[Reading] Machine Learning – the Emperor’s Clothes?

I’ve been obsessing about machine learning for a while but haven’t found a way to really get into it. This is a great read that might finally motivate me to dive right in, in a way that I haven’t seen before.

Machine Learning – Is the emperor wearing clothes by Cassie Kozyrkov, chief decision intelligence engineer from Google.

Here is the visual summary about machine learning from the article:

If this still confuses you, here is another simplified version:

Machine learning for poets

If that was confusing, maybe you’ll like this analogy more: A poet picks an approach (algorithm) to putting words on paper. The approach determines the resulting poetic form (boundary shape) — will it be a haiku or a sonnet? Once they’re finished optimally fleshing out their sonnet, it is now a poem (model).

It’s embarrassingly simple in a way every one of us should embrace.

Machine learning may be prosaic, but what you can do with it is incredible! It lets helps you write the code you couldn’t come up with yourself, allowing you to automate the ineffable. Don’t hate it for being simple. Levers are simple too, but they can move the world.

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