I personally found this post valuable and thought-provoking. Sure, there’s plenty that it doesn’t cover, but it’s already pretty long, so that seems perfectly reasonable.
I particularly I dislike your criticism of it as strawmanish. Perhaps that would be fair if the analogy between RL and evolution were a standard principle in ML. Instead, it’s a vague idea that is often left implicit, or else formulated in idiosyncratic ways. So posts like this one have to do double duty in both outlining and explaining the mainstream viewpoint (often a major task in its own right!) and then criticising it. This is most important precisely in the cases where the defenders of an implicit paradigm don’t have solid articulations of it, making it particularly difficult to understand what they’re actually defending. I think this is such a case.
If you disagree, I’d be curious what you consider a non-strawmanish summary of the RL-evolution analogy. Perhaps Clune’s AI-GA paper? But from what I can tell opinions of it are rather mixed, and the AI-GA terminology hasn’t caught on.
I personally found this post valuable and thought-provoking. Sure, there’s plenty that it doesn’t cover, but it’s already pretty long, so that seems perfectly reasonable.
I particularly I dislike your criticism of it as strawmanish. Perhaps that would be fair if the analogy between RL and evolution were a standard principle in ML. Instead, it’s a vague idea that is often left implicit, or else formulated in idiosyncratic ways. So posts like this one have to do double duty in both outlining and explaining the mainstream viewpoint (often a major task in its own right!) and then criticising it. This is most important precisely in the cases where the defenders of an implicit paradigm don’t have solid articulations of it, making it particularly difficult to understand what they’re actually defending. I think this is such a case.
If you disagree, I’d be curious what you consider a non-strawmanish summary of the RL-evolution analogy. Perhaps Clune’s AI-GA paper? But from what I can tell opinions of it are rather mixed, and the AI-GA terminology hasn’t caught on.