For what it's worth, it's a very mainstream opinion in the physics community that Hinton did not at all deserve a nobel prize in physics for his work. But that's because his work, and wasnt impactful at all to the physics community

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Lerc 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think Hinton himself has made that observation.

In a recent talk he made a quip that he had to change some slides because if you have a Nobel prize in physics you should at least get the units right.

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jimsimmons 3 days ago | parent [-]

Honest person would have rejected it and protected the prize's honour

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pretzellogician 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's a joke, right? Turning down community recognition and a million dollars to make an unclear statement about which category the prize was awarded in?

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Kranar 3 days ago | parent [-]

The argument had to do with honesty while your justification is that money and popularity are worth more than being honest.

Now perhaps Hinton does deserve the award, but certainly it should not be because of the reasons you cite: money and popularity.

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pretzellogician 3 days ago | parent [-]

I said nothing of the sort. Being "honest" does not mean you have to give a middle finger to a panel that nominated you. The point of that Nobel was clearly recognition for their achievement; the category choice was mainly irrelevant.

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Kranar 3 days ago | parent [-]

No being honest does not mean that and had you said that I'd have no basis upon which to object to your comment.

You refuted an argument about being honest about accepting an award on the basis that the award pays a lot of money and grants one a great deal of popularity.

If your argument didn't involve money and popularity, then why did you choose those two specific criteria as the justification for accepting this award?

I want to be clear, I am not claiming that Dr. Hinton accepted the award in a dishonest manner or that he did it for money, I am simply refuting your position that money is a valid reason to disregard honesty for accepting a prestigious award.

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pretzellogician 3 days ago | parent [-]

So we agree; you aren't claiming the award was accepted in a dishonest manner, and I never claimed anything about honesty being an issue. I simply found the idea of Hinton rejecting the award for the "honour of the Nobel [choice of category]" to be a silly idea.

	▲	jrowen 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Your indignation here seems a bit unwarranted. You definitely did bring the arguments about recognition and money into play and then basically gaslit someone for responding to them. You could have simply said that you misspoke.

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bgnn 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's up to the committee to protect that honour

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cs702 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, I agree with that. When I first saw the announcement, my immediate thought was something like "huh, the Nobel guys sure want to make sure they've given an award for something related to AI which they can describe as foundational." However, I do think Hinton, Bengio, and LeCun deserved their Turing Award.

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fooker 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> wasnt impactful at all to the physics community

There are two reasons why Hinton got the prize.

A good majority of modern physics research depends on ML in some aspect. Look at the list of talks at any physics conference and count the number of talks that mention ML in the title.

And the 'physics community' has not produced any fundamental physics for a while. Look at the last several years of physics nobel prize. You can categorize the last ten years of prizes into two categories: engineering breakthroughs, and confirming important predictions. Both are impportant, but lacking fundamental physics breakthroughs, they are not clearly ahead in impact compared to ML.

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cutlilacs 2 days ago | parent [-]

I’m confused why confirming important predictions is considered less impactful than ML in physics. Isn’t experimental confirmation exactly what’s required for a Nobel Prize?

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fooker 2 days ago | parent [-]

Experimental confirmation of X makes X great physics and X worthy of a nobel prize, not the engineering setup needed for the experimental confirmation.

The setup by itself can also general technique that is useful beyond confirming one thing (example LIGO). But then, ML is itself is a more general technique that has enabled a lot more new physics than one new experiment.

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cutlilacs 2 days ago | parent [-]

I would couple the Experiment and the theory together, and treat them both deserving of the prize, but not sure how it works in practice. As for the general technique of ML, sure, it's important but it seems to me that it's a tool that can be used in Physics, and the specific implementation/use-case is the actual thing that's noteworthy, not the general tool. I wouldn't consider a new mathematical theorem by itself to be physics and deserving of a physics prize, I view general ML the same way.

	▲	fooker 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Ideally this would be coupled like you say, but often in physics these are increasingly further apart, often by several decades. And a large number of predictions being made now are unlikely to be ever confirmed.

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DalasNoin 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

At least among friends who are studying physics at university, many have had some kind of ML model as part of their thesis project, like an ML model to estimate early universe background radiation. Whether that's actually useful for the field is another question.