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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • It’s only black box because nobody has the time (likely years to decades) to wade through the layers of a finished model to check every node and weight.

    This is exactly correct, except you’re also not accounting for the insane amount of computational power that would be necessary to backtrack a single output of a single model. This is why it is a black box. It simply is not possible on a meaningful level.

    So if math and computer science isn’t an exact science, what is?

    Things that are reproducible with known inputs and outputs, allowing for all components to be studied and explained. As an example from my field: if you damage the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in a fully grown adult, they will have the impulse control of a three-year old. We know this because we have observed damage to this area in multiple individuals, and can measure the effects based on the severity of that damage.

    In contrast, if you provide the same billion-parameter neural network identical inputs, you will not receive identical outputs.


  • Look, I understand why you think this. I thought this too when I was first beginning to learn machine learning and data science. But I’ve now been working with machine learning models including neural networks for nearly a decade, and the truth is that is nearly impossible to track the path of an input to a given output in machine learning models other than regression-based models and decision tree-based models.

    There is an entire field of data science devoted to explaining how these models arrive at their conclusions. It’s called “explainable AI” or “xAI”, and I have a few papers that I’ve published in exploring the utility of them. The basic explanation for how they work is that we run hundreds of thousands of different models and then do statistical analysis to estimate why the models arrived at their conclusion. It isn’t an exact science, however.









  • That’s irrelevant. The plaintiff bought the FSD package and his attorney (not prosecutor, I missed that this was a civil suit not criminal trial) will likely argue that it introduced confusion on the part of his client. It doesn’t matter that the FSD package wasn’t actually in use if the plaintiff believed it was (or, more importantly, that he believed it could do things that it could not due to the confusing terminology)







  • I’m the director of technology for a neurology lab, where we collect patient health record data in a variety of disparate machines and modalities (e.g., MRI, EEG, physical functioning, retinal scans, etc.). We’ve been using the open-source database software REDCap (basically a wrapper for MySQL that enables easy GUI-based data entry), but we are reaching the limits of what it can handle and need something that can scale with our growing database.

    I have little experience in database management myself, but I am a competent programmer and feel comfortable learning whatever is needed (famous last words, I know).