
Applied Machine Learning Is a Meritocracy - theBashShell
https://machinelearningmastery.com/applied-machine-learning-is-a-meritocracy/
======
klyrs
Once upon a time, I had an employer who was looking for a machine learning
expert. I mean, we had a brilliant mathematician who was breaking serious
ground in the field, but we needed an _expert_ , apparently. We were having
trouble drawing experts out of Silicon Valley, and our resident genius said
"Hey, I satisfy all of the requirements for this job you've posted, and I'm
already doing the work. Can you promote me from this crap software-dev role
you stuck me in?" and the company's response was "No, it clearly states in the
posting that you'd need a PhD in machine learning." We promptly lost our
genius. If only TPTB knew that it was a meritocracy!

In short: article's claims sound fishy; your lived experience may vary.

~~~
josephg
I wonder how normal stories like this are. Was this just one bad manager in
one company, which you remember because of how surprising it was? If so, maybe
the core claim that software is a meritocracy holds.

Or are stories like this common and everywhere?

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Datenstrom
Not a genius but had something similar happen. Was literally doing the work
already and successfully. My coworkers and boss all vouched for me but the
company had a policy. There are probably other companies where a similar
policy that effects single person that works there.

~~~
sct202
So many times policy goes out the door if a Director or VP wants a specific
person for whatever reason.

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jp8585
As a machine learning freelancer, I can definitely understand the main
argument of this article. When I started applying for contracts I always felt
overwhelmed by the competition with math PhDs and other developers with
brighter pedigrees. After closing my eyes to the competition, I started
offering high quality communication, clear project specifications and complete
honesty in terms of project feasibility, just as I would for any regular
software project. After over 30 successful projects, I can't say I developed
an Ai that can beat Starcraft, but I definitely brought a lot of value to all
my clients. If you are passionate about machine learning and really like the
grind, just go for it. Work finds a way

~~~
tomrod
I'm one of those PhD types, and I would prefer to work with someone that has
your skillset over someone who promises the moon and is solely excited about
methodology. Based on your focus, I expect the projects you propose will have
a measurable impact to the bottom line. And that is what builds reputation.

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olliej
This is a repetition of “tech is a meritocracy” that ignores all of the
previous reasons that demonstrate why it isn’t.

There’s the nepotism portion (you need to get an interview first, before
demonstrating merit, and nepotism bypasses a lot of that, and has the “they’re
really good, just haven’t done much publicly/real world yet” backing).

Ignores that merit itself is not objective - just doing X doesn’t give an
objective measure for how much merit X should get, and there’s a long history
of evidence for non-merit/skill based bias in how much merit is “earned”.

Etc, etc

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thatfrenchguy
"Like the field of software development, the application of machine learning
is a meritocracy. A meritocracy is a structure under which participants are
valued based on their contributions or demonstrated achievement (merit)."

So far we've figured out that software development clearly isn't a
meritocracy.

~~~
dijit
I think people aren't super clear on what they expect from meritocracy, this
leads to statements like yours.

Speaking personally, I grew up in an incredibly deprived part of my nation, I
have little in the way of formal education and I definitely do not have
connections. However I have achieved incredible social mobility due to
technology. Why? because there is _some_ level of meritocracy going on even if
it's not entirely widespread through every single hiring manager or company
and I have a deep unyielding passion for this field that drives me to
continually educate myself which despite my poor connections and education is
looked at favourably.

I still think of meritocracy as a noble goal, and I feel that merit is
certainly definable if that's the main issue (IE; points based on time spent
contributing to open source and things like invitations to speaking
engagements and the like).

I genuinely do not buy the argument that having "merit" in other areas infers
that you have license to be a toxic asshole; because at (least in my mind)
part of merit is being able to work with others. You don't have "merit" if you
can't communicate effectively.

