
Yann LeCun on a MIT Tech Review article that is all hype - bmease
https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10152695097142143
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pvsnp
This is a great response and I wish more scientists held publications
accountable to their reporting. MIT Tech Review, Popular Science and Mechanics
are read by a lot of people -- both literate in the your discipline and not,
it's worthwhile to point the more nuanced view than what a 1000 word magazine
article can point out. I've personally found reporting by ArsTechnica on
recent security issues a good model. Wired occasionally comes through but has
similar problems like this. Nautilus has its own biases but in general is
good. I don't think bad reporting in these cases is necessarily out of malice
but the lack of background on reporter's side on your field. And, perhaps
sheer laziness. Remember when you procrastinated on writing that long overdue
paper, I'd imagine reporters aren't immune to that too ;)

Convolutional Neural Nets are getting to a hype-level that I find pretty
scary. We don't want another AI winter because people expect way too much too
early without understanding the domain, only to lead to receeded interest in
the field. Honest evaluation and crediting is invaluable to ensuring that.

Also --> What if there were a "rapgenius" for paper/article reviews where
these comments from trusted sources can be curated and commented on? Not sure
about viability, etc.. but could be interesting.

~~~
FanaHOVA
Genius is currently building a tool to achieve exactly this. It's in beta as
we speak, just put genius.com/ before any article URL to see an annotated
version of it. For eaxmple, here's an annotated version of a "Eloquent
Javascript" chapter [1]. If you want beta access get an account and shoot me a
message there [2].

We* have been annotating tech articles/papers for a while though, they were
stored in a sub-sub-channel of Rap Genius though and didn't get as much
exposure. The best example is teh analysis of NewsWeek's story "The Face
Behind Bitcoin" [3].

[1]
[http://genius.com/eloquentjavascript.net/05_higher_order.htm...](http://genius.com/eloquentjavascript.net/05_higher_order.html)

[2] [http://genius.com/fanahova](http://genius.com/fanahova)

[3] [http://genius.com/Leah-mcgrath-goodman-the-face-behind-
bitco...](http://genius.com/Leah-mcgrath-goodman-the-face-behind-bitcoin-
annotated/)

*I don't work at Genius, but I've been an editor/mod/intern for the past 2-3 years working on various things including Tech Genius.

~~~
acjohnson55
That's very cool. If people make a habit of using this, this could be really
handy for annotating programming tutorials. Just modified the HN bookmarklet
to make a new bookmarklet to reload the current page in Genius:

[http://acjay.github.io/genius_bookmarklet.html](http://acjay.github.io/genius_bookmarklet.html)

~~~
nightpool
Haha great minds think alike! We've got a bookmarklet already:
[http://genius.com/bookmarklet](http://genius.com/bookmarklet) (you can only
see the page if you're a beta tester) and a chrome extension coming that will
tell you when you browse to a page that's already been annotated and let you
switch to the annotated version. It's pretty cool stuff!

------
_delirium
MIT Tech Review sort of has a reputation for doing this.

~~~
Animats
Yes, they do. It should be embarrassing for MIT. They're not run by MIT.
They're a startup in San Francisco which somehow acquired the rights to MIT's
old in-house magazine. Their self-description: "an innovative, digitally
oriented global media company whose reach is rapidly expanding."

Their articles about "nanotechnology" (they mean surface chemistry) are even
worse.

~~~
_delirium
They have gotten more dissociated from MIT in the past decade, but I believe
MIT still owns the company that currently publishes it, so ultimately has some
kind of control (or could in principle have control, if they cared to exercise
it). I think overall they probably aren't unhappy with it, since MIT has long
had quite a bit of tolerance (or even love) for the scientific hype machine,
and the backlash tends to be infrequent and almost exclusively among
academics, while the general public eats it up.

I don't really single out MIT; plenty of universities' PR offices, if given
the chance, would publish a magazine similar or worse. Though perhaps with
their large reach and stacks of cash, MIT could afford to be more careful than
most, and set a better example.

~~~
analog31
_I don 't really single out MIT; plenty of universities' PR offices, if given
the chance, would publish a magazine similar or worse._

 _cough_ Harvard Business Review _cough_

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gohrt
More interesting than a debunking of yet another hype linkbait article from
MIT Tech Review, is that someone posted on Facebook a citation of his own
22-year old prior art.

Something about the Facebook backdrop makes that academic smackdown all the
more special.

~~~
lstamour
FYI, he works for Facebook. It'd be weird if he posted it to Google+ ;-)

~~~
dumitrue
Not really -- he's been an active Google+ poster even before he joined FB
([https://plus.google.com/+YannLeCunPhD/posts](https://plus.google.com/+YannLeCunPhD/posts))

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shon
Shameless tangential plug: Nicolas Vasilache from The Facebook AI Research
group (Yann LeCun's team) is speaking next month at
[http://MLconf.com](http://MLconf.com) in NYC. We will be livestreaming the
event for free. Watch @mlconf on 3/27 for the livestream link. If you would
like to attend in person use discount code MLML for a discount.

*FULL DISCLOSURE: This is my event

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seesomesense
" MIT Tech Review, Popular Science and Mechanics are read by a lot of people"

And the audience for all of them tends to want form over substance. That is
why the quality in those magazines is so abyssmal.

