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I have been following Jeff's work since 2005, only time will tell if his work will bear fruition. But science will be immensely grateful to Jeff for igniting th

• rvense 8y ago
  It was so exhilarating, that promise of maybe knowing ourselves. I remember watching the lectures on Youtube and getting On Intelligence from the library at another university department. I was a student of linguistics when I discovered it, having started a move from theoretical linguistics to a masters in more computational stuff just as machine learning was beginning to become more widely used. Hawkins was one of a few things that combined to make me so completely disenchanted with the entire field of computational linguistics, especially as it was practiced at my university, that I just left and became a regular software developer. I decided I'd rather have to center things in CSS than throw progressively fancier maths at bag-of-words models and poorly annotated corpora and pretending it had anything to do with thinking machines. (I don't regret this move at all since another major factor was I didn't want to go do a PhD somewhere far away; I do somewhat regret going into computational stuff in the first place, though - before that I wanted to become one of those Indiana Jones linguists who go to the mountains and write grammars of languages only spoken by a handful of 80-year-olds... that would have been really fun)