38 Quotes by Pedro Domingos

If you had witnessed life on Earth up to ten thousand years ago, that would not have prepared you for what was to come.

God created not species but the algorithm for creating species.

You could even say that the God of Genesis himself is a programmer: language, not manipulation, is his tool of creation. Words become worlds.

Knowledge is traded in both directions – manually entered knowledge for use in learners, induced knowledge for addition to knowledge bases – but at the end of the day the rationalist-empiricist fault line runs right down that border, and crossing it is not easy.

For a Bayesian, in fact, there is no such thing as the truth; you have a prior distribution over hypotheses, after seeing the data it becomes the posterior distribution, as given by Bayes’ theorem, and that’s all.

Learning is forgetting the details as much as it is remembering the important parts.

Machine learners, like all scientists, resemble the blind men and the elephant: one feels the trunk and thinks it’s a snake, another leans against the leg and thinks it’s a tree, yet another touches the tusk and thinks it’s a bull. Our aim is to touch each part without jumping to conclusions; and once we’ve touched all of them, we will try to picture the whole elephant.

Common sense is important not just because your mom taught you so, but because computers don’t have it.

A good learner is forever walking the narrow path between blindness and hallucination.