This post reminded me of this interview with Jeremy Howard, multiple-times winner of Kaggle data prediction contest. The article is titled “Specialist Knowledge Is Useless and Unhelpful” and includes this:
Q. How have experts reacted?
A. The messages are uncomfortable for a lot of people. It’s controversial because we’re telling them: “Your decades of specialist knowledge are not only useless, they’re actually unhelpful; your sophisticated techniques are worse than generic methods.”
It’s only anecdotal evidence, but still; I think that becoming a domain expert always comes at the cost of certain inertia in thinking. “If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like nail”. An abacus expert may have spent years honing his techniques, but that would not help him much in a contest against someone equipped with a computer. The expert would be better off if had switched to the computer himself, which was psychologically hard, because he had so much more (subjectively) to lose, compared with unskilled novices.
This post reminded me of this interview with Jeremy Howard, multiple-times winner of Kaggle data prediction contest. The article is titled “Specialist Knowledge Is Useless and Unhelpful” and includes this:
It’s only anecdotal evidence, but still; I think that becoming a domain expert always comes at the cost of certain inertia in thinking. “If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like nail”. An abacus expert may have spent years honing his techniques, but that would not help him much in a contest against someone equipped with a computer. The expert would be better off if had switched to the computer himself, which was psychologically hard, because he had so much more (subjectively) to lose, compared with unskilled novices.