[snowwrestler]

People studying machine learning are not like people running a psychology experiment. If you give the same code, data and computers to two different teams, they will get the same results, and they will understand why that happens.

That's because a machine learning system has been built up from known principles and hardware; whereas the human brain is not fully understood, so researchers must work their way down from observed evidence to induce theories.

[plonh]

Luckily bugs don't exist in machine-learning software!

[snowwrestler]

What is a bug, anyway? It means the system is not working properly, which implies that folks know in advance how the system is intended to work.

When physicists were struggling to explain radiation, they didn't call it a bug in the atom. It was their understanding, not the system they studied, that needed fixing.