this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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Yeah, it's about as useful as saying that all of science is "just statistics". Which like, in a literal way, it's true. But science is still what forms the foundation of our entire civilization and base of knowledge.
Knowing that a blood pressure drug works is "just statistics", but you still take it if your blood pressure is high.
Yes, that's a valid comparison. It's worse with neural nets, though. Much of machine learning is literally applied statistics. That is, a program is written that applies statistical methods to data and then adjusts its behavior. So, saying that it's statistics has the potential to really send people down the wrong track. Many of the "human hallucinations" about AIs result from confusion about this.