
How I Fail – Ian Goodfellow - harias
http://www.veronikach.com/how-i-fail/how-i-fail-ian-goodfellow-phd14-computer-science/
======
danieldk
That was a nice read, thanks!

In general, I don't know how I feel about these articles, they seem to be
trending among my Twitter friends. I know that these interviews are meant as
an encouragement. To show that even the great people of our field had to
struggle, so we should not give up when we are still struggling.

However, these stories can also be understood negatively - if you didn't make
it, you probably did not work or try hard enough. What makes this effect
stronger is the selection bias - we do not see articles of the other 99% that
work their tails of and do not become big in their fields. With a society that
focuses on being the best, 'making it', etc. it leaves a lot of people feel
inadequate, incompetent, or even depressed, even when they are big net
contributors to society.

E.g. think of the 50-year old professor a moderately successful academic
career. He/she is educating hundreds of students and having a big positive
impact on their lives. But they are seen by others and themselves as failed
academics who were not good enough to make it.

(I don't know what the solution is.)

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Well there isn't a solution because the metrics for "failure" and "success"
are fuzzy. In my mind, someone is a "success" if they accomplish the challenge
of being the person they see themselves as/want to be. It's way harder than it
sounds.

So while there are certainly some people who, as Pickard said "made no
mistakes but still lost," there are others who didn't put in sufficient effort
and failed as a result.

I'd imagine that there are more in the latter camp than in the former. In your
example, the professor is only a failure if their goal was something other
than moderately successful academic.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I suspect the whole goal thing is a problem, setting some specific outcome you
expect to reach when you have no idea what obstacles you might face on the way
is setting yourself up for failure.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Indeed! Goal setting is one of the most complex tasks we do.

Doing it successfully, defined as a measurable outcome, requires that you have
a pretty accurate assessment of both the landscape, your abilities and the
path to achieve the goal - with some factor considered for deviation from the
charted path.

Depending on the scope of goal, the confidence interval on probability of
success probably decreases exponentially with respect to time.

~~~
danieldk
_Doing it successfully, defined as a measurable outcome, requires that you
have a pretty accurate assessment of both the landscape, your abilities and
the path to achieve the goal - with some factor considered for deviation from
the charted path._

I agree, but for longer term goals, an extremely large amount of luck
involved. Sometimes the right opportunities and persons just line up. I often
realize that I'd be in a completely different (and probably worse) place if my
22 and 26-year old self didn't encounter the right persons and opportunities.

My current career path was largely unplanned, but is better than I hoped for
or planned when I was in my early to mid-20ies.

------
ericliuche
Getting a 404, the top level site has the error

"This account has been suspended. Either the domain has been overused, or the
reseller ran out of resources."

Here's an archive link

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180505190115/http://www.veroni...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180505190115/http://www.veronikach.com/how-
i-fail/how-i-fail-ian-goodfellow-phd14-computer-science/)

~~~
consp
The 404 is caused by the provider expecting less get requests than GB's
bought. The author (sitting next to me) actually bought more traffic but the
company decided to just stop after a number of GET requests.

~~~
quasimodem
Oh I thought the 404 was the joke.

------
nl
_Probably the failure I consider the biggest is that I spent most of my PhD
trying to solve supervised learning for computer vision using unsupervised
feature learning methods, and was caught totally off guard when Alex, Ilya,
and Geoff won the ImageNet contest with purely supervised methods. I think
that in general wasting time writing papers that turn out to be dead ends is
the main way that I fail in my own eyes._

Wow, what an amazing story.

And worth pointing out that Goodfellows work on unsupervised feature learning
is clearly seen in his invention of GANs.

Edit, and:

 _I think it’s hard to extract value from negative results in machine learning
because it can be so hard to tell what caused the negative result. A negative
result might point to something very fundamental wrong with an idea, but it
might also just be the result of a very small software bug, the wrong idea of
the hyperparameter values to try out, too small of a model, etc._

So, so true. I read comments on HN on how important negative results are in ML
and I look at all the things I’ve tried and someone else made work, and all I
see is reporting negative results just discourages ppl from trying things.

This is a great interview.

------
ivan_ah
The Deep Learning Book by Goodfellow et al. is amazing. I found the writing to
be very down-to-earth and it explains concepts without too much jargon.
[http://www.deeplearningbook.org/](http://www.deeplearningbook.org/)

------
akhilcacharya
Good interview. It really surprised me to see a Stanford undergrad fail at
anything to be honest, much less admission to a similarly ranked school for a
specific PhD concentration they are known for.

I guess in this circumstance it actually was their loss.

