There's a very literal sense in which NN parameters are just a db. As in, it's fairly trivial to get copyrighted verbatim output from a trained NN (eg., quake source code from git co-pilot, etc.).
"Connectionists" always want to reduce everything to formulae with no natural semantics and then equivocate this with science. Science isnt mathematics. Mathematics is just a short hand for a description of the world made true by the semantics of that description.
E=mc^2 isnt true because it's a polynomial, and it doesnt mean a polynomial, and it doesnt have "polynomial properties" because it isnt about mathematics. It's about the world.
E stands for energy, m for mass, and c for a geometric constant of spacetime. If they were to stand for other properties of the world, in general, the formulae would be false.
I find this "connectionist supernaturalism" about mathematics deeply irritating, it has all the hubris and numerology of religions but wandering around in a stolen lab coat. Hence the tone.
What can one say or feel in the face of the overtaking of science by pseudoscience? It seems plausible to say now, today, more pseudoscientific papers are written than scientific ones. A generation of researchers are doing little more than analysing ink-blot patterns and calling them "models".
The insistence, without explanation, that this is a reasonable activity pushes one past tolerance on these matters. It's exasperating... from psychometrics to AI, the whole world of intellectual life has been taken over by a pseudoscientific analysis of non-experimental post-hoc datasets.
"Connectionists" always want to reduce everything to formulae with no natural semantics and then equivocate this with science. Science isnt mathematics. Mathematics is just a short hand for a description of the world made true by the semantics of that description.
E=mc^2 isnt true because it's a polynomial, and it doesnt mean a polynomial, and it doesnt have "polynomial properties" because it isnt about mathematics. It's about the world.
E stands for energy, m for mass, and c for a geometric constant of spacetime. If they were to stand for other properties of the world, in general, the formulae would be false.
I find this "connectionist supernaturalism" about mathematics deeply irritating, it has all the hubris and numerology of religions but wandering around in a stolen lab coat. Hence the tone.
What can one say or feel in the face of the overtaking of science by pseudoscience? It seems plausible to say now, today, more pseudoscientific papers are written than scientific ones. A generation of researchers are doing little more than analysing ink-blot patterns and calling them "models".
The insistence, without explanation, that this is a reasonable activity pushes one past tolerance on these matters. It's exasperating... from psychometrics to AI, the whole world of intellectual life has been taken over by a pseudoscientific analysis of non-experimental post-hoc datasets.