[sinenomine]

The amount of disdain academically inclined people express towards reductionist engineering-first paradigms is hilarious and depressing.

The denial of obviously fertile paradigm feels like such a useless self-defeating loss to indulge in an intellectual status game.

We could be all better off right now if connectionists were given DOE-grade supercomputers in the 90s, and were supplied with custom TPUs later in the 00s as their ideas were proven generally correct via rigorous experimentation on said DOE supercomputers. This didn't happen due to what amounts to academic bullying culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptrons_(book)

The sheer scale of cumulative losses we suffered (at least in part) due to this denial of the connectionism as a generally useful foundational field will be estimated somewhere in the astronomical powers of ten in the future, where the fruits of this technology will provide radically better lives for us and our descendants.

I see you have a knee-jerk reaction to hype and industry, and we are all fearing replacement unless its a stock market doing the work for us ... but why do you feel the need to punch down at this prosaic field "about nonlinear optimization"? The networks in question just want to learn, and to help us, if we train them to this end - and we make any and all excuses to avoid receiving this help, as our civilization quietly drowns in its own incompetency...