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Douglas Hofstadter is a pompous buffoon. His style is infuriating, pushing his undoubtedly fine intellect in the reader's face. He writes for people who want

Douglas Hofstadter is a pompous buffoon. His style is infuriating, pushing his undoubtedly fine intellect in the reader's face. He writes for people who want to believe themselves smarter than most, and the only cost of admission is that they validate Hofstadter's high self-opinion. We all know by the end of the article that Hofstadter is a better translator than Google Translate, but nobody believes that Google Translate is going to match the work of someone who understands the text they are translating. Hofstadter claims he's not cherry-picking difficult examples, but he has chosen two passages where gender is critical, and moved them between languages where gender is expressed in very different ways. It's a tricky part of translation, as Hofstadter knows, and nobody expects a computer to speculate on the intentions of the author of a passage, as you must to successfully translate his examples. Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language --- and that's a great advance. Hofstadter expresses an expectation that no-one holds for an automatic translation tool, shows that Google Translate does not live up to it, and then is satisfied with himself, as usual.

austincheney 7y ago
I got something different out of the article other than offense at education envy.
sorokod 7y ago
Instead of an ad hominem, would you care to address the specific examples sighted in the article?
- JasonFruit 7y ago
  I did a bit, but honestly, my main point is that I can't stand Hofstadter's style, either of writing or thinking. It's not an ad hominem attack to prove some other point; it's intended as a criticism of the man himself.
- watt 7y ago
  I skimmed the article, but it seems the purpose of it would be better served as series of issue reports in the Google Translate bug tracking system than a full article. I think it's not really that interesting to diss the state of the machine translation art in 2019, instead of looking where it could be in 2020, 2025, 2030.
  - andrepd 7y ago
    >issue reports You miss the point. The point is that the "deep" learning approach is fundamentally flawed and will not lead to proper translation no matter how many racks of GPUs you throw at it, since it lacks the "understanding of ideas" required to do it.
arketyp 7y ago
It comes off as quite arrogant of Hofstadter to imply that people believe translation has now been solved by deep learning. You don't even have to be bilingual and know the other language to detect the subtleties lost by machine translation. It would have been interesting to hear the reflections of the Danish speaking friend. I can imagine Frank finds Google Translate practical for simple words that actually are more or less 1-to-1, things you would otherwise look up in a dictionary. And probably his Danish friend can pick up any idioms and such that Google Translate distorts anyway.
- interfixus 7y ago
  I utterly fail to see the point. In all likelihood I would take offense and cut short any further communication, should someone attempt to talk to me through Google [or whatever] Translate (but then, I can barely stand plain Gmail). For what it's worth, Danish actually is my native language.
  - xbmcuser 7y ago
    When I visited Thailand last year most of the apps like Uber and Grab were using Google auto translate in the chats. Made communicating with the car drivers painless. Many people knock these auto translations but after knowing people that can't read English the major language of the internet. I can't look at the translations with the kind of disdain many here seem to feel. As these auto translations open the world to lot more people that were sidelined previously.
ozim 7y ago
The practical utility of Google Translate and similar technologies is undeniable, and probably it’s a good thing overall, but there is still something deeply lacking in the approach, which is conveyed by a single word: understanding. It all boils down to this paragraph, and no one can say it is not true.
- gwern 7y ago
  You certainly can, and that is the biggest problem with this article: a completely lack of interest in understanding what deep learning understands (ironically). Hofstadter, having completely missed the boat on connectionism, committed himself to a failed paradigm, and been wrong about AI time after time (remember when Hofstadter claimed beating humans at chess would require computers to have emotions and be able to write poems?), totally fails to grapple with what NNs do do. For starters, Google Translate is a free service and not necessarily SOTA, even when he wrote this. For example, if you were going to ask 'what do multi-lingual translation seq2seq RNNs (or Transformers) understand?', the immediate obvious thing to discuss would be questions about the 'interlingua' which their embedding yields, things that word embeddings learn (including surprising things like relative locations of cities or sizes of objects), or about transfer learning to tasks that require grammar or reasoning or common-sense like Winograd schemas like in GLUE or SuperGLUE, and how they improve massively over earlier approaches and how they are scaling (one of the most important trends in AI). There is a great deal which could be said here, demonstrating why it works so well and why it doesn't work sometimes, and an AI researcher is just the sort of person to ask. And unfortunately, Hofstadter does none of this and instead bangs on about some errors he found, like it's a total blackbox and understanding is a binary where you either like the same poetry Hofstadter does or you are a cretin, and takes the attitude that any error shows that the approach has failed, is failing, and always will fail because it is 'deeply lacking' (what, exactly? And to think, he complains about 'deep' being abused for rhetorical purposes before and then goes and produces a shallow exercise like this). I thought this was a lousy neo-luddite essay in 2018, and it's only gotten worse since then. In another 10 years, it'll look like Cliff Stoll.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
tjpnz 7y ago
>Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language --- and that's a great advance. For some languages it will, they targeted the official working languages of the UN at the time. I hear for them it's pretty good. Personally, I live in Japan and rely on Google Translate every day and my experience has been generally crap. I've seen it get some simpler phrases in Japanese dead wrong and have been noticing it more often the more I learn the language. The part that infuriates me the most is how translations for simple phrases seem to change on an almost daily basis. Not long ago it had a pretty good translation for the formal (keigo) greeting used in business correspondence but as of a few months ago it utterly mangles it. Yes language changes but not this quickly, a lot of these phrases would've been used by the great grandparents of my colleagues.
andrepd 7y ago
>Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language Which is precisely what he says. > Hofstadter expresses an expectation that no-one holds for an automatic translation tool, As demonstrated by the quote at the start, about Russian being just English coded in strange symbols, and also by the unreal hype around "neural networks", plenty of people do on fact hold unrealistic expectations of automatic translation. How many times have you heard someone say translator jobs are going to be automated away in 5 or 10 years? I've heard and read it plenty of times.
gerbilly 7y ago
> but he has chosen two passages where gender is critical, and moved them between languages where gender is expressed in very different ways. So what, if the program can't handle these simple sentences, it can't claim to be a translation program. The machine 'translation' throws away the entire point of the sentence. Why don't we just evolve towards the machines and start speaking to each other in JSON (We should come up with a more efficient way to pronounce '}' as soon as possible!) Most of the AI revolution is just parlour tricks and marketing puffery. Fourth grade children could translate the French sentence better.
vixen99 7y ago
Make a point but better keep the name calling and gross generalizations regarding those who read Hofstadter's output for readers that enjoy that kind of pointless abuse. There are plenty of other outlets for it.
Uhuhreally 7y ago
would you prefer that he hid his light under a bushel ?

