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by frisco 1354 days ago
How many days, cumulatively, has Gary Marcus held the SOTA record for any well known machine learning task?
1 comments

Any specific reason this is relevant to the arguments in his post?
What is he even arguing here? That he has been cheated out of some kind of credit? Credit for what? Afaict he has never actually shown something novel based on his ideas to work in a way that has mattered.
> What is he even arguing here? That he has been cheated out of some kind of credit?

He's (at least to some extent) arguing that if you're going to say someone's paper is "mostly wrong", saying the same things 4 years later should probably warrant a "ok, you were right" at least.

His argument may be silly or pathetic or false or even true, but it has nothing to do with how long he held the SOTA record of any known machine learning task.
He is arguing that Yann LeCun is taking ideas from other researchers without citation or credit, and that this is a sign of insecurity and ego.
"Ideas" here being few commonly used words put together barely forming a sentence, not some algorithm, research or deep paper.

Ie. the whole "idea" being "hey, for gai we need something different than this gtp3" tweet, not "idea" as in "hey I invented this new thing I call LSTM, check it out [link to paper, results what not]".

> hey I invented this new thing I call LSTM

Well, the LSTM fella does pop up later calling out Lecun for "rehashes but doesn't cite essential work of 1999-2015". Which I guess does mean people with real "ideas" are also fed up with him?

"Deep learning pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber, author of the commercially ubiquitous LSTM neural network, arguably has even more right to be pissed [...]"

They should make an ai to do auto-citation for them.
Because Marcus isn't a practitioner and never has been. He's a public intellectual from a different field acting like he's an AI expert. You would never listen to criticisms of a Physics theory from a Biologist and you shouldn't listen to criticisms of Neural Networks from a Psychologist.

He's proven time and time again that he doesn't understand the methods at work and doesn't even seem interested in trying to do so.

> You would never listen to criticisms of a Physics theory from a Biologist and you shouldn't listen to criticisms of Neural Networks from a Psychologist.

Why? If their arguments are sound, why shouldn't we listen to them?

Where is this silly credentialism coming from?

It's not credentialism at all, I said nothing about having a PhD in Physics for example. These theories are highly technical and if you aren't actively engaged in reading/replicating the most important papers and even lack the technical training to do so how can you really make coherent criticisms of them? It really beggars belief that a Biologist with nothing more than basic stats training can make sense of or poke holes in String Theory or Quantum Chromodynamics for example. Hence we get Marcus' pseduointellectual mush that passes for valid criticism of DL in the media or among other non-experts.

>Why? If their arguments are sound, why shouldn't we listen to them?

Generally arguments from non-experts like this fall into the "not even wrong" category and don't merit much attention.

Experts, always and everywhere, tend to massively exaggerate the scope of their expertise.

How exactly holding the SOTA record of any, or even all, machine learning task gives you any authority on true intelligence?

What gives LeCun any authority on true intelligence?

Even Lecun points out that his paper is not technical.

The only thing that matters is the of the argument.