Interview with gwern

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620

Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, large, section of the community as an important influencer in AI. For me that's just a great example of how basically the vast majority of AI influencers (who vie for influence on social media, rather than research) are basically clueless about AI and CS and only have second-hand knowledge, which I guess they're good at organising and popularising, but not more than that. It's easy to be a cheer leader for the mainstream view on AI. The hard part is finding, and following, unique directions.

With apologies again for the negative slant of the comment.

Appreciate the diversity in the effort, but engineering is making things people can use without having to know it all. Far more interesting endeavor than being a human Google search engine.

And there's a limit to what you need to look up in a book. The limit moves further up the more you work with a certain kind of tool or study a certain kind of knowledge. I have to look up trigonometry every single time I need it because I only use it sparingly. I don't need to look up SLD-Resolution, which is my main subject. How much would Feynman need to look up when debating physics?

So when someone like Feynman talks about physics, you listen carefully because you know they know their shit and a certain kind of nerd deeply appreciates deep knowledge. When someone elbows themselves in the limelight and demands everyone treats them as an expert, but they don't know the basics, what do you conclude? I conclude that they're pretending to know a bunch of stuff they don't know.

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[1] ... some do. But they're students so it's OK, they're just excited to have learned so much and don't yet know how much they don't. You explain the mistake, point them to the book, and move on.