Generating a set of weights is not learning.

would you say that airplanes don't fly because they don't flap their wings? it's possible to achieve the same things with different approaches.

	▲	bigfishrunning 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I would say airplanes fly, but I wouldn't say that submarines swim. Things have a bit more nuance, and the field of "learning" isn't as well understood as the ML proponents claim it is.

That is a strong statement. I guess you are telling Machine Learning to go fuck itself.

No, Machine Learning is an unfortunate name for a well documented process for creating black-box classifiers. The process is good, the name is not.

And what, to your mind, would classify something as learning? I assume that your position is not the hard "only humans/living creatures can learn"

	▲	bigfishrunning 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Honestly, I'm not sure. But I do know that there is an entire field of cognitive science dedicated to understanding learning, and quite frankly it's in its infancy. Evidence of this is that every elementary school introduces new teaching techniques from time to time, and very rarely do they result in any benefit to the people who are doing the learning (more often they benefit consultants...). However, the current process of "Machine Learning" (which is a semi-random parameter descent/evolutionary replacement process) is unlikely to be equivalent to the way people learn, because we aren't copying/competing/replacing our brain constantly. People are actually very good at learning, but our brain material replaces itself partially and relatively slowly (when compared to how a neural network is trained).