7 ms·

To be fair, a whole uninterrupted week of highly focussed work can get you pretty far (considering that you have the necessary background, which Carmack has, i.

To be fair, a whole uninterrupted week of highly focussed work can get you pretty far (considering that you have the necessary background, which Carmack has, i.e. related to linear algebra, stats, programming, etc.)

short_sells_poo 7y ago
Yes, but let's not assume the the hundreds of other scientists in the field have just been twiddling their thumbs the whole time. It is preposterous to assume that someone largely new to a highly specialized field can somehow start pushing the envelope within a week. Yes, JC is nothing short of brilliant, but these sort of assumptions just set him up to disappoint and is also highly unfair to all the other hardworking brilliant people in the field.
- rfhjt 7y ago
  How many of them are doing real research, though? Corporate researchers improve ads impressions and academics researches are busy generating pointless papers or they won't be paid. Very few if any do actual research.
  - mr_mitm 7y ago
    Generating papers is research. I don't understand why you dismiss all papers as pointless.
    - rfhjt 7y ago
      The need to generate publishable papers means that a researcher can only participate in activity that leads to such a paper. He can't try to work on that idea for 5 years, because if no big papers follow, he's toast /he'd probably lose funding long before that).
      - p1esk 7y ago
        You have to earn the right to work on your idea for 5 years and get paid. Otherwise we would be funding all kind of crackpots. First you demonstrate you're a good researcher by producing good results. Then you can work on whatever you feel like (either by getting hired at places like DeepMind, or by finding funding sources that want to pay for what you want to work on).
        rfhjt 7y ago
        This is what I meant. In our society, only very few, usually already rich, can try their own ideas. Most of us have to stick with known ideas that bring profit to business owners or meaningful visibility to universities. When I was in college, I had to work on ideas approved by my professor. Now I have to work on ideas approved by my corporation. But if I had money, I'd work on something completely different. Sure, in 15 I will be rich and can start doing my own stuff, but I'll also be old and my ability will be nowhere near the peak at 25 years.
        p1esk 7y ago
        What would you work on if you could? Would you say you deserve to be paid for 5 years of uninterrupted research? Do you think you have a decent chance to make a breakthrough in some field? These are the questions I ask myself.
        rfhjt 7y ago
        I have some interesting ideas about managing software complexity in general (i.e. why this complexity inevitably snowballs and how we could deal with that), or about a better way to surf the internet (which may be a really big idea, tbh). But all these are moonshot ideas that gave a slim chance of success, while I need to pay ever raising bills. On the other hand I have a couple solid money making business ideas that I'm working on and that will bring me a few tens of millions, bit will be of no use to society, and I have a fallback plan: a corporate job with outstanding pay, but that brings exactly nothing to this world (it's about reshaping certain markets to make my employer slightly richer). Do I deserve to be paid for 5 years for something that may not work? "Deserving" something doesn't have much meaning: we, the humans, merely transform solar energy into some fluff like stadiums and cruise ships. Getting paid just means getting a portion of that stream of solar energy. There is no reason I need to "deserve it" as it's unlimited and doesn't belong to anyone. A better question to ask is how can we change our society so that all, especially young, people would get a sufficient portion of resources to not think about paying bills. Chances to make a breakthru are small, but that doesn't matter. It's a big numbers game: if chances are 1 to million, we let 1 billion people try and see 1000 successes. The problem currently is that we have these billions of people, but they are forces by silly constraints of our society to non stop solve fictional problems like paying rent.
    - dkersten 7y ago
      I don’t think all papers are pointless but it’s been shown that many are not reproducible, so those are worthless and pointless. There was that guy a few months ago who tried to reproduce the results of 130 papers on financial forecasting (using ML and other such techniques) and found none of them could be reproduced and most were p-hacked or contained obvious flaws like leaking results data into the training data. An academic friend of mine who works in brain computer interfacing also says that a large number of papers he reviews are borderline or even outright fraudulent but many get published anyway because other reviewers let them through. So I definitely wouldn’t dismiss all papers as pointless, but there certainly is a large percentage that are, enough that you can’t simply accept a published papers results without reproducing it yourself.
  - p1esk 7y ago
    If you look at papers from corporate AI researchers (FAIR, Google Brain, DeepMind, OpenAI, etc) they pretty much do whatever they want.
    - rfhjt 7y ago
      And I disagree violently. The deepmind folks are on salary and every year they need to prove that they are worth the money. This applies to Demis himself: he needs to prove that his org deserves this gaziliion of dollars per year.
      - p1esk 7y ago
        My point is they are not constrained to working on ads, or anything specific, and their work is not pointless.
        username90 7y ago
        They are constrained to problems with annual results though.
- nitwit005 7y ago
  They didn't suggest he invented some new technique. Figuring out the basics of the math and how to use whatever tools they use at FB is doable in a week.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Sometimes an outside perspective is just the ticket for getting past roadblocks that've stumped the experts. If any outsider could do this, it's John.
  - dimino 7y ago
    Sometimes, but mostly not.
    - dingo_bat 7y ago
      But John is not most men.

