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Comment by nonsequ | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone shed some light on what 'Director of Engineering' might mean at Google? It sounds rather unassuming for a person of his stature.

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For a long time it was the highest grade you could be hired in as since Google didn't feel like the title "Vice President" in Google meant the same thing as other places. I know VP's they gave offers to, who turned down the offer on the basis of having to take the title of director. At one time you had a limited amount of time post hire to 'prove yourself' or be managed out of the organization.

I found the hire curious from the standpoint that Kurzweil's tendency to handwave rather than retreat to data has historically been a red flag in the hiring process at Google. This tended to unfairly penalize theorists over experimentalists at Google. One wonders if they've changed.

I remember him giving a tech talk and talking about how many computers you'd need to simulate a brain and how nobody would put that together for years yet, and chuckling knowingly :-).

His tendency to handwave rather than retreat to data? What the heck are you talking about? Have you seen how many graphs he puts in his presentations?

You think he's a theorist rather than an experimentalist? How can you possibly get that idea with all of his game-changing inventions?

So he gave a tech-talk at Google, around 2008, and yes he had lots of graphs and such but during the Q&A session he kept retreating into generalized ideas rather than data. I recall the question about how he came up with his numbers for machines to hold a consciousness as one such exchange.

The impression I certainly got was that his approach is to theorize about something, then design experiments to test out his theory. As opposed to running a bunch of experiments and then figuring out a theory that would explain the collected data.

That said, I've got mad respect for his work and have enjoyed his talks and writings. Your comment though suggests you think 'theorist' is a negative in some connotation? Why is that?

> The impression I certainly got was that his approach is to theorize about something, then design experiments to test out his theory. As opposed to running a bunch of experiments and then figuring out a theory that would explain the collected data.

There's nothing wrong with this, as you've written it. (There might be a problem with his implementation.) All else being equal, I trust a theory which has made ten accurate predictions over a theory which merely explains ten previous observations.

You would be making a mistake unless the predictions had a high degree of "unexpectedness" or the ten prior observations lacked coherence.

If one person develops a theory and makes ten predictions which turn out to be true; and if a second person observes the same ten things, and then develops a theory without knowing the first; then I consider this stronger evidence in favor of the first theory than of the second. (The second might e.g. be more elegant, in which case I might prefer it anyway.)

This is true whatever the observations are. If they're unsurprising, then we already had a good theory, in which case I question the need for the two new ones, but that applies to both equally.

It may be that Kurzweil is falling into the trap of misinterpreting his results to fit his theory, but that can be done just as well when you try to base a theory off existing data. On the other hand, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy can only happen if you collect data before coming up with your theory.

I don't care for Kurzweil but I don't see anything wrong with hypothesizing about something and then designing experiments to test that hypothesis, rather than just being a mindless "data scientist." :) Sounds pretty normal to me.

> His tendency to handwave rather than retreat to data? What the heck are you talking about? Have you seen how many graphs he puts in his presentations?

The ability to present something in graph form does not mean that it isn't handwavy bafflegab rather than data.

One need look no further than his absurd joke of a "paradigm shifts"/"countdown to the singularity" graph.

Director is generally the management level just below VP.

I don't know the specifics of this situation though, so take it with a grain of salt. reply

Signaling is important in the maintenance and direction of culture. Whoever made this decision is making a statement about what sorts of projects they want google to work on in the future.

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