In my typical use, I’ve found that changing random init seeds (and also random seeds for shuffling examples during training, don’t forget that one) in many cases induces a larger variance on performance than many algorithmic or hyper parameter changes. Most prominently with imbalanced classification, which if often the reality of the valuable problem.

I guess it’s better to be lucky than smart.

Avoiding looking at the results of random init can make you think you’re smarter than you are and will tell yourselves false stories.