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- Hacker News
- Stepping away from the work to find inspiration, to allow the subconscious time to process everything, to present your conscious mind ideas is necessary. I try to pick a wild or almost outlandish idea from time to time, because if I only try what I think will work, then I'm not doing my job.by almarcher
- On a similar note, I think it's pretty hilarious (short sighted) of Anthropic to have open hiring positions, but ban the use of it's product for... frontier model research.
Where do you think these people are going to come from?
Rash decision, and will likely draw an anti-competitive lawsuit at some point.
by exabrial - Perhaps I've been deep in my own issues for too long, but it seems to me that the author is trying to say "don't trust the current evaluation suites too much"; scores only reflect a small part of the problem. What's interesting is discovering a new, stable evaluation metric, doing something new based on it, and having that new thing yield some unexpected intelligent resultsby sdfsefsdf
- This is certainly part of it! My point was that focusing on problems proposed by others is one very specific and pretty short-term mode of thinking. Good researchers improve benchmark scores. Great researchers think about what problem they're solving.by jxmorris12
- Tangential tidbit about etymology of the word Zen:
Zen is a Japanese word that comes from the Chinese “Chan”, which in turn comes from the Sanskrit word “Dhyana”, which roughly translates to focus/meditatiin.
That trajectory Sanskrit —> Chinese —> Japanese reflects the geographical trajectory of the spread of Buddhism out of India.
Same word in Vietnamese and Korean is “Thien” and “Seon” respectively.
by smath - > One really impressive thing about OpenAI is that most of the people running the company (on the technical side, at least) are under 35. Many of the important decisionmakers behind chatGPT are under 30.
During Gold Rush most 49ers were under 25, so there's still room for improvement!
[Continuing the analogy, you may find that many AI heroes are just those who happened to be closer to pools of TPUs and GPUs in the early days...]
by jjssmith - > [Continuing the analogy, you may find that many AI heroes are just those who happened to be closer to pools of TPUs and GPUs in the early days...]
And this in turn was much more likely if you were inexplicably obsessed with ML/AI at a point when it was widely considered unfashionable.
by kilpikaarna - I think this also stems from ML being more like biology or alchemy and less like math or programming (where you can get down to the first principles, abstractions are rock solid, and non-determinism is limited in scope).by Scene_Cast2
- excellent essay. what a great read.
like the author said, so much of 'success' or 'progress' (in research but of course also across disciplines) depends upon temperament. just straight up having a good attitude about things. the skills that make a good researcher could not be more transferable: patience, innate curiosity, and a resilience against failure.
that said, these skills are increasingly rare/at a premium given our culture of minimizing discomfort tolerance via hyperconvenience. people have a harder and harder time waiting or failing.
by mrmarket - It revolves around the sentiment of "go deeper" - but I think it is a double-edged sword. Sure, entropy, tensors and gradients are important - and yes, they are pretty much requirements.
But from what I see, it is the opposite - a lot (if not virtually all) progress in the last decade of deep learning was not because of a fundamental idea, but incremental, experimentally-verified practice. Even though I think there is good intuition for why ReLU is better than sigmoid (tl;dr: last layer is log(sigmoid) ~ ReLU, putting anything different inside kills the gradient), the original paper by Hinton himself was more or less "because it trains 3x faster".
Re-thinking fundamentals might help, but most "let's change the fundamentals" is rarely how it works. Even the most seminal papers, i.e. AlexNet and "Attention Is All You Need", are refinements of existing ideas, and show how they help.
Machine learning is an experimental science. Many mathematically cool ideas do not work. Many engineering ones do.
> I've tweeted before that one of the most important traits in a researcher is healthy paranoia. Be paranoid!
I have seen so many PhDs burned out to cinders; I don't think it is any more a good piece of advice than "depression is good for philosophers". Sure, be a relentless explorer.
> In short, holding on to ideas for too long can actually be counterproductive. Stay open-minded and refuse to let ego cloud your judgement.
Which I think is true.
by stared - > on days we find insight, we sit.
> on days we do not find insight, we sit.
This reminds me of Ed Witten (greatest living physicist?) in an interview by Brian Green. Green asked Witten what his day-to-day was like at the Institute for Advanced Study ...
Wittens' reply: "I sit at my desk".
- I have some coworkers that are similar in everything--education, work ethic, and intelligence--but some of the tick out ML ideas that work like clockwork, while others get hits rarely if ever. I cannot tell what makes it work for some and not others. Their ideas both sound equally good.
Sometimes a coworker will be an ML star for a year or two, but then suddenly run out of steam. It's brutal to watch.
I used to think most smart people had similar distributions of good ideas, and it was just that the hardest working tried out all 50 of their ideas to pick out the 2 good ones. But I've seen smart and hardworking people have a hit rate of 0.
by lostdog - Wow, this makes ML sound even more like voodoo than I thought. Can you give examples of what the nature of these ideas is?by 59nadir
- In spirituality it is believed that ideas and inspirations aren't our own. That our mind is like an LLM that gets prompted by higher beings. In research everyone has high param count minds, trained for many years by studying. But just like LLMs by themselves are useless at creating new original work, no matter the compute you have available, so the mind can not create anything new without "inspiration"by jack_pp
- It's not just ML research; that's just human nature.
We like to see hard-working, God-fearing people minting raw knowledge from Mount Olympus itself, whereby each shard of crystalline insight is carved meticulously by the Apprentice over the course of a productive and morally pure career.
The reality is it's some skill plus the occasional drive-by of an unknown force of nature, hitting you on the head with a shattered fragment of insight whose provenance you'll remain completely ignorant of. I'd say we just revert back to invoking the muses. It was a fine explanation.
