Jason Antic

3/ Here's the thing about high complexity: It's very easy to fool yourself into reaching wrong conclusions about cause/effect. In fact that's probably the norm. Why is that? Well a good part of that is that our working memory simply isn't equipped to deal many moving parts.

4/ You've probably experienced the severe difficulty of trying to recall more than 7-8 digits that you've just seen. Now imagine that you're trying to reason about a system with millions of parameters, many more connections, and innumerable interactions with the outside world.

5/ What's the answer to getting this complexity under control (somewhat)? Well good abstractions- ideally "lossless"- go a long way. Turning many things into one vastly reduces cognitive load and increases your chances of success.

6/ This is why people who say "chemistry is just physics" or "biology is just chemistry" are not just being annoyingly reductionist, but are also quite frankly wrong. These abstracted levels of study are absolutely necessary if we are to make sense of the complexity.

7/ Hence when I set out to deal with deep learning, I didn't think just digging deep into math and trying to view everything from that lens was going to get me far. For one, I'm just ok with math. Passable. It'd be a big, non-motivating uphill battle.

8/ But more importantly, I thought it would be much more productive to focus on honing in on the abstractions of the immense complexity you're dealing with. That is, to develop the skill of being able to intuit the interactions of the system at a high level.

9/ What does that even look like? Well first I think @fastdotai gives a great foundation for that, as they start with big picture abstractions that were clearly hard-earned and passed on to the students as very easy to digest. That was huge for me.

10/ This is in contrast to the bottom up method that you see in fields like math, where the reward of actually using it practically and intuitively never seems in your grasp until years down the road.