5 ms·

An appropriate quote: "If you can't intelligently argue for both sides of an issue, you don't understand the issue well enough to argue for either." There are

An appropriate quote: "If you can't intelligently argue for both sides of an issue, you don't understand the issue well enough to argue for either." There are many people for whom the declarative paradigm is a huge plus. I would say there are at least 2 major approaches in running fast neural networks: 1. Figure out the common big components and make fast versions of those. 2. Figure out the common small components and how to make those run fast together. Different libraries have different strengths and weaknesses that match the abstraction level that they work at. For example, Caffe is the canonical example of approach 1, which makes writing new kinds of layers much harder than with other libraries, but makes connecting those layers quite easy as well as enabling new techniques that work layer-wise (such as new kinds of initialization). Approach 2 (TensorFlow's approach) introduces a lot of complexity, but it allows for different kinds of research. For example, because how you combine the low-level operations is decoupled from how those things are optimized together, you can more easily create efficient versions of new layers without resorting to native code.

katastic 9y ago
>An appropriate quote: "If you can't intelligently argue for both sides of an issue, you don't understand the issue well enough to argue for either." Cannibalism rules!
- libeclipse 9y ago
  Lmao not sure why this was down-voted. Utterly destroyed your quotation, and gave me a giggle.
  - foobarchu 9y ago
    It didn't "utterly destroy" the quotation. It's pretty easy to argue the virtues of cannibalism, it's just that for modern day society they do not trump the downsides. For example, cannibalism has successfully prevented death by starvation (e.g. the Donner Party), and it reduces the need for disposing of the dead. It's an application of reduce-reuse-recycle. Some species of other animals practice it as part of their normal lives (praying mantis as part of mating, lions as a social mechanic). The very obvious counterpoints are that it's completely counter to modern cultural morality and it's been shown to increase likelihood of transferring brain parasites in humans. The fact that you didn't even approach the other side and immediately concluded that he "destroyed the quotation" kinda shows that you aren't making the slightest effort to understand opposing viewpoints.
    - gfodor 9y ago
      Not to mention that implied in the quotation is being able to argue both sides of a contentious issue is important to being able to make a case strongly for the one you agree with. Totally irrelevant for generally settled questions like cannabalism, so the "utter destruction" was anything but.
    - dvt 9y ago
      Small correction: not brain parasites, but specifically prions (misfolded protein that fascinatingly self-replicate). Kuru[1] (closely related to Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and Alzheimer's) was extensively studied last century in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea (which were practicing cannibalism as a funerary rite), culminating in the awarding of the 1997 Nobel Prize[2] for the discovery of the prion, a completely new kind of pathogen. It's a fascinating story! NPR has a great podcast on it. And for what it's worth, I completely agree. I was given two key pieces of advice by two brilliant professors in my undergraduate philosophy career: - Always be as charitable as possible with your opponents' arguments: always assume they are taking the best possible position. - And this goes hand in hand with the above: always be ready for the best possible counter to your own argument, making sure you have an appropriate response. Few arguments are air-tight, especially for controversial issues. [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/when-people-ate-people-a-strange-disease-emerged http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/whe... [2] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1997/press.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1...
      - eru 9y ago
        Do you get the prions only from rare meat? Would thorough cooking protect?
        kleer001 9y ago
        Kuru and CJD reside in the brain meats. Prions are highly resistant to disinfectants, heat, ultraviolet radiation, ionizing radiation and formalin. ... Prions can be destroyed through incineration providing the incinerator can maintain a temperature of 900 F for four hours.
- viraptor 9y ago
  Necro-cannibalism did allow some to survive severe famine. Seriously though, the quote works well for many usual cases of discussion. People have incentives which they do believe in - you can discuss how those beliefs started and why you think they don't apply. Sure, you can find pathological edge cases where doing that didn't make sense. Doesn't mean the rule is bad for almost everything else.
- nicklaf 9y ago
  https://www.scaruffi.com/news/opin0712.html https://www.scaruffi.com/news/opin0712.html Caveat emptor: Scaruffi doesn't hesitate to let his imagination far surpass his apparent handle on the facts, but hey they are just opinions, so let's not ruin the fun too easily. "I reached the conclusion that the meat diet started with cannibalism: we ate humans before we ate animals. And cannibalism started with women eating their own children, and children eating their grandparents. Cats do it all the time: when they cannot afford too many kittens, the mom eats some of them. If she didn't, it would reduce the chances that the others survive. Since they are YOUR children, you don't feel too bad eating them: they are flesh of your flesh, aren't they? You have to think like a woman of two million years ago, who was pregnant all the time, did not know how to prevent pregnancy nor how to perform abortion, and had to feed many children, often with no male partner to help out. The tradition of eating old people is documented in many cultures: nothing was wasted, and it would have been silly to waste the flesh of a dead person. Once you start eating your own family members, it becomes natural to start eating other humans. In prehistory (and even not too long ago) humans from other tribes were not perceived as belonging to the same species: they don't speak my language, their customs are different, they smell different, therefore they