

 The "Outside the Box" Box - prakash
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/outside-the-box.html

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nazgulnarsil
you're always in a box. being aware of the box can help you tremendously. it's
when you think that you've left the box that's dangerous, because you're still
in the box, but now you don't know it.

~~~
orib
You're always in a box, but it's not necessarily a cubic box, and it usually
has more odd nooks and crannies than you'd expect. Most people restrict
themselves to a certain well-explored subset of your problem space. The trick
is to explore the rest of it.

And this analogy is overextended and cliché. Let's move on and find better
analogies.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
of course exploring the box from the inside can never tell us if the box is
bright purple and unusually shaped, because there is no outside to stand in.
if aliens ever come along, they might tell us things that are along the lines
of "well of course your box is purple how could you not see that?" and of
course we'll be able to tell them that their box is lime green.

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ChaitanyaSai
People should stop associating neural networks with backpropagation networks.
That is like saying all of AI is based on simplistic rule-based systems. I
guess it is mostly people with only casual knowledge of both fields who make
suggestions of that sort. Also, there is no reason to get outside the box.
Most research and VC money tends to concentrate in one corner of the box. Go
forth, be brave, and explore the box first!

~~~
Eliezer
I don't object to "backpropagation" aka gradient descent, which is a bit of
simple calculus-based optimization. What I object to is the widespread public
perception that saying "neural networks" is a brilliant new paradigm-
overthrowing Key to General Intelligence, after over three damn decades.

Biologically inspired stuff? I applaud it to the extent that it works. It's
not a magic key to anything, and it doesn't avert the challenge of
understanding.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
it also seems the surest path to producing an intelligence that acts as if it
were a product of natural selection, i.e. one that is selfish, xenophobic,
etc. (other sexual competition based heuristics).

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henning
Considering that the backpropagation and variants thereof gained significant
commercial/industrial adoption while "monkey and banana" type problem solving
systems mostly failed, I think his criticism of artificial neural networks is
quite unwarranted.

The entire change has been that people _aren't_ trying to go for 'general
intelligence'. They approach it purely as a statistics problem. We have some
data, what can we do with the data, how accurately can we do that?

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pavelludiq
You know, our box is made of billions of tiny vibrating geometric figures. The
box is weirder than we thought.

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josefresco
not this guy again

/not a fan of this author

~~~
Eliezer
Why can't everyone love me? Why, why, why?

