On form and formlessness
A speech for a philosophy meetup, translated from Danish by Claude. The Danish original is below.
Late & Variable
Learning to write programs that learn to write programs
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The price of being easy to vary
We generate noisy positions of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars over 10 years with a real N-body integrator. Two models try to explain the data: Newton’s law of gravity (six coupled parameters) and a Fourier sum-of-sines regression (168 independent parameters). Both fit the data about equally well; the Bayesian held-out predictive log-likelihood prefers physics by 16 nats. That margin has nothing…
No shortcuts to knowledge
Will scaling deep learning produce human-level generality, or do we need a new approach? You may have read the exchange between Scott Alexander and Gary Marcus, and felt that there are some good arguments on both sides, some bad ones, but few arguments that go beyond analogy and handwaving - arguments that would take what we know about deep learning and intelligence, and look at what that…