7 ms·

I deleted an earlier, angrier comment of mine. Can you explain this last sentence (which I understand to be insulting and without basis): > Howard is great wit

I deleted an earlier, angrier comment of mine. Can you explain this last sentence (which I understand to be insulting and without basis): > Howard is great with one problem: he kinda hates math. It might also seem that he ends up promoting anti-intellectualism.

rg111 4y ago
He says repeatedly "You don't need math", and stuff like that. This is not insulting. That man is my hero, and I deeply respect him. But his 2019/20 course was riddled with such statements. He repeatedly said that one doesn't need math, and showed tools like drawing math symbols on a website to learn their names and ride on that. No further math needed. It's like you can wing it in Deep Learning without learning Math. His behavior throughout the course reinforced this attitude. It is harmful for new learners. But I am fortunate that I didn't learn from that, but learned from some successful alumni example that Howard gave. One woman who was also a musician ('19/'20), she made it big, but Howard mentioned that she did the Ng course, and also read the Goodfellow book. So, I took the cue, and did DL the proper way. Anybody I know in DL made it because they know the Math. There are some influencer types in fastai community who has 10ks of followers and shills stuff and do media stuff. Other than that 1-2 people, everyone who made it in DL, did it because they knew the math. So, I think that people might get the wrong idea hearing from Howard that "you don't need math". This is one fault I find. It's not like I dislike him. I like the rest of him. I love his attitude on almost all other things. I love Jeremy Howard, and he is my hero.
- victor106 4y ago
  Can you please provide some resources you used to learn?
  - rg111 4y ago
    Definitely do the fast.ai course. Totally worth it. But also use ISLR, Goodfellow, Bishop, etc. Start with Andrew Ng's ML, then do the first part of Aurelien Geron book, then do Ng's DL specialization, then do fast.ai. Then learn PyTorch. A great book would be Sebastian Raschka's book. Also d2l.ai. A fast-paced, but really good course would be the Neuromatch DL tutorials. Then move forward based on your interests. Yann LeCun has THE best MOOC on DL on YouTube. For the Math, I majored in Physics, so stuff came naturally. I suggest Imperial London's MOOC on Mathematics for ML specialization, Robert Ghrist's Calculus course, VMLS book for Linear Algebra. For stats, haven’t found a good one yet. What you read, how much- these all depend on what you want to do. Where do you want to see yourself, and so on. If you just want to brag about DL and put it on your resume so that you can get a job writing SQL queries and make PowerBI presentation as a "Data Scientist", then the bars are low. If you want to do some DL, then that is another league altogether. You need to be able to quickly read papers, understand ideas, use those for your own projects or papers. Makes sense?
- sabertoothed 4y ago
  I think you completely misunderstand his stance. You don't need the math in the beginning to train a model and get first results. Later, you will need the math and Jeremy clearly knows the math. He gives a great example: In sports, you don't start with learning about physiology and train individual muscles etc. (I paraphrase), you start playing basketball or baseball or soccer, and understand the overall game. And if you like it, you can then become better and better and get deeper and deeper. It's not helpful to start with linear algebra if - what motivated you - was the application of ML. We lose people who could have otherwise become experts later.
  - sabertoothed 4y ago
    It is far from anti-intellectualism. It is about didactics. And Jeremy is spot on about this.
  - rg111 4y ago
    It is good enough to not need heavy math to begin. Yeah, I know. But you need a lot of math to do Deep Learning. But I do not think Howard tries to communicate that. You can't show me people who knows high school math only and gets to work in FAANG, or PhD in DL/related, or CTO of an AI start-up, or anyhow "made it" in DL.
    - idf00 4y ago
      I think co-writing and co-teaching a math course at a deep learning company he co-founded, pinning that to the github repo and moving it close to the top of the home page makes it pretty clear he does see value in math in deep learning. I mean, if you need other evidence beyond than the fact that he teaches math needed to understand and build things from scratch in the deep learning course... In the courses he has always been clear you don't need a ton of math to begin. He's also always been clear that as you progress you will encounter math that you need to learn to continue. He's always clear that that is ok if you don't know it before you start and it's ok to learn it when you need it.
- mloncode 4y ago
  > influencer types in the fastai community who have 10ks of followers and shills Everyone that I can see that fits that profile work at real companies doing real deep learning work, or are building infrastructure and tools that we all use. Nvidia, Huggingface, Etc. I don't see pure media stuff at all, most people are developing libraries or doing other applied work, and talk about their work publicly. Frankly, your comments come across like you are salty. Being a unpleasant person in online forums that enjoys insulting people seems correlated, which likely doesn't bode well for your professional aspirations, regardless of how much math or python you do/don't know. > You don't need math He's saying you don't need a PhD in math, not that you should ignore math all together. I have graduate level math and CS background and I don't thing either of those helped much, other than overcoming gatekeeping. The thing thats far more important for applied ML is to practice DL on lots of different problems to be effective. PhD level math might be useful for research, but that isn't necessary in practice for most people.
  - rg111 4y ago
    - mloncode 4y ago
      > Sanyam Buhtani does not do real DL work. Oh wow, it seems like you have made a habit of judging people, even though you don't know much about them at all, as recently as 10 minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32197090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32197090 Despite the fake apologies, I suppose it is a habit you can't really shake. By the way, how do you do real DL work if you have so much trouble communicating and interacting with people generally? Seems like that would really get in the way of doing anything of any import. Throwing insults at people using their full names on anonymous internet forums as "being fake" is a special kind of toxic behavior. They really should not allow you to participate in these forums with this kind of behavior. I've flagged your comment as inappropriate.
    - dang 4y ago
      Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't post like this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rg111 4y ago

