The Bayesian approach is basically the simplest possible thing that doesn’t inevitably make the mistake I’m trying to describe. Something like Naive Bayes is still mostly legible if you stare at it for a while, and it was good enough to revolutionize spam filtering. This is because while Naive Bayes generates a big matrix, it depends on extremely concrete pieces of binary evidence. So you can factor the matrix into a bunch of clean matrices, each corresponding to the presence of a specific token. And the training computations for those small matrices are easily explained. Of course, you’re horribly abusing basic probability, but it works in practice.
This does not work for many other problems.
The problem is scaling up the domain complexity. Once you move from a spam filter to speech transcription or object recognition, the matrices get bigger, and the training process gets rapidly more opaque.
But yes, thank you for the correction—I still find a lot of MIRIs work in the 2010s a bit “off” in terms of vibes, but I will happily accept the judgement of people who read the papers in detail. And I would not wish to falsely claim that someone approved of the Cyc project when they didn’t.
The Bayesian approach is basically the simplest possible thing that doesn’t inevitably make the mistake I’m trying to describe. Something like Naive Bayes is still mostly legible if you stare at it for a while, and it was good enough to revolutionize spam filtering. This is because while Naive Bayes generates a big matrix, it depends on extremely concrete pieces of binary evidence. So you can factor the matrix into a bunch of clean matrices, each corresponding to the presence of a specific token. And the training computations for those small matrices are easily explained. Of course, you’re horribly abusing basic probability, but it works in practice.
This does not work for many other problems.
The problem is scaling up the domain complexity. Once you move from a spam filter to speech transcription or object recognition, the matrices get bigger, and the training process gets rapidly more opaque.
But yes, thank you for the correction—I still find a lot of MIRIs work in the 2010s a bit “off” in terms of vibes, but I will happily accept the judgement of people who read the papers in detail. And I would not wish to falsely claim that someone approved of the Cyc project when they didn’t.