I’ve been surprised by how bad the majority of scholarship is around the “inspired-by” or “metaphorical” genre of algorithms—neural networks, genetic algorithms, Baum’s Hayek machine and so on. My guess is that the colorful metaphors allow you to disguise any success as due to the technique rather than a grad student poking and prodding at it until a demo seems to work.
This was my area of research in my postgrad years. Specifically ants and birds. I couldn’t agree more. The techniques do work but the scholarship was absolutely abysmal.
Blast, I wrote a couple of paragraphs but accidental bumped the ‘cancel’ button. So you get dot points this time.
Some of the papers by field leaders misused statistical tool tools.
Insufficient comparison to the relevant mainstream techniques for the same problem.
Excessive amount of ad hoc algorithm selection and cherry picking of results.
I shouldn’t be able to see blatant problems in the leading research any any field when I am a hack who has had to self teach and pick things up as I go along.
My disillusionment, unfortunately, wasn’t just limited to that one field. I had higher expectations of academic research than what seems to be available in quite a few fields. There are some high quality fields but you still have to be careful when you take things at face value.
Is this lecture an example of this?
Not exactly. It is a bit more of a biology course than just a ‘metaphor’ course. It seems quite good. I’m looking at some of the other lectures now.
This was my area of research in my postgrad years. Specifically ants and birds. I couldn’t agree more. The techniques do work but the scholarship was absolutely abysmal.
Hey, can you expand a bit on this? Is this lecture an example of this?
Blast, I wrote a couple of paragraphs but accidental bumped the ‘cancel’ button. So you get dot points this time.
Some of the papers by field leaders misused statistical tool tools.
Insufficient comparison to the relevant mainstream techniques for the same problem.
Excessive amount of ad hoc algorithm selection and cherry picking of results.
I shouldn’t be able to see blatant problems in the leading research any any field when I am a hack who has had to self teach and pick things up as I go along.
My disillusionment, unfortunately, wasn’t just limited to that one field. I had higher expectations of academic research than what seems to be available in quite a few fields. There are some high quality fields but you still have to be careful when you take things at face value.
Not exactly. It is a bit more of a biology course than just a ‘metaphor’ course. It seems quite good. I’m looking at some of the other lectures now.
I hate it when that happens! There’s a good technique to prevent it from happening again, though: form recovery plugins, like Lazarus.
(Heck, it helped me just now; I accidentally pressed cancel on this very comment a moment ago.)
Thanks, installed. :)