Following this reasoning, why didn't the enlightenment occur in asia, which had earlier access to gunpowder? Iirc the ottoman empire had portable guns before the west. And china had fire lances way before that.
The intrinsic dimension paper indeed doesn't really show that big networks also search in small subspaces (and neither does it claim to), but this has already been shown in related papers like https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04754
Counterpoint: there's a whole civilization on the western/USA diet, which has been shown to not be that great for your health (see e.g. obesity rates).
As to 1, it has already been established that there's no biological plausibility of backprob whatsoever. You can only call the current models "neural" networks in the vaguest sense of analogy. There is significant academic interest in this intersection between AI and neuroscience, to design biologically plausible neural networks (see e.g. spiking networks). I guess the reasons there not very well known in the larger ML community is simply that these approaches don't work that well (as of yet).
Personally I don't believe chasing perfect biological plausibility will be very fruitful (in short term). An algorithm that runs efficiently on wetware will probably not be very efficient on current hardware like gpu's. The reason deep learning is so successful is for a large part that they are very good at exploiting the efficient linear algebra devices we have at our disposal (transformers are only the latest evidence of this).
Yes they do (arxiv is a place for scientific papers not press releases). I've only skimmed it, but the paper introduce an adaptive way to clip gradients. Meaning that if the ratio of the gradient norm to weight norm surpasses a certain threshold, they clip it. This stabilizes learning and seems to avoid the need for batch normalization. Seems quite promising imo and something that could stick (I'm quite happy if we could finally do away with batchnorm).
As a Belgian, I felt inclined to comment. And give a bit of the perspective on it from here.
It's true that the Belgian colonial history slips under many people's radar, and I agree that it should be discussed more. Too few people know that more people died under Belgian colonialism than e.g. in the holocaust. (I guess that people historically were less bothered by the deaths of so called "primitive bush people" than "educated white europeans")
> Belgian schools do not in any way teach that Belgium is solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide
I disagree with this claim. Colonial history was taught in my school and iirc it's part of the obligatory high school curriculum. That being said, this was not the case some decades back, and awareness is definitely not on par with e.g. Germany. For example, there exists a "Leopold II street" not too far from me. Imagine having "Adolf Hitler street" as the main street trough a German town. Especially among the older generation there are still people of the "we also did a lot of good in the congo" opinion.
I feel that a lot of belgians kind of feel disconnected from the colonial atrocities. The colonies were a long way from belgium, and few people were involved or even knew about what happened there, far from actually going there. What further complicates the matter is that the during the initial (and most cruel) colonial period, the colony was not actually property of Belgium, but of the belgian king. Hence the government and some people feel like they had little to do with it.
These reasons do not justify the ignorance, but do in some part explain it.
On a similar note, you claim that Belgium is "solely responsible for the Rwandan genocide", but said genocide occurred over 30 years after the Belgians had left. I'm certainly no expert on the matter, it's possible that this is an indirect result of the colonial administration, but I find the "solely" a bit reductionist. Neighbouring tribes were killing opposing tribes before the europeans arrived. (Although I'm sure the colonizers exacerbated this to play divida et concera). I'm not saying the belgians are not to blame, just saying that this is a nuanced discussion.
> To be clear, it's the system and leadership that I struggle with. Not the citizens.
This is indeed an important distinction to make. I feel that making sweeping claims like "Belgium has an evil, brutal and vile history" will cause people to feel attacked. It's counterproductive and will make people deny your real points. "I am Belgian and did not commit crimes so I guess his broader statements are false too"
> Belgium isn't about chocolate, it's a country which is completely fine with not teaching its citizens about the common practice of chopping off children's
I disagree. Belgium _is_ about chocolate. But it's also about a lot of different things. The history _is_ taught. But a country is not defined by the bloody pages in it's history book. Just like germany is not defined by the nazi's or americans are not defined by their genocide of the natives. I feel the past is too complicated to allow general statements about "country X" is good and "country Y" is bad.
> And those people want to tell China something about human rights, yelling from some tower in Brussels. It's breathtaking.
In contrary, the crimes of our forefathers just only fuel us to fight harder for our fellow humans.