Connectionists: Scientific Integrity, the 2021 Turing Lecture, etc.

[Richard Loosemore]

Sigh.

So storm! Very teacup!

Please, some of us were around in the 70s and 80s, and I gotta say that a certain amount of guff is being talked. I will confine myself to two points. 

1) It was not “PDP propaganda” that interest in neural nets was killed off by Minsky and Papert, it was already a widely acknowledged fact by the time I took a course on Neural Nets given by John G. Taylor (at Kings College London) in 1980/81. It doesn’t matter that M&P qualified their critique (everyone knew they said that) and it doesn’t matter that a few islands of NN did continue, what mattered was that there was HUGE excitement about the possibility of neurally inspired learning systems, in the wake of Rosenblatt, and then it died almost totally, with everyone citing M&P as the reason. Nobody gave a hoot that M&P themselves said that it shouldn’t be killed off). 

THAT’S WHAT SCIENCE DOES, IT BANDWAGONS AROUND MOST OF THE TIME. 

2) Yes, you can trace the origins of various NN ideas back into the mists of Gaussian prehistory, and into the far corners of the scienceiverse, but scientists are and always have been self-serving, hypocritical bastards when it comes to attribution:  they cram their references sections with whichever famous people’s papers happen to be the Soup du Jour, without EVER reading more than a tiny fraction of those papers. Entire oeuvres are quoted without anyone ever bothering to check if what is in them is diamond or dog poop, and nobody gives a damn if some little nobody writes something brilliant if they are not a Cool Kid. 

So, get over yourselves. Most of this debate is about self-preening, not giving credit where credit is due, and while there are some very valid points about the Gang of Four taking credit for what is actually a hundred people’s work, that message has gotten lost in a Boston Harbor so full of tea that there’s no water left in it anymore. 

Richard Loosemore

Humble Nobody at Cornell University.