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Under-Investigated Fields

matthewmcateer.me

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Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#21

Post by t_mann »

Palomides wrote: post #7

I think it's weird to suggest that programming languages are under-investigated, and the discussion he gives of it makes me question his conclusions about other fields. There are vastly different paradigms completely orthogonal to the hierarchy in that image the author uses. I don't think getting people to stop using assembly/C/fortran/cobol/php/whatever is a research problem.

His list regarding economics also raised my suspicion: anti-corruption, union organization, charter cities,... I couldn't really believe that no one was seriously studying these questions, so here are some results from literally 5 minutes of googling:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0969229100360783... https://www.jstor.org/stable/2522141 https://ideas.repec.org/p/ess/wpaper/id2471.html

and there are even dedicated Master's degrees for some of those questions: http://www.lse.ac.uk/study-at-lse/Graduate/Degree-programmes... http://www.lse.ac.uk/study-at-lse/Graduate/Degree-programmes...

conclusion: if you're not an expert on the matter yourself, you should be very careful when claiming that something is under-investigated. maybe it's just harder to come up with useable solutions than you think, and that's why you haven't heard of any. at the very least you should spend 5 minutes to google it.

PS: be generally cautious of anyone who writes or talks as if hew was an expert on no less than 10 entirely different disciplines.

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#22

Post by randallsquared »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #20
Palomides wrote: post #7

I think it's weird to suggest that programming languages are under-investigated, and the discussion he gives of it makes me question his conclusions about other fields. There are vastly different paradigms completely orthogonal to the hierarchy in that image the author uses. I don't think getting people to stop using assembly/C/fortran/cobol/php/whatever is a research problem.

> makes me question his conclusions about other fields I think this list makes no sense unless it is made into a wiki of some sort with community contributions from hundreds of people. Under "Physics", he has a sub-heading "Increasing Iteration Speed of Experimental Physics". This section mentions one random startup. Yet CERN has hundreds of people actively working on this topic for decades. They invented, built and…

> in the period 1972-1976

Did you mean "for decades", or "decades ago"? I'm not sure any notable result from half a century ago qualifies any of the list he's creating for modern research (without regard to the quality of that list).

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#23

Post by ImaTigger »

This is sort of a ridiculous list. There are, possibly by definition, and infinitude of under-investigated fields. A more useful list might be a list of OVER investigated fields, such as PvNP, Deep Learning, Consciousness, fMRI, ...

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#24

Post by semi-extrinsic »

randallsquared wrote: post #22
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> makes me question his conclusions about other fields I think this list makes no sense unless it is made into a wiki of some sort with community contributions from hundreds of people. Under "Physics", he has a sub-heading "Increasing Iteration Speed of Experimental Physics". This section mentions one random startup. Yet CERN has hundreds of people actively working on this topic for decades. They invented, built and…

> in the period 1972-1976 Did you mean "for decades", or "decades ago"? I'm not sure any notable result from half a century ago qualifies any of the list he's creating for modern research (without regard to the quality of that list).

I'm trying to say they didn't stop doing it. They've done it for decades.

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#25

Post by lonelappde »

TheAsprngHacker wrote: post #11
Palomides wrote: post #7

I think it's weird to suggest that programming languages are under-investigated, and the discussion he gives of it makes me question his conclusions about other fields. There are vastly different paradigms completely orthogonal to the hierarchy in that image the author uses. I don't think getting people to stop using assembly/C/fortran/cobol/php/whatever is a research problem.

Agreed, and Scratch is hardly the pinnacle of programming language theory. I was talking to professor Shriram Krishnamurthi a week ago about a block-based, educational ML dialect I was making, and he told me that he believed that once a language had a type system as sophisticated as mine, its target audience should be using text, not blocks. So, perhaps Scratch-style languages are a dead-end, or infeasible beyond a c…

Why do you think a block based language would be good for learning ML?

My impression is that blocks would be good for learning concepts without accidentally overfitting on syntax, but for writing real programs, blocks are hopelessly inefficient for input and editing. Then again, letting the user input text but automatically convert to blocks by continual parsing, might be the best of both worlds. Sort of like emacs lisp parens mode.

Re: Under-Investigated Fields

#26

Post by bra-ket »

life-long learning - worth mentioning the work by well known CMU researchers:

Tom Mitchell, Never-ending learning (2015): https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/pubs/NELL_aaai15.pdf

Sebastian Thrun, Life-long learning (1995) https://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub1/thrun_sebastian_1995_1...

Also this seminar at Stanford on Lifelong Machine Learning(2013): https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~eeaton/AAAI-SSS13-LML/#Schedule

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