The influx of scientists is a fascinating criticism. I guess maybe the lunatics run the asylum here, and what I've seen from recent csci grads is partly because

The influx of scientists is a fascinating criticism. I guess maybe the lunatics run the asylum here, and what I've seen from recent csci grads is partly because theyre being educated by people without the traditional csci scepticism (which I agree, is there: the older generation of csci academics and much more aligned with my view). Perhaps "scientist" is too vague a term. I mean people with a "in their bones" appreciation of experimentalism, empirical adequecy etc. What you're saying overall aligns with my view -- no on here is defining empirical adequacy on ML systems as "theories of natural language". As soon as you do this, which would be step1 in any experimental endeavour, the whole show collapses. No one here is being taught to target empirical systems and develop criteria of empirical adequacy... thinking somehow "accuracy on benchmarks" tracks "ability to understand language" -- this, as we both think, is mad. I guess my cultural issue is better described then as "pureish mathematicians" having come to own an empirical field, with all the predicatable nonesenses which follow (whether they are discrete or continous).