They are NOT as unaware of things as we are. That’s like someone seeing a software developer googling stuff and saying “see, they don’t know much more than me”.
An expert refreshing their knowledge on Google is not the same as a layman learning it for the first time. At all.
> in no universe is that a legitimate ML interview question
Why not? This seems like the ML equivalent of FizzBuzz. If you don't know how matrix multiplication works well enough to implement it, I would argue that you don't know what you're doing at all.
I think the time estimates depend heavily on the field. A mathematician recently told him that it would take him 1-2 weeks (with nothing else to do in that time) to digest a paper outside his main area.
Makes me wonder: should it, though? The author of the paper presumably had gone through the trouble of understanding everything described in the paper, built intuition and a mental model. Instead of putting more effort in writing the latter down, it appears to me that authors are inclined to throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water: they spend more time writing out the dense proof rather than an exposition.
I'm not saying proof isn't important or to exclude it. But given that more people understand plain and intuitive explanation (at the expense of accuracy, maybe), their hard work reaches broader audience that way. Isn't that what authors want, instead of "dog whistling"? Do proofs alone carry intuition? I don't think so.
It takes many dozens of hours, sometimes hundreds, to write a paper (just the writing not the technical work). People will spend a long time trying to improve the expositions. I have seen papers where co-authors have fought for weeks about the accuracy of a single sentence. I have seen papers where there were over twenty draft-revision cycles.
But there are natural limits. Usually, after working for years on a problem, you become so close to it that describing to a general technical audience is very difficult. Often, after you publish the work, someone else will do the difficult work of understanding your paper, and then write a more readable exposition as part of a review paper or book.
That makes sense. The proof-heavy part is the third pass and part the author says takes the longest (4-5 hours for a beginner). With math papers it's essentially all proof!
This was also a problem a decade ago. I asked a professor for research opportunities and ended up segmenting a bunch of images. That was it. No credit for that work, either (or pay).
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