Neal Parikh
@npparikh
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Teaching AI policy at Columbia. Previously Director of AI for NYC. PhD from Stanford AI Lab.
NYC
Joined June 2009
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Feynman once had a problem like this and patiently argued with the teacher like an equal but ultimately gave up and just had to go “look I’m Richard Feynman”
As a math lover Im annoyed just reading this.
What would you do in this situation?
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Uh, yeah, I have heard it may substantially affect my seat location.
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This is a letter Feynman wrote to a former student who wrote congratulating him for the Nobel. I’ve posted it before but I really find it worth it to read especially as a student or early stage research person.
I was recently on a panel with several other professors and we were asked to give some tips to graduate students in machine learning. It got me thinking about why professors are so bad at giving advice. So here are some reasons why you should not take advice from professors.
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Honestly if I couldn’t convince with sources I’d probably just resort to credentialism too.
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@infrecursion1
Why do people still post sanctimonious bullshit like this from anonymous accounts?
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This site has become kind of hard to use. I basically stay on it because academics and math people haven’t left, and that conversation is civilized and ok, but you step one toe outside that and it’s just deranged racist morons and trash ads everywhere. When are we going to move?
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Matlab is maligned, sometimes for good reason, sometimes unfairly. But there is this thing in it called the backslash operator. A\b “solves” Ax = b. But this operator has like half of numerical linear algebra in it. It actually does this.
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@KevinMKruse
@kenklippenstein
This is also more or less what it would look like if universities tried to break graduate student strikes by deploying faculty. :)
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One of the most shocking things at the Stanford CS admit weekend is that Donald Knuth still comes. The faculty are supposed to introduce themselves:
“I’m Don and I write books about computer programming.”
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This meme has been going on for a while but I never said anything because my advisor once asked a brutal question I can’t top, about some algorithm, not even to an enemy. But ok, here it is.
“Let me rephrase. Does there exist any question for which this provides the answer?”
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@mikeman4223
I would also have been incredulous for the frustrated parent to eventually reveal himself to be Feynman
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There's an important point when you have to switch from just consuming more knowledge to actually producing things. Diligent people/students often get sucked into just keep reading more books because they feel bad they don't know everything. (I'm not subtweeting anyone here.)
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Feynman also used to do this and people would try to avoid having him on the committee. Though the worst horror story I heard was when Tibshirani pointed out in a defense that some bio student did cross-validation wrong, insisted he re-do it, and all the results vanished. 😱
fun story:
terry tao was on both my and my brother's committee.
he solved both our dissertation problems before we were done talking, each of us got "wouldn't it have been easier to...outline of entire proof" 🫠
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The first paper I wrote in grad school (12 years ago) just crossed 20,000 citations. To mark this satisfying but ultimately irrelevant milestone, I thought I’d share some thoughts on how to try to increase probability of more citations, especially since grad students follow me.
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@var_epsilon
This is the most PhD student schedule ever. Once you realize you don’t actually need to follow the 24 hour clock things get odd
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I would like to talk about one point made here that you can set up meetings with anyone. YES!!! You can do that, and you should. I learned this from reading about David Shaw who treated his early finance jobs “like a university.” I teach my students to cold call. Do it!
observations from my first two weeks as a Meta research intern
- research jobs are the same everywhere: no one ever asks me what I’m doing or how I’m spending my time; there’s an implicit expectation to be interested and work hard
- biking to work in the sunshine has noticeably
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@KyleWendling86
@opinonhaver
Absolutely. Ridiculous term to use when applied to talking to reporters.
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@academiquette
Going to wait to see if they update it again tomorrow. Don’t understand what’s going on when US DOT said they’re grounding all of them.
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@Triceratops235
@KyleWendling86
@opinonhaver
Clearly a skill issue here because they also gave away that the only reason they wanted a quote was to find one to dunk on it for being problematic in some way, not to actually just listen to whatever they were saying and report it straight
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Black-Scholes was rejected :)
Mamba apparently was rejected !? ()
Honestly I don't even understand. If this gets rejected, what chance do us 🤡 s have.
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I agree, I suspect Kamala Harris’ easy laugh and sense of humor, combined with the strategy of rightly calling Republicans total weirdos, will be effective and also not easy to run against.
New pod: Trump/MAGA sneering at Kamala Harris's laugh is a big political blunder. Her fun, optimistic demeanor is an effective antidote to MAGA's vicious, hateful politics. MAGA is too locked into "American carnage" to see this.