austincheney 7y ago

I got something different out of the article other than offense at education envy.

sorokod 7y ago

Instead of an ad hominem, would you care to address the specific examples sighted in the article?

JasonFruit 7y ago
I did a bit, but honestly, my main point is that I can't stand Hofstadter's style, either of writing or thinking. It's not an ad hominem attack to prove some other point; it's intended as a criticism of the man himself.
watt 7y ago
I skimmed the article, but it seems the purpose of it would be better served as series of issue reports in the Google Translate bug tracking system than a full article. I think it's not really that interesting to diss the state of the machine translation art in 2019, instead of looking where it could be in 2020, 2025, 2030.
- andrepd 7y ago
  >issue reports You miss the point. The point is that the "deep" learning approach is fundamentally flawed and will not lead to proper translation no matter how many racks of GPUs you throw at it, since it lacks the "understanding of ideas" required to do it.

arketyp 7y ago

It comes off as quite arrogant of Hofstadter to imply that people believe translation has now been solved by deep learning. You don't even have to be bilingual and know the other language to detect the subtleties lost by machine translation. It would have been interesting to hear the reflections of the Danish speaking friend. I can imagine Frank finds Google Translate practical for simple words that actually are more or less 1-to-1, things you would otherwise look up in a dictionary. And probably his Danish friend can pick up any idioms and such that Google Translate distorts anyway.