are not the same species as me. Killing them and eating them was not any more morally wrong than eating a hamburger today. The main meal was brains: our brains need a lot of proteins, and another brain gives the highest amount of proteins in the shortest time. Hence the tradition of killing an enemy and eating his brain. Then cost/benefit analysis made humans realize that humans were difficult and dangerous to kill, whereas many animals were easy to kill and provided almost the same proteins. That's when domestication started: feeding on defenseless cows and goats was a lot safer than feeding on humans armed with spears and axes. That's when cannibalism became a thing of the past, of primitive men. However, it was still practiced (and valued) until recently in many places of the world. We are living in the first age free of cannibalism in the history of the human species. It's an age just a few decades old. The age of cannibalism lasted several million years. Put things in perspective and, as repugnant as it sounds today, cannibalism can be said to be the norm, and non-cannibalism the abnormality. If some day the whole world becomes vegetarian, you the meat eater will look like a savage but today you think of vegetarians as lunatic people. There are 1500 animal species that are cannibals, and 75 of them are mammals, and one of them is the chimp, our closest relative. And now you may continue to eat your hamburger."
yongjik 9y ago
After being exposed to several declarative tools during my career, I must say they age poorly: make, autoconf, Tensorflow, and so on. They may start out being elegant, but every successful library is eventually (ab)used for something the original authors didn't envision, and with declarative syntax it descends into madness of "So if I change A to B here does it apply before or after C becomes D?" At least Tensorflow isn't at that level, because its "declarative" syntax is just yet another imperative language living on top of Python. But it still makes performance debugging really hard. With PyTorch, I can just sprinkle torch.cuda.synchronize() liberally and the code will tell me exactly which CUDA kernel calls are consuming how much milliseconds. With Tensorflow, I have no idea why it is slow, or whether it can be any faster at all.
- rkangel 9y ago
  I believe that make's declarative is not the cause of it's problems at all - it's poor syntax and lack of support for programming abstractions is what makes it clunky to use. Something like rake, which operates on the same fundamental principles (i.e. declarative dependency description) but using ruby syntax has aged better.
  - eru 9y ago
    Indeed. Getting these text based configuration tools work requires a lot of experience in language design. Lots of tools become accidentally Turing complete, like Make. You need to plan these things from the start. If you want any computation possible at all, you need to be extremely vigilant, and base your language on firm foundations. See eg Dhall, a non-Turing complete configuration language (http://www.haskellforall.com/2016/12/dhall-non-turing-complete-configuration.html http://www.haskellforall.com/2016/12/dhall-non-turing-comple...). If you are happy to get Turing completeness, you might want to write your tool as an embedded DSL and piggy-bank on an existing language, declarative or otherwise.
  - acjohnson55 9y ago
    SBT in the Scala world would also fit this description.
ballenf 9y ago
I took the article to be the counterpoint to the uninhibited praise of TF. In that light, I don't think it was meant as a balanced assessment of the whole product, but had a narrow scope of simply pointing out a handful of flaws that he thinks isn't discussed enough. It's the same feeling when you hate a movie that everyone gives five stars: you might agree with some aspects of the praise (or even most of it), but that's not what you're going to be talking about. You'll talk about how and why it sucks compared to better movies. I'd guess he could make a strong pro-TF argument if desired, but that just wasn't the point of this post.
bryanrasmussen 9y ago
The assumption that there are always two intelligent sides to an issue is a pretty big assumption. If you understand both sides of an issue really deeply and you choose side B and are against side A, you should be able to argue intelligently for side A otherwise your choice of side B is not made intelligently, but this falls down on further examination. If you believe that side B is correct and side A is incorrect given your deep understanding of the issue then an argument for side A is in some way not intelligent because you must keep out your most potent arguments for side B from your argument for side A - you must deny their existence in your head and thus argue from a less intelligent position than you normally would. The ability to argue both sides is only really possible when all sides are considered trivial in their differences. on edit: improved formatting for legibility.
- eru 9y ago
  You should still be able to give the other side the best defense imaginable. (See 'steelmanning'.)
  - bryanrasmussen 9y ago
    ok, I've seen stellmanning? https://www.google.com/search?dcr=0&source=hp&q=stellmanning&oq=stellmanning&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i13k1j0i13i5i30k1l2.1054.1054.0.1444.2.1.0.0.0.0.92.92.1.1.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..1.1.90.0...0.17XpCLAAYmg https://www.google.com/search?dcr=0&source=hp&q=stellmanning... on edit: never mind, I see you mean steelmanning. However that does not really have anything to do with what I said, you should be able to give someone the best defence imaginable, but what if the best defence imaginable is shit compared to the other side. Then you cannot argue both sides equally, this does not mean you do not understand either side. It means one side is actually wrong, and the other is correct.
    - eru 9y ago
      Sorry, I can't spell. It's steelmanning. (Edited the other comment.) The idea is to beat a steelman of the idea. Because that's a greater victory than beating a strawman.
vbuwivbiu 9y ago
"If you can't intelligently argue for both sides of an issue, you don't understand the issue well enough to argue for either." please argue the opposite of this before continuing

katastic 9y ago

>An appropriate quote: "If you can't intelligently argue for both sides of an issue, you don't understand the issue well enough to argue for either." Cannibalism rules!