@jenancona
and I dig in:
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It’s true. I had no interest in academia when starting at Stanford. But every other profession is also busy work and junk. Most hedge funds do not deliver alpha. Nobody reads your crap in the NYT. Your startup will go bankrupt. Most jobs are a fraud if that’s your sense.
As an undergrad, I thought about going into academia, but I never could understand the publish-or-perish system.
I could see that the vast majority of articles published in my field (history) were dreck.
Why make people publish if they have nothing to say? What is wrong with
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There is a now obscure book everybody interested in optimization should read; we call it the Red Book. The real title is Optimization by Vector Space Methods, by Luenberger. It’s really about convex duality and functional analysis. It’s lovely and how I learned duality.
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I mean I totally get his frustration but actually just starting a whole separate PhD without telling the advisor is so funny that it’s hard to get mad at it.
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@Medisinman4567
@revhowardarson
Nobody wants you to drop it. Do more and make sure every single voter knows what you people think please. Thanks.
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@The_Law_Boy
They seem to do this with everything. Even after the 2016 election they were still incredibly angry
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@ZachWahls
@keithdorejel
You know, rural people also do this exact thing and act like people who live in cities aren’t even American.
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This is an old line from John von Neumann. “People who do not understand mathematics is simple don’t understand how complex the world is.”
People who think agi is imminent aren’t overestimating how quickly ai will improve. They are underestimating how complex the world is. Being an expert on deep learning doesn’t necessarily make you an expert on how the world works.
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I know people are excited by LLMs. They are miraculous despite their issues. But what I constantly have to remind people is that almost everything that runs actual really serious stuff - courts, hospitals - is linear and logistic regression, with variants. Period.
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Statistics is really difficult to teach. I took a course in statistics at Wharton and I think I had done enough math by that point to know about Galois theory or whatever. It was all these cookie cutter hypothesis tests. I retained nothing. I actually learned it in grad school.
When people say we should replace calculus in the high school math sequence by "statistics" what they often mean is something like, "it would be good if students had some statistical literacy." But it is not clear to me that teaching about e.g. chi^2-tests would provide this!
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From “Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman.”
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This reminds me of this very famous slide from
@JeffDean
. This is from 2010 so of course the numbers will be different now. From this great presentation:
A recurring topic (which is relevant far beyond statistics) which I've enjoyed discussing on this website is simply that many { operations, subroutines, ... } are much faster these days than people imagine, and the implications of this may not yet have been fully internalised.
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I hesitate to comment on Columbia but there is a ton of BS on here. Let me give a different perspective. I teach in the School of International & Public Affairs, a place with an actual Middle East Institute and a lot of political content and so on.
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It is a lovely letter, and always puts me in a mood. The most important part:
“Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naive ideals of your own youth, nor what you erroneously imagine your teacher’s ideals are.
Best of luck and happiness.”
This is a letter Feynman wrote to a former student who wrote congratulating him for the Nobel. I’ve posted it before but I really find it worth it to read especially as a student or early stage research person.
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“When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea.” FFS
How Claude Shannon decided on the name "entropy" in information theory (image from the nice survey ):
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@jacob_mauren
@whstancil
This is objectively untrue, his issues barely get covered. For example, have you heard incessant coverage about his disastrous RNC speech or stuff like this link? No.
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@opinonhaver
I’m really not one to get into the shitting on NJ from NYC discourse because I think it’s usually childish, but they are way way past the line here. I hope NY takes them to the cleaners.
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@vanillaopinions
I still can’t wrap my head around how highly correlated it is with terrible opinions
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There is a long and friendly rivalry between Berkeley and Stanford. The funniest instance to me is this one. A senior CS professor was asked why Stanford produces so many more companies. With a look of disgust, he goes, “Berkeley doesn’t produce companies. We produce industries.”
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I worked with a couple of these language foundations kind of guys years ago at Goldman. They were really senior but a couple times we called them. I don’t know what Google is thinking firing them, those are not replaceable people. Anyway you’ll probably have fun at Jane Street.
We're still growing our Python team!
I've heard some talk of layoffs at Google in this space, so, please retweet, and share with anyone you know who might be affected.
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@radleybalko
Virtue signaling against Elon Musk seems better than vice signaling against the Auschwitz Memorial. But what do I know.
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I argued with a mentor of mine, Max Mintz, about this. I think linear algebra is one of the hardest topics in all of math, actually. Since Ben is doing this in the context of Boyd & Vandenberghe I’ll share that Stephen likes to say linear algebra is poorly taught “by tradition.”
