Deep Learning’s Rapid Progress Leads Us to Feel Overwhelmed

Deep Learning’s Rapid Progress Leads Us to Feel Overwhelmed

We should not be rushing ourselves to learn anything quickly.

Deep Learning is reaching its best year of progress. It also becomes the buzzword for the recent year by any stakeholders. Because of that, there’s a lot of resources that exist, such as courses, papers, communities, and many more.

And amazingly, most of the resources are given at no cost, and it’s publicly accessible on the internet. Therefore, Deep Learning becomes available for communities around the world regardless of what’s their background and where they represent.

As those factors make Deep Learning so famous this time, some effects will affect to us. One of them is affecting our mental health. With that vast amount of resources, it leads us to become overwhelmed.

Feel overwhelmed is a feeling where you become frustrated because of some factors. If we don’t treat it really great, it will lead us to become unmotivated to do many things.

Yoshua Bengio, one of the winners of 2018 Turing Award and the famous deep learning researcher, recently publishes an article on his blog about rethinking how the publication in machine learning would like to be. It resembles to a manifesto called Slow Science. I’ve quoted it, and what is said is like this,

We do need time to think. We do need time to digest. We do need time to mis­understand each other, especially when fostering lost dialogue between humanities and natural sciences. We cannot continuously tell you what our science means; what it will be good for; because we simply don’t know yet. Science needs time.

— Bear with us, while we think.

Based on the quotes above, it shows that, as a scientist, we should slow down ourself to achieve things. What he really wants is that the field should have more conversations to it. Therefore, it could produce a breakthrough, or it could be new inspirations.

The concept itself is not just for the scientist, but also for us, as a learner, to slow us down to achieve more from the field.

Now, let me ask you these questions,

• How does your feeling right now with the vast amount of Deep Learning resources?
• How much you’ve recently read the new Deep Learning research papers?
• What kind of things you’ve already learned about Deep Learning?

Probably you will answer that you’ve learned a lot, and also you feel okay while learning Deep Learning. Are you sure with that? Maybe you will answer it yes or no. But if you already open so many resources and don’t feel that you’ve learned any single things from it, you should take a break.

We may want to learn so many things, and we want to achieve many things, but don’t rush on it. We have to slow ourself down, or it could lead us to become unmotivated.