0. Hah, yeah. Pretty sure you’re the first person to accuse me of being anti-intellectual...I can’t say for certain, but I think this interpretation here might be on you.
1. Indeed I think you missed my point: the causality implied in your earlier post reads as “well, if you know math, PageRank pops right out!” — my point is, you don’t need to know anything about eigenvalues for PageRank to be an intuitive solution; the insight isn’t eigenvalues or even probability distributions of pages, it’s ranking by relative rank of inbound links. There are many ways to operationalize that insight, and your post made gatekeeping allusions about what math it takes to do that. That’s what I’m responding to.
2. Sure, but you were originally responding to a post about when graph algorithms might ever be useful in industry. Obviously all things being equal, knowing about graph algorithms > not knowing about them. But again, you don’t need to know about them in advance.
3. No doubt Google’s early success is due to PageRank. But PageRank’s success is due to the insight behind it — following web links backward (in fact the precursor to PageRank was called “backrub”) — and not due to eigenvalues.
To be clear, I’m not at all anti-intellectual, and I love a good math puzzle or algorithm as much as the next guy — and I said as much in my other post.
But I’m also not in love with the fetishization of formalisms that is common in technical and academic circles, and the attendant value system that is so eager to prove itself that it tries to fit any and all adjacent insights into its own paradigm — just as you’ve done here.