Neuroscientists don't understand cognition, rather they understand how parts of the biological brain function. These are subjects that only partially overlap.
Is there any siloed field that can claim an understanding of general intelligence? I highly doubt it. It's an interdisciplinary problem where most of its practitioners are without an academic home.
Do deep learning practitioners understand general cognition? I doubt it. They may partially understand their connectionist architectures but these are just a sliver of capabilities of what's available to a general intelligence.
Do cognitive psychologists understand general intelligence? They are indeed familiar with human behavior but that familiarity does not imply an understanding of how this behavior becomes emergent. Perhaps they are relevant for creating good Turing tests.
Top of my head, the most promising fields to understand general intelligence can be found in 'artificial life' and 'computational linguistics'. Also, there's a lot of new math that can serve as formal scaffolding into this emergent area of inquiry.
There's a lot of promising stuff emerging and they don't look anything like the previous more established approaches on understanding human cognition. It's time to embrace what's new and throwing away a ton of excess baggage.
Unfortunately, too many fields have invested too much in honing their craft on antiquated technologies. Ignore these people. It's wise to ignore people who invested in Yahoo when Google was still in its infancy. Be prepared to pick the winners and not those who embrace legacy.
History shows that those who defect early from legacy approaches are the ones to reap the biggest upside.
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What I find very weird is that people are surprised with the notion that someone taught himself a skill. As if a teacher was absolutely necessary to learn anything. As if you can't learn anything by reading and experimenting by yourself.
"Wow, he's self-taught, he must be extremely gifted!" Are people, in general, incapable of learning anything without a teacher?
But to be perfectly fair, I'm in awe with kids who self teach themselves how to play music. I don't think I have the passion to do that! So I suspect this self-taught thing has everything to do with passion and talent.
I'm coming to the realization that the GOP isn't a conservative party but rather an incoherent group of disenfranchised parties. Any group that has trouble pushing its agenda sees an opening by joining the GOP. It's also a business model to milk the disenfranchised.
Trump perhaps saw this so he reached out to any and every fringe group for their support. Any group, no matter how abhorrent their views are welcome in the GOP. But how do they handle conflicts between parties in the group?
They actually don't need to be because incoherence is the mode of operation. Trump has consistently been logically inconsistent. It is the same for parties within the GOP. They band together not because of commonality but rather because of shared disenfranchisement.
Sometimes you just never know who reads your blogs/tweets. One of the most innovative developers I followed was James Strachan @jstrachan . I was in complete surprise when the one time we met that he said he read my blog that was about software engineering.
In my former life, I used to really enjoy writing about software development. Things like extreme programming, agile development, refactoring etc. So I actually know something about this stuff and am quite opinionated about them. Of course, it's different when stuff is new.
The commonality however with software development and artificial intelligence is that both areas deal with extreme complexity. The agile stuff that was invented two decades ago was motivated by the need to control the complexity.
I lived in Manhattan in the last half of the 1990s and left in 2001 before the twin towers fell. So downtown NYC seems early strange for me without seeing the towers. But where I hear the slogans of 911, "Never Forget" I am unable to understand what that even means.
Remembering history should mean that you don't repeat the mistakes of the past. But has the nation learned its mistakes? Did we go into war with false pretenses? Did we overextend our presence in Afghanistan?
What happened after 911 was a cascade of more mistakes compounded one after another. In my opinion, the swift victory against the Taliban via the CIA was one of the few things done right. But it was downhill since then.
Science is being eaten up by deep learning. A fact that nobody can ignore.
But what's unfortunate is that nobody understands deep learning well enough to set up the experiments and interpretations correctly! It's damn good at making predictions but damn terrible at explaining anything!!
The uncertainty principle of deep learning is that the more generalized one's network, the least likely it's interpretable! medium.com/intuitionmachi…