This is a cool idea, and I have no doubt it helped somewhat, but IMO it falls prey to the same mistake I see made by the makers of almost every video series/online course/list of resources for ML math: assuming that math is mostly about concepts and facts.
It’s only about 5% that. Maybe less. I and many others in ML have seen the same videos and remembered the concepts for a while too. And forgotten them, in time. More than once! On the other hand, I’ve seen how persistently and operationally fluent (especially in ML and interpretability) people become when they actually learned math the way it must be learned: via hundreds of hours of laborious exercises, proofs, derivations, etc. Videos and lectures are a small fraction of what’s ultimately needed.
For most of ML, it’s probably fine—you’ll never need to do a proof or do more than simple linear algebra operations by hand. But if you want to do the really hard stuff, especially in interpretability, I don’t think there’s any substitute for cranking through those hours.
To be clear, I think this weekend was a great start on that—if you continue immediately to taking full courses and doing the exercises. I’m a top-down learner, so it would certainly help me. But unless it’s practiced in very short order, it will be forgotten, and just become a collection of terms you recognize when others talk about them.
This is a cool idea, and I have no doubt it helped somewhat, but IMO it falls prey to the same mistake I see made by the makers of almost every video series/online course/list of resources for ML math: assuming that math is mostly about concepts and facts.
It’s only about 5% that. Maybe less. I and many others in ML have seen the same videos and remembered the concepts for a while too. And forgotten them, in time. More than once! On the other hand, I’ve seen how persistently and operationally fluent (especially in ML and interpretability) people become when they actually learned math the way it must be learned: via hundreds of hours of laborious exercises, proofs, derivations, etc. Videos and lectures are a small fraction of what’s ultimately needed.
For most of ML, it’s probably fine—you’ll never need to do a proof or do more than simple linear algebra operations by hand. But if you want to do the really hard stuff, especially in interpretability, I don’t think there’s any substitute for cranking through those hours.
To be clear, I think this weekend was a great start on that—if you continue immediately to taking full courses and doing the exercises. I’m a top-down learner, so it would certainly help me. But unless it’s practiced in very short order, it will be forgotten, and just become a collection of terms you recognize when others talk about them.