any way. - That doesn't make me a skeptic towards the current state of machine learning thoug…

There's good reason to be skeptical of AI as it is. Here's a couple of reasons Racial bias in facial recognition: "Error rates up to 34% higher on dark-skinned women than for lighter-skinned males. "Default camera settings are often not optimized to capture darker skin tones, resulting in lower-quality database images of Black Americans" https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discriminatio... Chicago’s “Heat…

It's very easy to fix these problems though. There's nothing inherently broken about the models or direction that prevents error rates from being made more uniform. In fact newer facial recognition models with better datasets do perform approximately equally well across skin tones and sex

Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)

#128

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 8:31 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #121

> The problems of theory-free statistical inference go far beyond hallucinating faces in the snow. Anyone who’s ever taken a basic stats course knows that “correlation isn’t causation.” For example, maybe the reason cops find more crime in Black neighborhoods because they harass Black people more with pretextual stops and searches that give them the basis to unfairly charge them, a process that leads to many unjust…

[deleted]

Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)

#129

Post by Quarrelsome » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 8:41 PM UTC

foobiekr wrote: post #46

3gg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I also don't think the engineers working in this space are as out to lunch as the author seems to imply. Are you at all close to this space? It sounds you may be underestimating corporate politics and the lack of rigour and ethical thought with which these systems are applied. The example Cory puts on policing -- and the many other examples you can find in Evgeny Morozov's book or "The End of Trust" -- are soli…

There are three entirely different groups at work here. The deepmind team etc type of group who actually know what they’re doing and the boundaries of what they are working with the “AI-washing” startups, corporate groups who know they are faking it and that what they’re doing is extremely limited the corporate project team types who are just doing random tool play and honestly don’t understand what they are doing or…

I feel like we're missing the point here. The dangerous groups are those execs you mention who will have the decision about whether to move something into production or not.

When this technology gets into their hands with a dev leash it will be recklessly implemented and people will die.

Re: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results (2020)

#130

Post by akomtu » Sat, Jul 31, 2021, 8:49 PM UTC

shreyshnaccount wrote: post #33

jstx1 wrote: post #16

> I am an AI skeptic. I am baffled by anyone who isn’t. I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) ‘machine learning’ field that leads to a general AI - I share the skepticism towards any progress towards 'general AI' - I don't think that we're remotely close or even on the right path in any way. - That doesn't make me a skeptic towards the current state of machine learning thoug…

I'm in favor of changing the terminology from AI and ML to something along the lines of 'prediction model' so that the idea of machines 'thinking' is replaced with them 'predicting'. it's just easier for our mushy meat brains to think that AI and ML means that it'll lead to general AI or as I like to call it 'general purpose decision maker'. it's all about the language!

Iirc, predictive coding is a well known branch of math that's said to be the next big step towards AI.