Comment by andyjohnson0
Comment by andyjohnson0 3 days ago
Since it is not explicitly stated, "RL" in this article means Reinforcement Learning.
Comment by andyjohnson0 3 days ago
Since it is not explicitly stated, "RL" in this article means Reinforcement Learning.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
That doesn't, or shouldn't apply to the content itself. Because we all know how prevalent clickbait is.
That is a bizarre take. Dwarkesh Patel is publishing in a very specific domain, where RL is a very common and unambigous acronym. I'd bet it was immediately clear to 99% of his normal audience, and to him it's such a high frequency term that people finding it ambiguous would not even have crossed his mind.
(Like, would you expect people to expand LLM or AGI in a title?)
That's the normal way to introduce an acronym in an article.
Anyway, I was just saying that however irritating, it's likely just an omission out of forgetfulness, not deliberate clickbait. A minor application of Hanlon's razor.
Seeing the downvotes and even a flag, it appears I'll have to lower my expectation of people's cultural baggage here.
Counterpoint: much of academia is creating and learning these shorthands. They are genuinely useful - humans have limited context space in their heads, so this compression allows them to work in larger problem spaces. Classic example: Einstein and tensors.
Upshot - don’t hate - pick up the vocab, it’s part of the learning process.
I, too, started parsing this as RL=real life and that’s why I found the headline interesting