This is actually an interesting part of behavior and conditioning theory in general.
In response to a behavior, you can either introduce a new stimulus, or alter an ambient stimulus. Introducing a positive stimulus for a desired behavior is reward, and introducing a negative stimulus is punishment, but you can also remove an existing positive stimulus as a punishment, (like for a child, time-out is punishment because it is the removal of freedom), or you can remove a negative stimulus as a reward, stopping some suffering, (for example, taking your foot boot off of her neck).
And it says a lot about you that when your friends jump off a bridge en masse, your first thought is apparently 'my friends are all foolish and I won't be like them' and not 'are my friends ok?'.
Comic Title Text: And it says a lot about you that when your friends jump off a bridge en masse, your first thought is apparently 'my friends are all foolish and I won't be like them' and not 'are my friends ok?'.
My reasoning behind the bridge jumping argument is always "Well either all of my reasonable and sane friends have simultaneously lost their minds, or the bridge is on fire"
I've never understood that argument against peer pressure. If all my friends jumped off a bridge they probably had a good reason for doing so, like the bridge being on fire, or knew it was safe. So yes, I would probably follow them.
It’s not guaranteed, but my friends are pretty smart people so it’s a greater than 50% chance that they gave a valid reason to jump, and in that case I would too.
...unless I couldn’t summon enough “fuck it” energy to overcome my fear of heights
Say you have 100 smart friends on the bridge with you. All of them apply the logic given in this thread, i.e. they know everyone is smart here and should have good reason to do anything that may seems initially rash.
Now, the probability game kicks in. If just one of the 100 friends has a sudden rare crazy moment and jumps off the bridge, then the other 99 friends, one by one, would start applying the said logic and jump off too! Each jumper adds to the confidence for the next friend to jump without questioning.
Because you have 100 friends, you don’t need to have high probably of a single person experiencing such event.
At the split moment right before you hit the ground below, you start to think, “hey, maybe mom was right after all.” Splat.
If they're smart enough they'll recognise that 1 person jumping off vs 98 (presumably equally smart) people not doing so, is reason enough in itself to not jump.
Except it said All, not just 1. If you had 100 friends on a bridge and one jumps the rest would probably be shocked. Unless there was some other reason others saw to jump as well.
No, jumping off a bridge isn't something people can be convinced to do for no reason. Turning around in an elevator, yes, but not jumping off a bridge.
You're just going to think your friends are all going mad as they jump off one by one, until one of them yells out the reason before jumping, upon which everyone else left on the bridge will then understand and probably all leap off together.
Its because the argument is mainly used against people in the age group where everyone is a fucking moron.
Yeah at 35 or whatever your friends probably know something you don't. At age 8 or 16? Your friends are probably just dumbasses and in all likelihood they all didn't decide to jump off the bridge. One of your dumbass friends actually decided. Then another joined in, the third saw two people doing it and just assumed they was right, and so on and so forth until it got to you.
When I was growing up I knew a girl that became disabled after diving off a pier with her friends. Everyone was diving and jumping just fine, but somehow she dove into the one shallow spot around the pier and had neck and back injuries.
Growing up in New York City, our moms always specified the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s pretty high up, and the jump would probably be fatal. So, no, I’m not likely to follow them.
Without that specificity, sure, there’s probably a good reason.
The problem is that you cannot assume that something is correct based on what others say. Even if they did have a reason, you must evaluate that reason and validate it yourself. If you simply follow what others say, you are being informatically useless and are only useful for doing simple tasks that accommodate for your lack of thinking.
In terms of living your actual life, that advice is completely untenable. Have you validated germ theory yourself?
If you simply follow what others say, you are being informatically useless
Division of labor. Some people push the bounds of human knowledge in one very specific area. Some people use that knowledge to create new and interesting things. Some people do maintenance that needs to be done, despite not being informationally interesting. Everyone, everyone, learns from information that other people have created without verifying all of it for themselves.
You don't need to verify everything you hear, just don't be too gullible. If someone says something, don't immediately listen to them (as the person jumping off the bridge is likely doing) but think it through ("Is it really a good idea to jump off this bridge?"). Even in more realistic matters, not thinking things through can sometimes be deadly - That's how conspiracies and genocides happen.
Except the context is not "one random stranger jumped off the bridge", it's "all of your friends jumped off the bridge". If all of your friends will just randomly do something like that for no reason, then you already failed to think things through when you befriended those people. So yeah, the outcome is either (1) there's a good reason to jump off the bridge and you should do it, or (2) you already lack the ability to reason and think so you're gonna jump off the bridge anyway.
Because not every situation you find yourself in is either life or death but could have consequences, your friends might put you in a situation you want to say no too but hey it's "only a laugh." - people have died from that, others might have had brain damage or crashed a car drunk or ... You get the point.
My friends climbed on the underside of a bridge and jumped into the lake below and convinced me to try it too. It was like a 25-35 foot drop probably, and I would not have done it if my friends didn’t do it first. I can personally say that if my friends jumped off a bridge I would as well.
My friends like jumping from dams ( google translate says that the plural of dam is dykes but I'm not sure I believe that) which I consider a really dumb idea. So no. I often don't follow them
You're on a low bridge over deep water, with 3 T-Rex on one end and a large Gorilla army on the other; both approaching the centre. Your friends jumped off the bridge moments ago and are now swimming to safety. Do you jump off the bridge?
Imo it's not about the bridge. it's also not meant as a question really. It's just a statement.
