Reflections on AI's Bitter Lesson and the Decline of Decision Theory
By
slygent
An everything bagel for the brain. Substantive, layered, well-seasoned.
Summary
The author reflects on their experience writing about decision theory being abandoned in mainstream AI, only to be told by Hacker News commenters they were 'annoyed at the Bitter Lesson.' This prompted them to read Rich Sutton's 2019 essay, which argues that general computational methods consistently outperform human-crafted knowledge systems. The author explores how this 'bitter lesson' relates to their original point about decision theory's decline, noting that the misreading actually proves their argument about how AI discourse has shifted away from formal reasoning toward data-driven approaches.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledI wrote an essay arguing that decision theory had been quietly abandoned by mainstream AI — not because it stopped working, but because deep learning absorbed all the oxygen.
A commenter informed me I was 'annoyed at the Bitter Lesson.' I hadn't read the Bitter Lesson. This proved awkward for approximately forty-five seconds, after which it proved illuminating.
Rich Sutton's essay, published in 2019, argues that general methods leveraging computation consistently beat methods built on hand-crafted human knowledge.
The misreading proves the point.
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