short_sells_poo 7y ago

Yes, but let's not assume the the hundreds of other scientists in the field have just been twiddling their thumbs the whole time. It is preposterous to assume that someone largely new to a highly specialized field can somehow start pushing the envelope within a week. Yes, JC is nothing short of brilliant, but these sort of assumptions just set him up to disappoint and is also highly unfair to all the other hardworking brilliant people in the field.

rfhjt 7y ago
How many of them are doing real research, though? Corporate researchers improve ads impressions and academics researches are busy generating pointless papers or they won't be paid. Very few if any do actual research.
- mr_mitm 7y ago
  Generating papers is research. I don't understand why you dismiss all papers as pointless.
  - rfhjt 7y ago
    The need to generate publishable papers means that a researcher can only participate in activity that leads to such a paper. He can't try to work on that idea for 5 years, because if no big papers follow, he's toast /he'd probably lose funding long before that).
    - p1esk 7y ago
      You have to earn the right to work on your idea for 5 years and get paid. Otherwise we would be funding all kind of crackpots. First you demonstrate you're a good researcher by producing good results. Then you can work on whatever you feel like (either by getting hired at places like DeepMind, or by finding funding sources that want to pay for what you want to work on).
      - rfhjt 7y ago
        This is what I meant. In our society, only very few, usually already rich, can try their own ideas. Most of us have to stick with known ideas that bring profit to business owners or meaningful visibility to universities. When I was in college, I had to work on ideas approved by my professor. Now I have to work on ideas approved by my corporation. But if I had money, I'd work on something completely different. Sure, in 15 I will be rich and can start doing my own stuff, but I'll also be old and my ability will be nowhere near the peak at 25 years.
        p1esk 7y ago
        What would you work on if you could? Would you say you deserve to be paid for 5 years of uninterrupted research? Do you think you have a decent chance to make a breakthrough in some field? These are the questions I ask myself.
        rfhjt 7y ago
        I have some interesting ideas about managing software complexity in general (i.e. why this complexity inevitably snowballs and how we could deal with that), or about a better way to surf the internet (which may be a really big idea, tbh). But all these are moonshot ideas that gave a slim chance of success, while I need to pay ever raising bills. On the other hand I have a couple solid money making business ideas that I'm working on and that will bring me a few tens of millions, bit will be of no use to society, and I have a fallback plan: a corporate job with outstanding pay, but that brings exactly nothing to this world (it's about reshaping certain markets to make my employer slightly richer). Do I deserve to be paid for 5 years for something that may not work? "Deserving" something doesn't have much meaning: we, the humans, merely transform solar energy into some fluff like stadiums and cruise ships. Getting paid just means getting a portion of that stream of solar energy. There is no reason I need to "deserve it" as it's unlimited and doesn't belong to anyone. A better question to ask is how can we change our society so that all, especially young, people would get a sufficient portion of resources to not think about paying bills. Chances to make a breakthru are small, but that doesn't matter. It's a big numbers game: if chances are 1 to million, we let 1 billion people try and see 1000 successes. The problem currently is that we have these billions of people, but they are forces by silly constraints of our society to non stop solve fictional problems like paying rent.
  - dkersten 7y ago
    I don’t think all papers are pointless but it’s been shown that many are not reproducible, so those are worthless and pointless. There was that guy a few months ago who tried to reproduce the results of 130 papers on financial forecasting (using ML and other such techniques) and found none of them could be reproduced and most were p-hacked or contained obvious flaws like leaking results data into the training data. An academic friend of mine who works in brain computer interfacing also says that a large number of papers he reviews are borderline or even outright fraudulent but many get published anyway because other reviewers let them through. So I definitely wouldn’t dismiss all papers as pointless, but there certainly is a large percentage that are, enough that you can’t simply accept a published papers results without reproducing it yourself.
- p1esk 7y ago
  If you look at papers from corporate AI researchers (FAIR, Google Brain, DeepMind, OpenAI, etc) they pretty much do whatever they want.
  - rfhjt 7y ago
    And I disagree violently. The deepmind folks are on salary and every year they need to prove that they are worth the money. This applies to Demis himself: he needs to prove that his org deserves this gaziliion of dollars per year.
    - p1esk 7y ago
      My point is they are not constrained to working on ads, or anything specific, and their work is not pointless.
      - username90 7y ago
        They are constrained to problems with annual results though.
nitwit005 7y ago
They didn't suggest he invented some new technique. Figuring out the basics of the math and how to use whatever tools they use at FB is doable in a week.
_bxg1 7y ago
Sometimes an outside perspective is just the ticket for getting past roadblocks that've stumped the experts. If any outsider could do this, it's John.
- dimino 7y ago
  Sometimes, but mostly not.
  - dingo_bat 7y ago
    But John is not most men.