The critique is about the importance of priors in BNN. In my humble understanding of Bayesian reasoning the argument to defend any prior is that with enought data the learning method converges to the real distribution, so if the result of any learning method depends heavily of any prior assumption then that assumption is crucial and in no way can it be taken randomly. On the other hand, it is well known that deep lea…
Have you seen the latest research on double descent? Here's a good intro, with references to some of the foundational work: https://openai.com/blog/deep-double-descent/ It seems bias-variance doesn't apply to neural networks at all! So your intuitions are good, but there's definitely more to the story.
A Sober Look at Bayesian Neural Networks
51–52 of 52 posts
Re: A Sober Look at Bayesian Neural Networks
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Critical and technical literature needs to be held to a standard. When the rhetor introduces errors in the artifact, the rhetor's ethos with the audience is diminished. The more fundamental the error (getting a basic equation wrong I guess?) the more trust you lose with a knowledgeable audience. If the author doesn't see that a fundamental issue was introduced, they may not have been expert enough to not introduce ad…
> Critical and technical literature needs to be held to a standard. That's a sloppy statement. You haven't defined what standard. Clearly, everything is held to "a standard"; making that an entirely empty claim. > When the rhetor introduces errors in the artifact, the rhetor's ethos with the audience is diminished. A "rhetor" is a teacher of rhetoric. This is not the correct word in this case. In this case, the corre…
Actually, I think I established a basis of discussion then later illustrated this basis with the way HN has grown and tends to enforce its standard.
> A "rhetor" is a teacher of rhetoric. This is not the correct word in this case.
A rhetor is a person practicing rhetoric, or a person delivering persuasive or effective communication. Teachers are indeed a subset of that, but also public speakers, negotiators, and e.g. authors who write to influence their audiences' understanding or perception.
I think you may also misunderstand the function of ethos in rhetoric.
> A knowledgeable audience can decide whether to trust something based on the actual content.
Perhaps we're in agreement? If the content reflects reflects clear understanding it can improve the efficacy of a rhetorical artifact, while sloppiness can reduce its persuasiveness.
Errors can diminish ethos. Correcting errors can amplify it: https://jacobbuckman.com/2020-01-17-a-sober-look-at-bayesian...