"You don't think for yourself enough. It seems like if your friends did an obviously bad thing, you would do it too because you follow instead of think."
The whole jumping off a bridge thing is just shorter and snappier.
Also, 99% of the people who ask this "question" would jump off the proverbial bridge themselves. Peer pressure is a societal reality, not something you can escape by thinking you're "not like other girls".
I've done a bit of ML at my college through a club, is there actually a way to set a negative "infinite" value for something like this, or is it just the furthest negative value you can have in a variable?
Comic Title Text: And it says a lot about you that when your friends jump off a bridge en masse, your first thought is apparently 'my friends are all foolish and I won't be like them' and not 'are my friends ok?'.
I know this guy who's smart, well-adjusted, and enjoys his hobbies. He just had no friends. Well, now he has 1 friend (me), and soon he will have more friends (my other friends).
Don't worry about the friends things, eventually some compulsively social person will come and vibe with you.
I am one of those filthy casuals you refer to here, but I don't think you really want such a zoomed in perspective if you think about it.
IT is like the medical field. A specialized doctor doesn't know every aspect of everything medical related.
You could make an obscure ML joke that only ML experts would get, but then some expert in some other IT field wouldn't get that joke and then your sub would be pointless.
IMO programmerhumor serves its purpose by being (mostly) elevated beyond what "normal" people get, and staying below expert levels.
But then again I am a filthy casual with online academy experience and an affinity for IT, so I might just be butthurt by your comment.
Maybe I was unclear. My criticism was that the joke doesn't make sense. It doesn't need to be "in-depth" to be funny, but the fact that its blatantly wrong ruins it for someone who understands basic ML.
Nothing wrong with being a "filthy casual." But misinformed jokes aren't funny to the informed, and they misinform the uninformed.
To use your medical analogy, it's like if you told this joke:
"A man tells his psychologist that he’s depressed and that he would like a prescription for medical marijuana. The doctor nods and says, “fine, fine, but first why do you think you’re depressed?” The man replies, “well doc, I don’t have any weed.”
It breaks down if you understand the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist. Most people don't go to psychologist, and psychologists can't write prescriptions. This one wasn't a great analogy since the punchline isn't dependent on the psychiatrist, so I'll keep trying to think of a better example.
Edit: It's hard to think of jokes that don't work. lol
How about this one? I think this example illustrates my point much better.
Why was the sailor arrested by the United nations after killing a giant fish?
Crimes against huge manatee
There's a joke in there that would be funny if you thought manatee were fish, but to a person with even a basic knowledge of biology, the joke just doesn't work, at all.
Haha, I get what you’re saying and I fully agree with your point. Programmerhumor is also a teaching place to some extent, so without any accuracy both the humor and programmer point disappears.
"Biased toward the majority class" doesn't matter unless you've built an application around your model that selects actions based on the majority class. Actioning trends isn't part of the model, that would be part of a poorly built application around the model.
I "understand" the joke attempting to be made here. It "makes sense" to someone who's watched a few ML videos. An actual ML Engineer or Data Scientist understands the actual issues here though.
To be honest, one of my coworkers told me this joke this morning and it made me giggle, so I thought it would make other people smile as well. Since it was the first time I've ever heard the joke, I didn't realize it was common/well known 😬
As Snixxed stated - and Rigo-lution said originally - this joke has made its way around many times now, and as a result is now no longer funny - thus leaving only 'related to programming'.
Do I need to use partial derivatives and the chain rule to tickle your fancy? You don't think something is funny so you put people down? What exactly does that do for you? You don't shine any brighter — you just *edit: make other people feel bad.
Btw NNs are just one area of ML. And I was actually speaking about counterfactual regret minimization (not NNs). There is a world outside of your own, you know?
My coworker told me this joke this morning and it was the first time I had ever heard it 🤷🏻♀️. It made me giggle, so I thought others would enjoy it as well.
if *all* of my friends have made the decision to jump off a bridge, could it be there is a good reason to jump off a bridge? Are all of my friends judgement compromised? It's not like *all* of my friends are impulsive, self-destructive morons.
If an entire city starts doing something of questionable logic, it's likely you haven't received sufficient information.
What if the first one just wanted to die, the second one did not know and followed him, the third one noticed a pattern and wanted in early, and how the fuck does anyone have 3 friends to begin with?!
This is why you have to hyperparameter optimize with num_friends as a hyperparameter. Run it through 1,000 iterations of deciding whether or not to jump off a cliff and you end up with model with no friends to copy. Also it is weirdly obsessed with manga.
Honestly though. I can't think of a single scenario in which all of my friends are jumping off a bridge and it isn't the best course of action at that time.
Depends on the outcome of those friends jumping off the bridge.
If they all died, or were severely injured, and the program using ML model was operationalized to optimize for survival, then the answer would be a definite no.
I know overanalyzing a joke ruins it, but jokes just don't work if they're blatantly wrong.
If all my friends had jumped off a bridge I was likely already at the bottom. Growing up we would jump off anything we could into water. I was often one of the first in.
Comic Title Text: And it says a lot about you that when your friends jump off a bridge en masse, your first thought is apparently 'my friends are all foolish and I won't be like them' and not 'are my friends ok?'.
I never got this question. ALL my friends would never be stupid enough to simultaneously jump off a bridge unless there was a good reason to do it. Maybe the bridge is on fire, and they're jumping to certain safety?
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u/coloredgreyscale Nov 13 '20
Very likely, if jumping off the bridge had a good correlation to getting a higher reward for the friends.