interfixus 7y ago
I utterly fail to see the point. In all likelihood I would take offense and cut short any further communication, should someone attempt to talk to me through Google [or whatever] Translate (but then, I can barely stand plain Gmail). For what it's worth, Danish actually is my native language.
- xbmcuser 7y ago
  When I visited Thailand last year most of the apps like Uber and Grab were using Google auto translate in the chats. Made communicating with the car drivers painless. Many people knock these auto translations but after knowing people that can't read English the major language of the internet. I can't look at the translations with the kind of disdain many here seem to feel. As these auto translations open the world to lot more people that were sidelined previously.

ozim 7y ago

The practical utility of Google Translate and similar technologies is undeniable, and probably it’s a good thing overall, but there is still something deeply lacking in the approach, which is conveyed by a single word: understanding. It all boils down to this paragraph, and no one can say it is not true.

gwern 7y ago
You certainly can, and that is the biggest problem with this article: a completely lack of interest in understanding what deep learning understands (ironically). Hofstadter, having completely missed the boat on connectionism, committed himself to a failed paradigm, and been wrong about AI time after time (remember when Hofstadter claimed beating humans at chess would require computers to have emotions and be able to write poems?), totally fails to grapple with what NNs do do. For starters, Google Translate is a free service and not necessarily SOTA, even when he wrote this. For example, if you were going to ask 'what do multi-lingual translation seq2seq RNNs (or Transformers) understand?', the immediate obvious thing to discuss would be questions about the 'interlingua' which their embedding yields, things that word embeddings learn (including surprising things like relative locations of cities or sizes of objects), or about transfer learning to tasks that require grammar or reasoning or common-sense like Winograd schemas like in GLUE or SuperGLUE, and how they improve massively over earlier approaches and how they are scaling (one of the most important trends in AI). There is a great deal which could be said here, demonstrating why it works so well and why it doesn't work sometimes, and an AI researcher is just the sort of person to ask. And unfortunately, Hofstadter does none of this and instead bangs on about some errors he found, like it's a total blackbox and understanding is a binary where you either like the same poetry Hofstadter does or you are a cretin, and takes the attitude that any error shows that the approach has failed, is failing, and always will fail because it is 'deeply lacking' (what, exactly? And to think, he complains about 'deep' being abused for rhetorical purposes before and then goes and produces a shallow exercise like this). I thought this was a lousy neo-luddite essay in 2018, and it's only gotten worse since then. In another 10 years, it'll look like Cliff Stoll.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

tjpnz 7y ago

>Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language --- and that's a great advance. For some languages it will, they targeted the official working languages of the UN at the time. I hear for them it's pretty good. Personally, I live in Japan and rely on Google Translate every day and my experience has been generally crap. I've seen it get some simpler phrases in Japanese dead wrong and have been noticing it more often the more I learn the language. The part that infuriates me the most is how translations for simple phrases seem to change on an almost daily basis. Not long ago it had a pretty good translation for the formal (keigo) greeting used in business correspondence but as of a few months ago it utterly mangles it. Yes language changes but not this quickly, a lot of these phrases would've been used by the great grandparents of my colleagues.

andrepd 7y ago

>Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language Which is precisely what he says. > Hofstadter expresses an expectation that no-one holds for an automatic translation tool, As demonstrated by the quote at the start, about Russian being just English coded in strange symbols, and also by the unreal hype around "neural networks", plenty of people do on fact hold unrealistic expectations of automatic translation. How many times have you heard someone say translator jobs are going to be automated away in 5 or 10 years? I've heard and read it plenty of times.

gerbilly 7y ago

> but he has chosen two passages where gender is critical, and moved them between languages where gender is expressed in very different ways. So what, if the program can't handle these simple sentences, it can't claim to be a translation program. The machine 'translation' throws away the entire point of the sentence. Why don't we just evolve towards the machines and start speaking to each other in JSON (We should come up with a more efficient way to pronounce '}' as soon as possible!) Most of the AI revolution is just parlour tricks and marketing puffery. Fourth grade children could translate the French sentence better.

vixen99 7y ago

Make a point but better keep the name calling and gross generalizations regarding those who read Hofstadter's output for readers that enjoy that kind of pointless abuse. There are plenty of other outlets for it.

Uhuhreally 7y ago

would you prefer that he hid his light under a bushel ?