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Visual Information Theory (2015)

colah.github.io

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Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#41

Post by stonogo »

fergal_reid wrote: post #34
lonelappde wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your hostile attitude to the people putting the work in is disrespectful and inappropriate. It's like the people who make entitled demands of open source software authors. Academics don't get rewarded for confusing each other, they have to create research that their peers appreciate, understand, and value.

That's naive. Academia isn't some perfect system with perfect incentives. There's plenty of incentive to dress something up as more complex and impressive and using more high powered machinary than needed, e.g. impressing reviewers, qualifying for a particular conference, convincing the funding body that your pet technique can actually be useful etc I don't think you'd find many academics that dispute this, though ho…

The things you describe are common among unsuccessful academics. It is not common to see a researcher build a career on pissing off all the funding agencies and hoodwinking a project into a conference for which it is not appropriate.

I suspect you'd find thousands of academics who dispute your claims. Nobody is going to claim perfection, but the problems you're describing are not systemic and basically absent from anyone with a career.

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#42

Post by m3at »

Rainymood wrote: post #29

Love this article. It makes statistics enjoyable and accessible. Most of Olah's old stuff is also really good, especially the one on manifolds and neural networks [1] [1] https://colah.github.io/posts/2014-03-NN-Manifolds-Topology/

You might like to check distill [1], it's a journal with a limited amount of content for now, but of very high quality, and C. Olah is one of the editor.

[1] https://distill.pub/

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#43

Post by feral »

stonogo wrote: post #41
fergal_reid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's naive. Academia isn't some perfect system with perfect incentives. There's plenty of incentive to dress something up as more complex and impressive and using more high powered machinary than needed, e.g. impressing reviewers, qualifying for a particular conference, convincing the funding body that your pet technique can actually be useful etc I don't think you'd find many academics that dispute this, though ho…

The things you describe are common among unsuccessful academics. It is not common to see a researcher build a career on pissing off all the funding agencies and hoodwinking a project into a conference for which it is not appropriate. I suspect you'd find thousands of academics who dispute your claims. Nobody is going to claim perfection, but the problems you're describing are not systemic and basically absent from an…

>I suspect you'd find thousands of academics who dispute your claims.

I should have chosen my words more carefully; we can probably find 1000s of academics to dispute a lot of perspectives on academia.

> are not systemic and basically absent from anyone with a career.

So, leaving aside criticism of any particular field, and to take just one pretty big cross-discipline trend, there's this 'replication crisis' thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis (wiki links to plenty of reputable sources).

I find it difficult to reconcile that with the idea that incentives to over-inflate claims were 'basically absent from anyone with a career'.

Maybe we think everyone was just really bad at statistics?

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#44

Post by Koshkin »

applecrazy wrote: post #24
ThouYS wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

incredible guy, he really is the 10x everything type: https://colah.github.io/cv.pdf

Wow, his internship host was Jeff Dean ? I knew @colah was amazing (his neural net articles come to mind), but this is a whole other level of awesome.

> Wow

WTH is Jeff Dean and WSIC.

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#45

Post by james_s_tayler »

colah3 wrote: post #33
tw1010 wrote: post #2

This guy seems to have peaked in terms of creative output while he was on the thiel fellowship, and then abruptly stop once he was sucked up by google.

Hello! Thanks for pointing out that my CV is out of date. You're right that none of my work over the last two years is listed there, and I should probably fix that. It feels a bit awkward to chime in, but it feels a bit important because I think there's a way in which the narrative is a little off (although I'm very grateful for everyone's kind comments): Working at Google wasn't a trade off where I got financial sup…

I feel like someone who would write an article like "Research Debt" is someone who truly gets it. Someone who sees the enormous upside potential that can be unlocked through just investing in quality.

I'm deeply interested in these topics, but I'm not so good at them. I have gotten much further than I ever would because of efforts like these.

Thanks for being you.

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#47

Post by Allower »

lonelappde wrote: post #26
behnamoh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish more people were interested in research distillation. Recently I've been searching for intuitive explanations of different areas of math, and while there are some great blogs that do so, the lack of such materials is indeed obvious. I don't think academia is going to contribute to this mission as it's mostly governed by a make-it-look-ridiculously-difficult-so-people-won't-find-it-approachable-and-thus-give-yo…

Your hostile attitude to the people putting the work in is disrespectful and inappropriate. It's like the people who make entitled demands of open source software authors. Academics don't get rewarded for confusing each other, they have to create research that their peers appreciate, understand, and value.

>they have to create research that their peers appreciate, understand, and value.

That's the problem. They SHOULD be creating research that is USEFUL, not a play for status in a tribe of over inflated egos.

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#49

Post by stonogo »

feral wrote: post #43
stonogo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things you describe are common among unsuccessful academics. It is not common to see a researcher build a career on pissing off all the funding agencies and hoodwinking a project into a conference for which it is not appropriate. I suspect you'd find thousands of academics who dispute your claims. Nobody is going to claim perfection, but the problems you're describing are not systemic and basically absent from an…

>I suspect you'd find thousands of academics who dispute your claims. I should have chosen my words more carefully; we can probably find 1000s of academics to dispute a lot of perspectives on academia. > are not systemic and basically absent from anyone with a career. So, leaving aside criticism of any particular field, and to take just one pretty big cross-discipline trend, there's this 'replication crisis' thing: h…

The replication crisis is a real example of an incentive problem rampant in the current system. However, this leads to a disproportionate emphasis on original research. Accusing it of leading to the things you talked about is a non sequitur.

Again, by no means is academia perfect. But insisting that its primary problem is that grant writers are a pack of pathological liars is both incorrect and unhelpful in solving actual problems, that's all.

And yeah. I would say that most people would benefit from regular refreshers on statistics... in or out of academia.

Re: Visual Information Theory (2015)

#50

Post by feral »

stonogo wrote: post #49
feral wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I suspect you'd find thousands of academics who dispute your claims. I should have chosen my words more carefully; we can probably find 1000s of academics to dispute a lot of perspectives on academia. > are not systemic and basically absent from anyone with a career. So, leaving aside criticism of any particular field, and to take just one pretty big cross-discipline trend, there's this 'replication crisis' thing: h…

The replication crisis is a real example of an incentive problem rampant in the current system. However, this leads to a disproportionate emphasis on original research. Accusing it of leading to the things you talked about is a non sequitur. Again, by no means is academia perfect. But insisting that its primary problem is that grant writers are a pack of pathological liars is both incorrect and unhelpful in solving a…

> Accusing it of leading to the things you talked about is a non sequitur.

I didn't say the replication crisis lead to bad incentives. I cited it as evidence bad incentives exist.

> But insisting that its primary problem is that grant writers are a pack of pathological liars

I didn't say remotely that.

Academics have incentives to make their work sound overly impressive, and many are playing this game. That doesn't mean every grant writer is a pathological liar, but it's very naive to think they aren't incentivised to oversell findings, and many do.

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