Four short links: 5 January 2018
Intolerable Speech Rule, Deep Learning, C++ in Jupyter, and Complexity+Game Theory+Economics
- The Intolerable Speech Rule — The Paradox of Tolerance says that a tolerant society should be intolerant of one thing: intolerance itself. This is because if a tolerant society allows intolerance to take over, it will destroy the tolerant society and there will be no tolerance left anywhere. What this means for tech companies is that they should not support intolerant speech when it endangers the existence of tolerant society itself. A talk that presents the simple rule: If the content or the client is: advocating for the removal of human rights from people based on an aspect of their identity, in the context of systemic oppression primarily harming that group in a way that overall increases the danger to that group…then don’t allow them to use your products.
- Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal (Gary Marcus) — Ten challenges: Deep learning thus far is data hungry; deep learning thus far is shallow and has limited capacity for transfer; deep learning thus far has no natural way to deal with hierarchical structure; deep learning thus far has struggled with open-ended inference; Deep learning thus far is not sufficiently transparent; deep learning thus far has not been well integrated with prior knowledge; deep learning thus far cannot inherently distinguish causation from correlation; deep learning presumes a largely stable world, in ways that may be problematic; deep learning thus far works well as an approximation, but its answers often cannot be fully trusted; deep learning thus far is difficult to engineer with. (via Gary Marcus)
- C++ in Jupyter — what it says on the box. Nifty.
- Complexity Theory, Game Theory, and Economics — This document collects the lecture notes from my mini-course “Complexity Theory, Game Theory, and Economics.” Starts well: To an algorithms person (like your lecturer), complexity theory is the science of why you can’t get what you want.