He says repeatedly "You don't need math", and stuff like that. This is not insulting. That man is my hero, and I deeply respect him. But his 2019/20 course was riddled with such statements. He repeatedly said that one doesn't need math, and showed tools like drawing math symbols on a website to learn their names and ride on that. No further math needed. It's like you can wing it in Deep Learning without learning Math. His behavior throughout the course reinforced this attitude. It is harmful for new learners. But I am fortunate that I didn't learn from that, but learned from some successful alumni example that Howard gave. One woman who was also a musician ('19/'20), she made it big, but Howard mentioned that she did the Ng course, and also read the Goodfellow book. So, I took the cue, and did DL the proper way. Anybody I know in DL made it because they know the Math. There are some influencer types in fastai community who has 10ks of followers and shills stuff and do media stuff. Other than that 1-2 people, everyone who made it in DL, did it because they knew the math. So, I think that people might get the wrong idea hearing from Howard that "you don't need math". This is one fault I find. It's not like I dislike him. I like the rest of him. I love his attitude on almost all other things. I love Jeremy Howard, and he is my hero.

victor106 4y ago
Can you please provide some resources you used to learn?
- rg111 4y ago
  Definitely do the fast.ai course. Totally worth it. But also use ISLR, Goodfellow, Bishop, etc. Start with Andrew Ng's ML, then do the first part of Aurelien Geron book, then do Ng's DL specialization, then do fast.ai. Then learn PyTorch. A great book would be Sebastian Raschka's book. Also d2l.ai. A fast-paced, but really good course would be the Neuromatch DL tutorials. Then move forward based on your interests. Yann LeCun has THE best MOOC on DL on YouTube. For the Math, I majored in Physics, so stuff came naturally. I suggest Imperial London's MOOC on Mathematics for ML specialization, Robert Ghrist's Calculus course, VMLS book for Linear Algebra. For stats, haven’t found a good one yet. What you read, how much- these all depend on what you want to do. Where do you want to see yourself, and so on. If you just want to brag about DL and put it on your resume so that you can get a job writing SQL queries and make PowerBI presentation as a "Data Scientist", then the bars are low. If you want to do some DL, then that is another league altogether. You need to be able to quickly read papers, understand ideas, use those for your own projects or papers. Makes sense?
sabertoothed 4y ago
I think you completely misunderstand his stance. You don't need the math in the beginning to train a model and get first results. Later, you will need the math and Jeremy clearly knows the math. He gives a great example: In sports, you don't start with learning about physiology and train individual muscles etc. (I paraphrase), you start playing basketball or baseball or soccer, and understand the overall game. And if you like it, you can then become better and better and get deeper and deeper. It's not helpful to start with linear algebra if - what motivated you - was the application of ML. We lose people who could have otherwise become experts later.
- sabertoothed 4y ago
  It is far from anti-intellectualism. It is about didactics. And Jeremy is spot on about this.
- rg111 4y ago
  It is good enough to not need heavy math to begin. Yeah, I know. But you need a lot of math to do Deep Learning. But I do not think Howard tries to communicate that. You can't show me people who knows high school math only and gets to work in FAANG, or PhD in DL/related, or CTO of an AI start-up, or anyhow "made it" in DL.
  - idf00 4y ago
    I think co-writing and co-teaching a math course at a deep learning company he co-founded, pinning that to the github repo and moving it close to the top of the home page makes it pretty clear he does see value in math in deep learning. I mean, if you need other evidence beyond than the fact that he teaches math needed to understand and build things from scratch in the deep learning course... In the courses he has always been clear you don't need a ton of math to begin. He's also always been clear that as you progress you will encounter math that you need to learn to continue. He's always clear that that is ok if you don't know it before you start and it's ok to learn it when you need it.
mloncode 4y ago
> influencer types in the fastai community who have 10ks of followers and shills Everyone that I can see that fits that profile work at real companies doing real deep learning work, or are building infrastructure and tools that we all use. Nvidia, Huggingface, Etc. I don't see pure media stuff at all, most people are developing libraries or doing other applied work, and talk about their work publicly. Frankly, your comments come across like you are salty. Being a unpleasant person in online forums that enjoys insulting people seems correlated, which likely doesn't bode well for your professional aspirations, regardless of how much math or python you do/don't know. > You don't need math He's saying you don't need a PhD in math, not that you should ignore math all together. I have graduate level math and CS background and I don't thing either of those helped much, other than overcoming gatekeeping. The thing thats far more important for applied ML is to practice DL on lots of different problems to be effective. PhD level math might be useful for research, but that isn't necessary in practice for most people.
- rg111 4y ago
  - mloncode 4y ago
    > Sanyam Buhtani does not do real DL work. Oh wow, it seems like you have made a habit of judging people, even though you don't know much about them at all, as recently as 10 minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32197090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32197090 Despite the fake apologies, I suppose it is a habit you can't really shake. By the way, how do you do real DL work if you have so much trouble communicating and interacting with people generally? Seems like that would really get in the way of doing anything of any import. Throwing insults at people using their full names on anonymous internet forums as "being fake" is a special kind of toxic behavior. They really should not allow you to participate in these forums with this kind of behavior. I've flagged your comment as inappropriate.
  - dang 4y ago
    Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't post like this again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html