Effective learning ≠ overfitting

And he soon developed a strain of fly that learnt so fast that it got the message after a single lesson whereas other flies needed ten lessons to learn to fear a smell that was reliably followed by an electric shock. Tully described these flies as having photographic memories; far from being clever, they over-generalised horribly, like a person who reads too much into the fact that the sun was shining when he had a bicycle accident and refuses thereafter to bicycle on sunny days. (Great human mnemonists, such as the famous Russian Sherashevsky, experience exactly this problem. They cram their heads with so much trivia that they cannot see the wood for the trees. Intelligence requires a judicious mixture of remembering and forgetting.

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  • Comparable to machine learning: mixture of bias (remembering) & generalization (forgetting)

机器学习让我意识到,bias 只有在信息不足的时候才是 bias

任何结果由什么过程导致,这个数量永远可以增加
因素的数量越多就越精确
这个在模型很粗糙的时候叫 generalization,但逐渐更加精细就是 variation 了

正如 sapolsky 所举例的三个仙人掌,一个基因在不同气候下对它们高度的排序完全相反,正说明“控制变量”的这些被控制的变量,是带有巨大 interaction(depends)信息和条件的

那么一个有效的模型,在越精细后、越能够模拟真实反映后,对人来说就越难以用几个恒定的关系/系数/比例/趋势来衡量,因为它们每一个都建立在彼此微小变化的基础上,构成一个非常复杂、易变的网络,共同影响最终的结果

反之为了让人能够理解,我们就不得不对模型进行简化,对不必要的细节抹去,留下一些诚实说是偏见,但也比过度繁杂的信息更有实际用处的规律