In fact, there is an old saying about that: "Lots of MIPS but no I/O" which
would make for a shitty CPU. Why would it make for a non-shitty developer?

~~~
meheleventyone
I think meritocracy is the wrong phrasing for all of that though. Basically it
boils down to there being slightly different standards around formal education
than might be expected in some other career paths. I also think a lot of that
is a perceived difference in standards and I've not seen any actual evidence
that software engineering as a career field is genuinely more accessible to
people without formal qualifications. Even though I believe that to be the
case as well.

There of course are still standards and lots of disagreement on whether they
are merit based (e.g. whiteboarding interviews) and evidence that women and
other minorities are systematically excluded in the whole, which is clearly
not merit based.

Further whilst I think many of us could define what merit means for any
particular job or find consensus in a group making that decision. I still
expect there would be large differences between definitions and methods of
selection.

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touringmachine
I think the author is trying to lend support to people who feel excluded from
the field due to a lack of credentials - great! You can, in fact, materially
contribute and succeed without a PhD. Machine learning is a pretty big tent.

Claiming that a profession is meritocratic, though, strikes me as a harmful
framing. From my vantage I don't see a) what an objective notion of merit
would be and b) that all people who have the capability to contribute is
strictly equal to the number of good jobs that are currently available.

I can definitely see when someone is already doing something useful well, but
not if they might do that later or if the notion of useful will change.

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jshowa3
Merit is relative. For example, it shows a lot of merit that you successfully
completed a PhD program in machine learning. However, for some reason, there
seems to be this constant need to discount people with academic qualifications
when most of what machine learning is comes directly from there. For example,
just because you write cool, useful applications in machine learning, doesn't
mean you are breaking ground in the field. It means you are using other
peoples knowledge effectively and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that
and his highly necessary. But don't confuse it with making contributions to
the theory itself.

~~~
xamuel
Great point. If someone without credentials were truly doing ground-breaking
stuff in the field, then getting a PhD should practically be a formality--
schools should be banging the door down trying to recruit that person just for
the status of having him or her (with full tuition waiver plus generous
stipend being the bare starting ground).

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ranchpredictor
I think what he meant by meritocracy is that the merits from doing projects
hands on and having solid results, as opposed to the “scholastic” meritocracy
which I had initially assumed he meant (and which may be confusing other
readers too).

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make3
normal people call this an "empirical discipline"

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RobLach
_meritocracy is a structure under which participants are valued based on their
contributions or demonstrated achievement (merit)._

Of course what is considered meritorious or an achievement is almost entirely
dependent on the stakeholders in power above you and rarely has any purely
objective measure, and any objective measures are almost always project
dependent, making it all a highly political game to figure out what's
important to whatever system is judging you.

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fogetti
I would add that even some of the academic papers focus on the applied
perspective of machine learning. Such examples can be found in papers issued
by security research institutes/companies. And now that we have cloud
computing to replicate/validate or even extend those research papers is really
just the matter of determination even if the subject of the paper needs a
whole cluster of distributed resources.

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hbogert
Says someone with a PhD. The advice in the text of just going into the field
of ML blazing, is just weird. Every field is difficult, and you always have to
see the light at the end of the tunnel. Personally I like to get the basics
first, so yeah, I would read that required math first.

However, this just boils down to people's preference, are you a bottom up
learner, or not. Both ways have yielded success for many different people. So
what is the text actually saying?

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bitL
Almost nobody will talk to you about ML positions unless you have at least MS
in ML or have a large portfolio of recent SOTA implementations under your
hood. More often a PhD in ML is a requirement for entry-level ML jobs with
ridiculously low salaries (seeking enthusiastic doctorate holders etc.).
Meritocracy is an illusion unless you do your own company and start competing
in hottest areas - there your exit might be ridiculously big.

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plaidfuji
The author clearly abides by the old adage, “Tell them what you are going to
tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.”

~~~
nixpulvis
It's like a hamburger you see.

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taeric
No it isn't. Applied machine learning is an arms race of who has the data.

~~~
robotresearcher
There's a more interesting research race to figure out how to learn well with
less data.

~~~
taeric
Is there, though? Sure it would be great, but this feels more like the modern
day alchemy.

~~~
robotresearcher
Yes there is an active literature on this. The extreme is called ‘one-shot
learning’, which means what you’d guess.

~~~
taeric
I know it is a thing. My question is if there is actual money/progress being
made there. Hence my comparing it to alchemy. A widespread practice that
generally did not produce any results in what they were attempting.

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hnuser355
My question is if people are so good at math why are they doing machine
learning, especially in practice?

Some very good people investigating it theoretically. But the best young math
professors that I’m personally friends with actually do have something of the
“elitist math attitude” and will tell me things like they think the ML field
belongs in the 1600s while they successfully work in their obscure area of
algebra applied to mathematical physics or something

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looneysquash
I thought meritocracy was a discredited concept.

