Psychology
There is a famous Viktor Frankl quote:
“When a man can’t find a deep sense of meaning, he distracts himself with pleasure.”
There were parts of my childhood and teenage years when I found myself visiting what I now think of as the cave of disparity. I was fortunate enough to find my way out. much of the credit goes to one essential shift that guided me toward stability if I my say: I stopped over-complaining about my condition and began paying attention to how my thoughts were shaping my state of being.
When making decisions in life, especially when we are faced with selecting between two events, we find ourselves comparing how important they are in order to determine which event we should choose. Some people study the implications of each decision and measure how rewarding or penalizing the outcomes might be. Picking the least penalty is a tactic for choosing a decision under this scenario.
Action Influences Thought and Not The Other Way Around.
Most self help books sell you the same idea in different packaging: fix your mind first, then your life will follow. cultivate the right thoughts. visualize the outcome. build the belief before you build anything else.
Indeed there is truth in that, thoughts do shape action, I agree. but there is a half of the equation that nobody talks about, the feedback running in the other direction. action shapes thought. and it does, faster, and more permanently, than thinking ever could.
I remember once posting on Facebook about how I dislike people who compliment me , and I wrote something along the lines of: if you want to be a good friend of mine, do not give me compliments.
Reproducibility is the corner stone of science
Somewhere between building a model and publishing the results, something gets lost. not the results themselves, those make it into the paper. what gets lost is everything that would allow someone else to arrive at the same place.
This is the reproducibility problem in machine learning, and it is more widespread than most people admit.
In 2016, the journal Nature reported that around 70% of researchers had failed to reproduce another researcher’s results , and 50% had failed to reproduce their own. machine learning is no exception. a study that analyzed 400 papers from top AI conferences found that only 6% shared code, roughly 33% shared test data, and 54% shared nothing more than a pseudocode summary of their algorithm. not the environment. not the hyperparameters. not the exact version of the library that made it work. just a rough sketch of the idea.