libeclipse 9y ago
Lmao not sure why this was down-voted. Utterly destroyed your quotation, and gave me a giggle.
- foobarchu 9y ago
  It didn't "utterly destroy" the quotation. It's pretty easy to argue the virtues of cannibalism, it's just that for modern day society they do not trump the downsides. For example, cannibalism has successfully prevented death by starvation (e.g. the Donner Party), and it reduces the need for disposing of the dead. It's an application of reduce-reuse-recycle. Some species of other animals practice it as part of their normal lives (praying mantis as part of mating, lions as a social mechanic). The very obvious counterpoints are that it's completely counter to modern cultural morality and it's been shown to increase likelihood of transferring brain parasites in humans. The fact that you didn't even approach the other side and immediately concluded that he "destroyed the quotation" kinda shows that you aren't making the slightest effort to understand opposing viewpoints.
  - gfodor 9y ago
    Not to mention that implied in the quotation is being able to argue both sides of a contentious issue is important to being able to make a case strongly for the one you agree with. Totally irrelevant for generally settled questions like cannabalism, so the "utter destruction" was anything but.
  - dvt 9y ago
    Small correction: not brain parasites, but specifically prions (misfolded protein that fascinatingly self-replicate). Kuru[1] (closely related to Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and Alzheimer's) was extensively studied last century in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea (which were practicing cannibalism as a funerary rite), culminating in the awarding of the 1997 Nobel Prize[2] for the discovery of the prion, a completely new kind of pathogen. It's a fascinating story! NPR has a great podcast on it. And for what it's worth, I completely agree. I was given two key pieces of advice by two brilliant professors in my undergraduate philosophy career: - Always be as charitable as possible with your opponents' arguments: always assume they are taking the best possible position. - And this goes hand in hand with the above: always be ready for the best possible counter to your own argument, making sure you have an appropriate response. Few arguments are air-tight, especially for controversial issues. [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/when-people-ate-people-a-strange-disease-emerged http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/whe... [2] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1997/press.html https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1...
    - eru 9y ago
      Do you get the prions only from rare meat? Would thorough cooking protect?
      - kleer001 9y ago
        Kuru and CJD reside in the brain meats. Prions are highly resistant to disinfectants, heat, ultraviolet radiation, ionizing radiation and formalin. ... Prions can be destroyed through incineration providing the incinerator can maintain a temperature of 900 F for four hours.
viraptor 9y ago
Necro-cannibalism did allow some to survive severe famine. Seriously though, the quote works well for many usual cases of discussion. People have incentives which they do believe in - you can discuss how those beliefs started and why you think they don't apply. Sure, you can find pathological edge cases where doing that didn't make sense. Doesn't mean the rule is bad for almost everything else.
nicklaf 9y ago
https://www.scaruffi.com/news/opin0712.html https://www.scaruffi.com/news/opin0712.html Caveat emptor: Scaruffi doesn't hesitate to let his imagination far surpass his apparent handle on the facts, but hey they are just opinions, so let's not ruin the fun too easily. "I reached the conclusion that the meat diet started with cannibalism: we ate humans before we ate animals. And cannibalism started with women eating their own children, and children eating their grandparents. Cats do it all the time: when they cannot afford too many kittens, the mom eats some of them. If she didn't, it would reduce the chances that the others survive. Since they are YOUR children, you don't feel too bad eating them: they are flesh of your flesh, aren't they? You have to think like a woman of two million years ago, who was pregnant all the time, did not know how to prevent pregnancy nor how to perform abortion, and had to feed many children, often with no male partner to help out. The tradition of eating old people is documented in many cultures: nothing was wasted, and it would have been silly to waste the flesh of a dead person. Once you start eating your own family members, it becomes natural to start eating other humans. In prehistory (and even not too long ago) humans from other tribes were not perceived as belonging to the same species: they don't speak my language, their customs are different, they smell different, therefore they are not the same species as me. Killing them and eating them was not any more morally wrong than eating a hamburger today. The main meal was brains: our brains need a lot of proteins, and another brain gives the highest amount of proteins in the shortest time. Hence the tradition of killing an enemy and eating his brain. Then cost/benefit analysis made humans realize that humans were difficult and dangerous to kill, whereas many animals were easy to kill and provided almost the same proteins. That's when domestication started: feeding on defenseless cows and goats was a lot safer than feeding on humans armed with spears and axes. That's when cannibalism became a thing of the past, of primitive men. However, it was still practiced (and valued) until recently in many places of the world. We are living in the first age free of cannibalism in the history of the human species. It's an age just a few decades old. The age of cannibalism lasted several million years. Put things in perspective and, as repugnant as it sounds today, cannibalism can be said to be the norm, and non-cannibalism the abnormality. If some day the whole world becomes vegetarian, you the meat eater will look like a savage but today you think of vegetarians as lunatic people. There are 1500 animal species that are cannibals, and 75 of them are mammals, and one of them is the chimp, our closest relative. And now you may continue to eat your hamburger."

