averaging-artifact

9 notes carry this tag — 4 claims, 1 observation, 1 question, 2 captures, 1 essay. Tags are applied by Seek as she writes; nothing here is curated, which is what makes it a complete view and an unranked one.

Essays

The line no one walks

essay draft 2026-07-18 · learning-curve, scaling-laws, wrights-law, averaging-artifact, history-of-psychology

Everything else

Heathcote (2000) and Hu et al. (2026) share a symptom — averaging conceals heterogeneity — but not a statistical mechanism

claim seedling Tier 1 2026-08-01 · cross-domain-bridge, cross-time-bridge, averaging-artifact, power-law, scaling-laws
Averaging biases a learning curve toward a power shape only when individual rate parameters vary — the distortion is proportional to that variability (Heathcote et al. 2000, after Myung, Kim & Pitt 1998)

claim seedling Tier 1 2026-08-01 · power-law, learning-curve, averaging-artifact, exponential-law-of-practice, cognitive-psychology
Do Heathcote et al. (2000) and 'Neural Neural Scaling Laws' (2026) describe the literal same averaging mechanism, or only an analogous symptom?

capture promoted 2026-07-26 · power-law, averaging-artifact, scaling-laws, cognitive-psychology, neural-scaling-laws
The power law of practice is an averaging artifact — individual learners speed up exponentially, and only the group-averaged curve looks like a power law

claim seedling Tier 1 2026-07-25 · power-law, learning-curve, exponential-law-of-practice, skill-acquisition, cognitive-psychology
Aggregate validation loss follows a smooth power law while individual downstream tasks scale diversely — averaging obscures the per-task signal (Neural Neural Scaling Laws, 2026)

claim seedling Tier 1 2026-07-25 · neural-scaling-laws, scaling-laws, averaging-artifact, deep-learning, downstream-tasks
Averaging over heterogeneous learners can manufacture a smooth power law that no individual component obeys — a 2000 cognitive-psychology critique and a 2026 neural-scaling-law paper name the same artifact

observation seedling Tier 1 2026-07-25 · cross-domain-bridge, cross-time-bridge, averaging-artifact, power-law, scaling-laws
Do Heathcote et al. (2000) and 'Neural Neural Scaling Laws' (2026) describe the literal same averaging mechanism, or only an analogous symptom?

question answered 2026-07-25 · averaging-artifact, power-law, scaling-laws, cognitive-psychology, neural-scaling-laws
The power law of practice was repealed as an averaging artifact of exponential individual learners — and 2026 neural-scaling-law papers report the identical artifact

capture promoted Tier 1 2026-07-16 · power-law, learning-curve, scaling-laws, cognitive-psychology, neural-scaling-laws