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Being a quant (which can mean many things) is so boring. It has no soul in it. It’s the same repetitive thing, endless. There’s a few interesting technical aspects but don’t really do this unless you know a way out.
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This isn’t exactly how this happened, Emmanuel went to him for some reasons I can’t remember and then this got started. I asked Emmanuel about this once.
One of the nuttiest things I've ever heard: apparently Terence Tao got bored at some point and decided to spent a little time doing some applied math and
and yea he then just goes back to doing pure math
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I worked before my PhD and was a bit insecure at the PhD admit weekend. But I let it get out of hand, telling Persi Diaconis “oh, I know I’m starting late” forgetting who I’m talking to. He just grins, I didn’t go to college until I was 25! It’s ok, nothing bad happens. :)
A nice thing about working a little before PhD is you realize the outside option is not bad, you make a lot more money for working less, which allows you to chill a bit. If you'd never worked before PhD your mental model of industry is probably more or less hell on earth
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A thing I think students don’t do enough is going to the physical (math, CS, etc) library at the university. You get a huge amount of information just seeing which books are next to other books, and just looking at the intros and table of contents and stuff.
@eigenknight
Always love books from out of domain, I should dedicate some time to picking interesting things from these( via the help of experts as yourself)
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I usually don’t do this but an AI startup is looking for founding engineers. Old friend of mine and I’m an investor, disclosure. This company is a very good place to learn AI and startup stuff, but it moves very fast and does want comfort with that. It … is run by adults. :)
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@ryxcommar
The degree to which Trump absolutely hates everyone that likes him is genuinely hilarious
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A quasi-math topic I always was really interested in but is almost never formally taught is how to write mathematics. It’s its own genre and requires mixing different languages together. Here are a couple good resources if interested.
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I wasn’t that successful but here are a few I liked if it helps. These are the nicknames, if you don’t know ask and I’ll give you the titles.
Baby Rudin
Big Rudin
CLRS
Lewis and Papadimitriou
Kreyszig
Boyd and Vandenberghe
Luenberger, red
Dummit and Foote
Rockafellar
Feller
I wish more researchers who have been successful in their fields would write a minimal list of textbooks and / or skills that they usually bring to the table
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I was born in the US, but my dad took the IIT exam and placed 6th in India. That is high, obviously. When he came to the US, he went to MIT and Stanford; my mom at Berkeley. But it is very difficult to go through the immigration process even then. It was very hard on my parents.
The US should just offer a visa to anyone who scores in the top 1,000. This exam is insanely hard
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A dirty secret of optimization theory is that it’s actually unbelievably boring, with a few exceptions (which get more useless as they get more interesting). It’s probably the closest to weapons manufacturing I’d get. What is strange is that people who work in it also feel this.
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I don’t think my advisor will mind me sharing this. When we were working on ADMM, Boyd was supposed to present this to the statistics seminar at Stanford. He panicked and was scared we had done nothing. So many people came they changed buildings and it has 20K citations now.
currently in the "math behind all my proofs is trivial and a talented second grader could do it" phase
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Inspired by some conversation in here, here’s some advice especially to PhD students managing their todo lists, especially if you feel stuck. You can break the tasks into crazily granular things. You’ll actually get more done and feel a sense of progress.
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There’s something very very funny to me about someone suddenly discovering Terry Tao now. I mean if you’re not in mathy things why would you know but still, hilarious.
recently learned about this guy called terry tao
holy shit this guy is insane
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A thing that would be pretty cool is an oral history of numerical linear algebra, BLAS, LAPACK, all that hardcore stuff. It’s hard to think of almost anything outside stuff the PL people do or SQLite or Linux kernel, BSD at this level. Has anyone done this?
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I read this early in undergrad partly because the PL people were the only people nice enough to let me flail around to no use to them. This book is written in a crazily difficult way (for the author, not reader) because it explicitly shows why each concept needs to be introduced.
I started reading "Types and Programming Languages" (Pierce, 2002). It begins by describing the seemingly mystical qualities programmers associate with statically typed languages.
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@ArmandDoma
Yea. My dad got sixth place in India. Went through a fucking nightmare with my mom to get US citizenship.
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@opinonhaver
NYC alone is 9% of the US economy and we famously don’t care about anywhere else.
