Certainly it’s not a necessarily good thing either. I would posit isolation is usually not good. I can personally attest to being confused and limited by the difference in terminology here. And I think that when it comes to intrinsic interpretability work in particular, the disentanglement literature has produced a number of methods of value while TAISIC has not.
Ok it sounds to me like maybe there’s at least two things being talked about here. One situation is
A) Where a community includes different groups working on the same topic, and where those groups might use different terminology and have different ways of thinking about the same phenomena etc. This seems completely normal to me. The other situation is
B) Where a group is isolated from the community at large and is using different terminology/thinking about things differently just as a result of their isolation and lack of communication. And where that behaviour then causes confusion and/or wasting of resources.
The latter doesn’t sound good, but I guess it looks like to me that some or many of your points are consistent with the former being the case. So when you write e.g. it’s not “necessarily a good thing either” or asking for my steelmanned case, this doesn’t seem to quite make sense to me. I feel like if something is not necessarily good or bad, and you want to raise it as a criticism, then the onus would be on you to bring the case against TASIC with arguments that are not general ones that could easily apply to both A) and B) above. e.g. It’d be more of an emphatic case if you were able to go into the details and be like “X did this work here and claimed it was new but actually it exists in Y’s paper here” or give a real example of needless confusion that was created and could have been avoided. Focussing just on what they did or didn’t ‘engage with’ on the level of general concepts and citations/acknowledgements doesn’t bring this case convincingly, in my opinion. Some more vague thoughts on why that is:
Bodies of literature like this are usually very complicated and messy and people genuinely can’t be expected to engage with everything.
It’s often hard or impossible to tack dependencies of ideas because of all the communication you cannot see and not being able to see ‘how’ people are thinking of things, only what they wrote.
Someone publishing on the same idea or concept or topic as you is nowhere near the same as someone actually doing the exact same technical thing that you are doing. ime the former is happening all the time; and the latter is much rarer than people often think.
Reinvention, re-presentation and even outright renaming or ‘starting from scratch’ are all valuable elements of scholarship that help a field move along.
Idk maybe I’m just repeating myself at this point.
On the other point: It may turn out the MI’s analogy with reverse software engineering does not produce methods and is just used a high-level analogy,, but it seems too early to say from my perspective—the two posts I linked are from last year. TASIC is still pretty small and experienced researchers in TASIC are fewer and this is potentially a large and difficult research agenda.
Ok it sounds to me like maybe there’s at least two things being talked about here. One situation is
A) Where a community includes different groups working on the same topic, and where those groups might use different terminology and have different ways of thinking about the same phenomena etc. This seems completely normal to me. The other situation is
B) Where a group is isolated from the community at large and is using different terminology/thinking about things differently just as a result of their isolation and lack of communication. And where that behaviour then causes confusion and/or wasting of resources.
The latter doesn’t sound good, but I guess it looks like to me that some or many of your points are consistent with the former being the case. So when you write e.g. it’s not “necessarily a good thing either” or asking for my steelmanned case, this doesn’t seem to quite make sense to me. I feel like if something is not necessarily good or bad, and you want to raise it as a criticism, then the onus would be on you to bring the case against TASIC with arguments that are not general ones that could easily apply to both A) and B) above. e.g. It’d be more of an emphatic case if you were able to go into the details and be like “X did this work here and claimed it was new but actually it exists in Y’s paper here” or give a real example of needless confusion that was created and could have been avoided. Focussing just on what they did or didn’t ‘engage with’ on the level of general concepts and citations/acknowledgements doesn’t bring this case convincingly, in my opinion. Some more vague thoughts on why that is:
Bodies of literature like this are usually very complicated and messy and people genuinely can’t be expected to engage with everything.
It’s often hard or impossible to tack dependencies of ideas because of all the communication you cannot see and not being able to see ‘how’ people are thinking of things, only what they wrote.
Someone publishing on the same idea or concept or topic as you is nowhere near the same as someone actually doing the exact same technical thing that you are doing. ime the former is happening all the time; and the latter is much rarer than people often think.
Reinvention, re-presentation and even outright renaming or ‘starting from scratch’ are all valuable elements of scholarship that help a field move along.
Idk maybe I’m just repeating myself at this point.
On the other point: It may turn out the MI’s analogy with reverse software engineering does not produce methods and is just used a high-level analogy,, but it seems too early to say from my perspective—the two posts I linked are from last year. TASIC is still pretty small and experienced researchers in TASIC are fewer and this is potentially a large and difficult research agenda.