- That's the nature of research. You try every idea that may be a good avenue and only a handful work out, if at all. That's why quantifying research credibility via publication and citation counts inherently lead to toxic work cultures. The best ideas must be given time to be discovered, not forced out and contorted to fit the requirements of a journal.by fyredge
- Around 2015, I found myself managing back end and machine learning engineers (not researchers) at the same time. Many of the back end engineers wanted to do more ML. Some of them did well when given a chance, but others wanted to revert to back end within a few months. At the same time, one of the ML leaders wanted to step away from ML and only do back end work to support ML.
As I studied these dynamics, something occurred to me... Different people need to see signs of success at different frequencies. Because of the nature of our product, measuring the performance of a new/updated model required the model to be live for at least a full calendar month. So, between initial work and final analysis, it was often a 2 month wait or more. For many back end tasks, you can build a quick prototype, run it to see if it works, and be on your way - the signals come all day long. The varying frequency needs of different people went a long way to determining which of them liked working on ML.
This is sort of a manager's version of feature engineering. ;-) The people on that team taught me a lot!
by rented_mule - I saw the same thing and always wondered how you can manage it effectively.
I had a team of data engineers that wanted to do more data science, and 2 data scientists that both wanted to be data engineers(one of them argued that everyone wants to be DS and so it was too crowded, saying that they could make more money as a DE).
I also remember a specific instance where, one day, my friend ranted about how he needs to step away from pure front end and that it's a dead end career (he was quite good at it too!) and then the next day at lunch a colleague started complaining about how front end developers get all the credit and he's considering moving.
by dalvasorsali - I feel that the Zen used in the West and the Zen in East Asia are quite different. I think the Western Zen is probably the one from the 1970s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It usually carries a sense of equanimity and beginner's mind. But in East Asia, Zen actually emphasizes aimlessness or non‑purposefulness.
The point where I really feel the difference is that Western Zen seems to be about how to train the self to become stronger, whereas actual Seon (Zen) in East Asia is about going with nature, letting go of the self, and allowing things to flow. In the actual practice of Seon, it's about doubting the self, letting go of attachments, and realizing that achievement, comparison, and the desire for control are all just fleeting. There's a famous phrase: 'Banghasak (放下著)' — let it all go.
If anything, I think ancient Roman Stoicism feels more like Zen than Western Zen does
So that's fascinating. When I saw this article, I was expecting it to be about whether we should give up the desire for success, but instead it took a completely different direction, which was surprising
by jdw64 - > The point where I really feel the difference is that Western Zen seems to be about how to train the self to become stronger, whereas actual Seon (Zen) in East Asia is about going with nature, letting go of the self, and allowing things to flow.
I think the Western sentiment, and why it is attached to strength, comes from a combination of the West's allure to Eastern martial arts and the reality of plateauing during training. Once you've been doing something for 2 years, you are no longer seeing the massive learning gains you saw as a true novice. However in that journey toward "mastery" (a term I hate) you have to keep a positive outlook that the practice takes time.
I now use this phrase from my instructor: "Practice makes permanent". There's no such thing as "perfect practice", but whatever you practice is what will stick.
by tsumnia - They’re both wrong though in reality. Zen comes from the chinese word chan, which comes from the pali word jhana, meaning meditative absorption (and it doesn’t just mean “meditation” in a general sense, it’s really referring to the rupajhanas). Real Buddhadharma has nothing to do with going along with nature or nonduality. What you’re describing sounds like taoism.
- Zen I believe is about meditation where thoughts quiet down and you experience the moment. When you do, it means your brain gets rest because it is not "chasing thoughts". And that means when you stop the mediation you brain is well-rested and can work better because it can focus much better, the runaway thoughts are not leading it astray continually. That means your brain, and you, can accomplish more.
It is probably true that many Western zenists have figured this out and use meditation for that purpose. Think about star-wars, the "force" is about being able ro lift a rocket-sdhip with the power of your concentration. That's the myth.
Whereas I believe when you achieve a zen-like state of mind it becomes less important to you whether you can lift the rocket-ship or not. In the Eastern tradition Zen is it own goal.
Is this something like what you meant?
by galaxyLogic - When I read the title I thought it was about running machine learning algorithms on AMD/Zen processorsby ffsm8
- > But in East Asia, Zen actually emphasizes aimlessness or non‑purposefulness.
I cannot recommend the Idler magazine strongly enough. It's outstanding material towards a healthy way of aimless being.
- I don't think the intent of Robert Pirsig's work was to outline a git gud strategy cloaked in chillness. The book is heavily inspired by Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery which is explicitly not about trying to get good at something.
Both books highlight the value of dissolving conscious aim in favor of experience something. Pirsig's point isn't, you gotta act like a noob and then you can be good at maintaining motorcycles. His point was that there is a joy in losing yourself in these things that have to be done. If you are rushing to get it done or focusing too much on the end state, you will lose the joy and this thing will become a chore.
He does make the connection that years of doing things this way will lend you a kind of skill. And he connects the ideas to the Western concept of gumption which is a kind of motivation or persistence but again the book's core is not, lose yourself and you will get good. It's more like that a Western obsession with accomplishment can rob you of the joy that can come from engaging with activities for their own sake and not pushing through them just to get them done.
- "To be done with doing", from Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea novels, always struck me as such a powerful phrase. An entire state of mind boiled down to 5 words. But then again I remember her saying eastern philosophy greatly influenced her writing, if I'm not mistakenby isoprophlex
- Similarly, the Western idea of Stoicism seems to focus mostly on controlling or even suppressing your emotions (at least on surface level), while the Stoicism you rightly call "Roman" (thanks for that, btw) is much more holistic and more of an ethical framework.by peepee1982