Bad Hypothesis Contest

This ICLR 2021 social is organised in the format of a contest. Each participant will prepare/improvise a 5 minutes stand-up, where they present a bad hypothesis (that is clearly ridiculous and untrue) and provide “evidence” (spurious correlations) that supports this hypothesis.

We provide a list of hypotheses to choose from below, however everyone is welcomed to propose their own bad hypothesis.

Our format is inspired by BAHfest.

Social

The social will take place Thu 6 May 6 p.m. CEST — 8 p.m. CEST and can be accessed here (ICLR registration required).

Participate

We’d love to have you present your bad hypothesis! You can either present one of the example hypotheses below, or even better, come up with your own. Just fill out this form (deadline: 30 April) — we can only select a limited number of hypotheses to be presented at our social due to time constraints, but everyone is invited to participate the social!

Examples

• Neural networks are bad at generalisation because they already achieved consciousness and are trying to destroy humanity’s technological advancement
• Generators and discriminators are tired of being adversarial and just want to be friends
• RL agents get emotionally attached to specific random seeds
• The reason RL is bad at Montezuma’s revenge is that the game is just boring (credit)

Non-machine learning hypotheses are also welcomed! For instance:

• Time travel is impossible because time doesn’t exist
• Water polo players are big because they soak up all the water
• Reviewing has a lot of problems because there are no bad papers anymore
• Dutch food looks very bad because Amsterdam wants to discourage tourism
• People like dogs because they remind them of pokemon
• Mice in New York steal pizza because New York doesn’t want tourists

The contest & Prize

This social is organised by Elise van der Pol, Karen Ullrich and Yuge (Jimmy) Shi. They will be judges to the contest and offer their completely fair and unbiased opinions based on the scientific facts you present. Once all presentations are finished, judges and audience will vote for their favourite bad hypothesis, and the winner will be officially granted the title of super cool!