isaac io schankler
My semi-spicy take is that computer science depends on analogy, metaphor, and subtext just as much as the humanities or the arts. But because so many people in tech are willfully oblivious to this, they're especially prone to the kinds of cognitive distortions that people in the humanities and the arts are trained to recognize and understand.
What makes a neural network "neural"? What assumptions does that analogy carry? What does that encourage us to see? What does that prevent us from seeing?
luka prince lucija
@io the interesting question is why are a majority of people in tech oblivious or even willfully oblivious to these cognitive distortions
nnirror
@io My response obviously does not speak to the last three questions in your post. Those questions by themselves could be a PhD thesis. I think the questions you're asking are very interesting. I just don't think it's that unreasonable to label this sort of system "neural". Wouldn't it be more absurd if the inventors decided not to name it after a brain, distortion and all?
nnirror
Googles "how does a neural network resemble a brain"
From MIT: (https://news.mit.edu/2017/explained-neural-networks-deep-learning-0414)
"Modeled loosely on the human brain, a neural net consists of thousands or even millions of simple processing nodes that are densely interconnected. Most of today’s neural nets are organized into layers of nodes, and they’re “feed-forward,” meaning that data moves through them in only one direction."
Obviously it's not a perfect analogy. But, I think, given that this type of system needed a name that was a few words maximum, it seems like not that unreasonable? This sort of "distortion" is just par for the course when talking about labeling things, no?
Maybe I'm wrong, not trying to be a tech-bro-reply-guy, just genuinely curious
Sexy Moon
Cleopatra
@Moon @io
There used to be a whole trend of professional opinion-havers taking those new terms (such as 'neural network' or 'selflearning') very seriously and spinning a whole sloppy argument out of their misunderstandings.
Haven't seen that in a while, thankfully. But it did leave me with a kneejerk 'please only comment on tech if you can code' reaction
clacke
Josh Wells
@io
Jargon and milestones throughout CS comes from the arts.
First programmer? Daughter of the poet Byron.
Robots? From a Czech play in the 1920s.
Cyber[insert concept]? Famous science fiction novel.
And so on … obliviousness to these cultural debts is what makes the torment nexus possible
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