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Math book recs. Oh no. Impossible so here are some classics worth looking at regardless of whether you like them. Abbreviated titles and bias to older stuff.
Halmos, Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces
Knuth, Concrete Mathematics
Walter Rudin, all
Feller, Probability, all
currently culling through old tweets and planning to convert some of the more 'useful' ones (such as the attached) into blog posts; bumping this one now in case things don't go to plan (!).
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Convex sets are the intersections of the halfspaces containing them.
What is your favourite mathematical result? Doesn’t have to be sophisticated or anything.
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@karaswisher
I know exactly why they don’t want to get into a mudfight but it’s really time for Apple to put their foot down also.
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This is great and you should feel good. When I first met Stephen at Stanford on the PhD admit weekend I described a vague idea I had. He laughed and said, that’s good, that’s a thing called dual decomposition. This is how we ended up working on ADMM.
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@BartenderHemry
These people are just a genuine menace to society. Can’t imagine having to spend all my time fighting with these idiots
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People are asking what this is from. I *think* it’s from his daughter Michelle, so it’s probably in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, which is his collected letters. I don’t think he ever told this himself.
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Friends of mine were basically kicked out. They’re senior people in London, Tehran, etc now. So pointless.
The presidents of other countries are actively recruiting global talent while the United States is kicking out people with STEM PhDs 🤦
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This is great news for other countries. Don’t waste your time in the UK.
From today, the majority of foreign university students cannot bring family members to the UK.
In 2024, we’re already delivering for the British people.
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The beating heart of optimization is distinguishing between the problem intended to be solved and a method used to try to solve it. This is constantly conflated and confused in machine learning in particular.
Something I dislike that is quite common is thinking very hard about how to solve an optimization problem while only thinking very superficially about what it is you are optimizing.
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It seems some people like this a lot. I think it’s weird, especially explaining the subscript. Is this a nouveau ML/DL thing intended to make it more readable for software engineers etc? Not criticizing the authors at all but don’t get it.
really love when authors do things like explain equations in-line with colors etc... just makes papers so much easier to read.
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I had another thought about the question, how could one read so many math/CS books. One thing is, you don’t read all of them cover to cover. Two, it helps a LOT (or it helped me) to use multiple books in tandem when learning a thing. They explain stuff differently.
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This is a bit much. The actual serious advice I’ll give PhD applicants is be VERY careful taking advice off Twitter or the web in general, because the conventions vary widely between fields. Do *not* take advice from a CS person on how to apply to chemistry and vice versa.
In your application letter for
#PhD
/ postdoc, NEVER ever say:
"Hi prof"
"Hello"
"Dear Professor"
"Greetings of the day"
If you do, your email will be immediately deleted by 99% of professors.
▫️
Only start your applications with “Dear Prof. [second_name],”
And don’t
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@HegelwCrmCheese
Lol, my first job out of college was on Wall Street. I was nervous about filling out the tax form wrong. HR laughed and said, don’t worry, they’ll get the money.
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It’s not specific to Muslims but many don’t realize how common this is for many people. I’m not Muslim and I was once asked in a very fancy place “what’s your opinion of 9/11?” Fortunately I was able to recall Kumail’s joke and say well it was a tragedy, we lost 19 of our best.
A lawyer in New York stalked and harassed a Muslim man while he was delivering Uber Eats in Brooklyn. She commanded him to take off the Kuffiyeh on his neck and proceeded to stalk and harass him in her car. She called him a terrorist, to which he responded, "Be original, I
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Hey, this is cool, I didn’t know it was named after David Blackwell. One interesting thing about Blackwell was the emphasis he placed on teaching; he used to say a lot of his discoveries came from trying to find ways to explain things better to students.
.
@nvidia
just debuted its next-generation Blackwell AI chip and it's named after Dr. David Blackwell, the 1st Black full professor at UC Berkley, 7th Black person to get a math PhD + who wrote one of the 1st textbooks on Bayesian statistics.
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@yashar
@The_John_Becker
No, they’re saying it because they know the US press are unmitigated idiots and this is not going to look like Prime Minister’s Questions. It will be another trash heap.
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Yes. I threw one. It was “The Master Algorithm” by Pedro Domingos, the worst piece of shit I have ever read in my entire life. I have a lower opinion of Bill Gates because he endorsed this horrendous book.
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Stephen Boyd is this guy but does it in his group only. He would actually review not just the content and writing and typesetting of our papers but the LaTeX code style (even if the typesetting produced might be identical).
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