yongjik 9y ago

After being exposed to several declarative tools during my career, I must say they age poorly: make, autoconf, Tensorflow, and so on. They may start out being elegant, but every successful library is eventually (ab)used for something the original authors didn't envision, and with declarative syntax it descends into madness of "So if I change A to B here does it apply before or after C becomes D?" At least Tensorflow isn't at that level, because its "declarative" syntax is just yet another imperative language living on top of Python. But it still makes performance debugging really hard. With PyTorch, I can just sprinkle torch.cuda.synchronize() liberally and the code will tell me exactly which CUDA kernel calls are consuming how much milliseconds. With Tensorflow, I have no idea why it is slow, or whether it can be any faster at all.

rkangel 9y ago
I believe that make's declarative is not the cause of it's problems at all - it's poor syntax and lack of support for programming abstractions is what makes it clunky to use. Something like rake, which operates on the same fundamental principles (i.e. declarative dependency description) but using ruby syntax has aged better.
- eru 9y ago
  Indeed. Getting these text based configuration tools work requires a lot of experience in language design. Lots of tools become accidentally Turing complete, like Make. You need to plan these things from the start. If you want any computation possible at all, you need to be extremely vigilant, and base your language on firm foundations. See eg Dhall, a non-Turing complete configuration language (http://www.haskellforall.com/2016/12/dhall-non-turing-complete-configuration.html http://www.haskellforall.com/2016/12/dhall-non-turing-comple...). If you are happy to get Turing completeness, you might want to write your tool as an embedded DSL and piggy-bank on an existing language, declarative or otherwise.
- acjohnson55 9y ago
  SBT in the Scala world would also fit this description.

ballenf 9y ago

I took the article to be the counterpoint to the uninhibited praise of TF. In that light, I don't think it was meant as a balanced assessment of the whole product, but had a narrow scope of simply pointing out a handful of flaws that he thinks isn't discussed enough. It's the same feeling when you hate a movie that everyone gives five stars: you might agree with some aspects of the praise (or even most of it), but that's not what you're going to be talking about. You'll talk about how and why it sucks compared to better movies. I'd guess he could make a strong pro-TF argument if desired, but that just wasn't the point of this post.

bryanrasmussen 9y ago

The assumption that there are always two intelligent sides to an issue is a pretty big assumption. If you understand both sides of an issue really deeply and you choose side B and are against side A, you should be able to argue intelligently for side A otherwise your choice of side B is not made intelligently, but this falls down on further examination. If you believe that side B is correct and side A is incorrect given your deep understanding of the issue then an argument for side A is in some way not intelligent because you must keep out your most potent arguments for side B from your argument for side A - you must deny their existence in your head and thus argue from a less intelligent position than you normally would. The ability to argue both sides is only really possible when all sides are considered trivial in their differences. on edit: improved formatting for legibility.

eru 9y ago
You should still be able to give the other side the best defense imaginable. (See 'steelmanning'.)
- bryanrasmussen 9y ago
  ok, I've seen stellmanning? https://www.google.com/search?dcr=0&source=hp&q=stellmanning&oq=stellmanning&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i13k1j0i13i5i30k1l2.1054.1054.0.1444.2.1.0.0.0.0.92.92.1.1.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..1.1.90.0...0.17XpCLAAYmg https://www.google.com/search?dcr=0&source=hp&q=stellmanning... on edit: never mind, I see you mean steelmanning. However that does not really have anything to do with what I said, you should be able to give someone the best defence imaginable, but what if the best defence imaginable is shit compared to the other side. Then you cannot argue both sides equally, this does not mean you do not understand either side. It means one side is actually wrong, and the other is correct.
  - eru 9y ago
    Sorry, I can't spell. It's steelmanning. (Edited the other comment.) The idea is to beat a steelman of the idea. Because that's a greater victory than beating a strawman.

vbuwivbiu 9y ago

"If you can't intelligently argue for both sides of an issue, you don't understand the issue well enough to argue for either." please argue the opposite of this before continuing