~~~
laurieg
I did my undergrad at Cambridge University and I was surprised at how normal
people were. Of course, there were a couple of utter geniuses, but they were
the exception.

I think an undergrad friend of mine put it best: "Cambridge doesn't take the
top 1%, it takes a certain type of person from the top 10%"

~~~
icc97
How many of your friends had anything less than 3 A's (A* since 2010) at
A-level?

There's 424,000 students got into university [0] and Cambridge enrols 3,480
out of 17,000 applicants [1]. So they don't take even 1% and only the top 4%
of students even bother applying.

Edit: I suspect that 3,480 includes overseas students which makes the the
percentage of UK enrolments is even less.

Further [1]:

> In 2006, 5,228 students who were rejected went on to get 3 A levels or more
> at grade A

Perhaps being surrounded by the top 1% makes you feel very normal/average, but
there's certainly nothing normal about the Cambridge applicants and your
figure of 10% definitely isn't correct.

I got accepted at Imperial with predictions of ABC (+ no extra curricular) to
do Maths and Computer Science there's no way Oxford or Cambridge would have
looked at me without 4 A's + a significant amount of extra curricular
activities.

[0]:
[https://www.theguardian.com/education/live/2016/aug/18/a-lev...](https://www.theguardian.com/education/live/2016/aug/18/a-level-
results-day-2016-uk-students-get-their-grades-live)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Cambridge#Admiss...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Cambridge#Admissions)

~~~
laurieg
> So they don't take even 1% and only the top 4% of students even bother
> applying.

I went to the college with the highest number of state school students. After
participating in outreach events to get more people from a variety of
backgrounds to apply to Cambridge I honestly think the biggest bottleneck is
people from state schools not applying. They hear all the stories about
strange interviews or being surrounding by posh people they have nothing in
common with and just don't bother.

I was the only person in my (rather large) school year to get into Cambridge,
and only a couple of people applied. I was told all sorts of strange things
about the application process which turned out not to be true. I imagine it
must be far easier to apply if you go to a school where almost everyone does
and the staff are well versed in what to get ready.

------
yial
I feel the story of his professor who responded “why do you have an ‘a’ in my
class?” Is so incredibly relatable. It seems that sometimes; it’s far to easy
to do in some “luck”.

------
agentofoblivion
I think the most likely cause of his success is not related to his talent, but
his focus. When I was choosing a college, I wasn’t thinking about advisors. It
certainly never occurred to me to find the best guys in the field and try to
get in under them. It just sounds too far fetched to be a real possibility.
But it is a real possibility, of course, and the people that identify that and
go for it have a remarkable outcome of accumulating advantage. It’s like
compound interest. Go to the best school you can. Get under a top advisor in
grad school. Publish in top journals. Work for major companies. At this point
you’re surrounded by the best and have become the best. You have to know what
you want early, and then optimize your ass off. I was late to the party, but
the last couple years have been huge successes for me relative to previous
parts of my life, and that started with saying to myself “start by applying to
the very best and working down from there.”

------
colmvp
I can only assume his answer to question 11 is in response to the very public
discourse between him and Jürgen Schmidhuber.

~~~
amai
see also [https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/251460/were-
genera...](https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/251460/were-generative-
adversarial-networks-introduced-by-j%C3%BCrgen-schmidhuber)

------
degrews
I'm getting a 404 Not Found. Anyone else?

~~~
WordSkill
It has been down for a couple of hours.

I mentioned that in a comment here and, for reasons I don't understand, was
immediately downvoted. I deleted the comment in case there is some sort of HN
404 taboo I'm not aware of.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I mentioned that in a comment here and, for reasons I don't understand, was
> immediately downvoted. I deleted the comment in case there is some sort of
> HN 404 taboo I'm not aware of.

It's good to reflect on whether a comment that you posted that is downvoted
really is problematic in some way, and if you see a real problem with that
reflection to delete or edit it, but you shouldn't delete a comment when you
don't understand a downvote because, frankly, lots of good posts get stray
early downvotes, and that usually gets corrected over time.

