Transfer learning isn’t what is controversial, it is far and/or general transfer to many different domains which is controversial. There is no verified method of raising general intelligence, for example.
Do you have any pointers to what you mean? (i.e. sources that demonstrate “not particularly general transfer?” or “explicitly not working in the general case”)
Part of why I feel optimistic is I’m specifically trying to learn/teach/enable skills in a set-of-domains that seem at least fairly related, i.e. research taste in novel, technical domains, and I’d expect “weak transfer learning” to be good enough to matter without making any claims about “general transfer learning.”
(I separately guess it should be possible to train at general transfer learning but it should require training at a pretty wide variety of skills, at which point it’s actually kinda unclear whether mechanistically what’s happening is “lots of transfer between related skills” vs “raising general intelligence factor”)
Transfer learning isn’t what is controversial, it is far and/or general transfer to many different domains which is controversial. There is no verified method of raising general intelligence, for example.
Do you have any pointers to what you mean? (i.e. sources that demonstrate “not particularly general transfer?” or “explicitly not working in the general case”)
Part of why I feel optimistic is I’m specifically trying to learn/teach/enable skills in a set-of-domains that seem at least fairly related, i.e. research taste in novel, technical domains, and I’d expect “weak transfer learning” to be good enough to matter without making any claims about “general transfer learning.”
(I separately guess it should be possible to train at general transfer learning but it should require training at a pretty wide variety of skills, at which point it’s actually kinda unclear whether mechanistically what’s happening is “lots of transfer between related skills” vs “raising general intelligence factor”)