~~~
josephg
I’m always confused by this. Isn’t merit exactly what we want to be hiring
for? I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want people who are the best at
getting the job done. Or in opensource, I don’t understand why you would want
to care about any attribute of a contributor other than the quality of their
contributions. Anything else seems like discrimination.

And I acknowledge that we often don’t do a good job of this; but surely that
doesn’t mean we want to move away from merit based decisions.

~~~
MyHypatia
My reading of the parent comment is that it is acknowledging that few
decisions are purely merit based. People making hiring decisions have
incomplete information and often rely on nebulous impressions and feelings of
the candidate. People also tend to like and feel more comfortable with other
people who "get" them, and have similar backgrounds/characteristics. I do not
think the comment is advocating against hiring the best nor advocating for
making less merit based decisions.

~~~
josephg
Yeah; I guess there are two questions:

1\. How meritocratic are the decisions we make today?

2\. Do we want more meritocracy, or less?

I think there's specific ways we fail to make meritocratic decisions
(credentialism, "culture fit", big company politics). But in my experience
these things are the exception, not the rule. We don't start by trying to
figure out if someone is a good culture fit, then assess their technical
skills afterwards. We assess technical skills, then if we like what we see we
check culture fit.

I don't know about the GGP post, but I've certainly talked to people who claim
to reject (2) - saying that the whole idea of meritocracy is flawed. But I'm
always confused by that argument. Would you accept a rubbish pull request in a
personal project? Would you hire someone with no technical skills into a
technical role in your company? If the answer is no, then you're on team
meritocracy-is-good.

~~~
meheleventyone
You might find this interesting from the author that coined the term
meritocracy. In particular addressing point 2.

[https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment)

"It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is
the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind
harden into a new social class without room in it for others."

I think you can see inklings of this in support for Trump, Brexit and distrust
of elites the term for the new 'meritorious' social class.

Further merit in a job should extend well beyond technical skills.

~~~
josephg
Wow, ok, so it looks like there's a 3rd thing we're discussing: Does
meritocracy mean "status based on qualifications" or does meritocracy mean
"status based on relevant ability".

Reading that article it looks like the term 'meritocracy' was coined to refer
to the former, but we didn't have a word for the latter and so the word has
been co-opted and muddied. "Meritocracy is a discredited concept" could thus
mean any combination of these statements:

1\. We don't / can't currently hire based on collage degrees

2\. We don't / can't currently hire based on relevant ability

3\. We shouldn't try to hire based on collage degrees

4\. We shouldn't try to hire based on relevant ability

People in this extended comment thread seem to be arguing assuming that these
stances are interchangeable, or arguing assuming that there is consensus about
which of these points we're arguing and _they know what it is_.

Personally, I believe that we should try our best to hire based on relevant
ability. Because I want the most qualified people as coworkers and creators of
the products and services I consume. I welcome debate of the idea, but arguing
about meanings badly is pointless.

Slatestarcodex wrote a great piece about this whole thing a few years ago. I
highly recommend having a read:
[https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/24/targeting-
meritocracy/](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/24/targeting-meritocracy/)

> The intuition behind meritocracy is this: if your life depends on a
> difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced
> medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely
> scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with
> respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for
> being a meritocrat everywhere else.

~~~
meheleventyone
It's muddied because we have to define merit.

Take for example your quote from Slatestarcodex. That's purely about
qualifications. Surgeon A might be an alcoholic and Surgeon B might have an
incredible success rate. Are their qualifications relevant then?

Anyway the point of the article and book isn't about merit as just
qualifications but about the detrimental impact of rewarding only merit on the
stratification of society. Changing the criteria for merit just alters the
stratification.

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mharrison
Have seen jobs where PhD is "required". (Many data scientists tend to push
this view as they feel it protects them and gives them elevated status).

Am also in the middle of training a group of future data scientists. The
company is having issues hiring, and believe it is easier to train SME's in
data science than the reverse.

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norswap
Mmkay. It's an applause light. What are we even suppose to think/say?

[https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/dLbkrPu5STNCBLRjr/applaus...](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/dLbkrPu5STNCBLRjr/applause-
lights)

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dangero
Access to datasets makes machine learning not a meritocracy. Saw a recent talk
at an insuretech conference where the speaker lamented that China will leap
ahead in AI research since they gather more data about users than anyone else.
From that perspective, things like GDPR hinder EU researchers.

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usgroup
Meritocracy all the things!

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nixpulvis
In this post I learned...

