4 ms·
I think comparing Chomsky to Jesuit astronomers declining to look through Galileo’s telescope is an unfair analogy. A better analogy in my opinion would be Ein
by ak_111 4y ago
I think comparing Chomsky to Jesuit astronomers declining to look through Galileo’s telescope is an unfair analogy.
A better analogy in my opinion would be Einstein's attitude to quantum mechanics, he accepted that it had predictive power but was militantly in the camp that it was incomplete as a theory for various reason. Similar to how Chomsky thinks that deep learning is effective and interesting as an engineering concept to generate language but sheds relatively very little light on how human intelligence and language works on a deeper level.
- eternalban 4y agoThe scientific community at the time had good reason to resist looking through telescopes. The entire scientific edifice was built on 7 planets going back thousands of years. What would happen to their medical "sciences", for example, if planet #8 showed up? Also note the church had already accepted Coppernicus's findings earlier. Issue was never the caricature of "bible says" that is claimed. In fact it was Babylonian roots of "sciences" -- everything around number 7 and 7 planets -- that caused a foundational problem. They had to rebuild sciences from the ground up. That was the reason for "jesuit" resistance.
- timeon 4y agoThis OT debate just shows that using analogy as argument is cul-de-sac.
- psychlops 4y agoThat's like saying it's a stalemate.
- pfortuny 4y agoWell, but they did use telescopes. One jesuit even discovered a comet, and it did not show parallax… The jesuits did wrong but were not silly.
- eternalban 4y agoOf course they did. There is no reason to assume people were stupid [in the past] and just got smart overnight. These were smart people struggling with a paradigm shift that would upset almost all their theoretical apple carts. It was an epistomelogical crisis but not of the spiritual flavor as it has been alleged.
- genman 4y ago[flagged]
- kgarten 4y agoha ha ... every human is a fool in that case (as every human holds some unreasonable believes and opinions some point in time). "He has discredited his mind?" This sentence does not make sense to me. Explain what you mean by this statement. I found his NYT piece well argued. How can you fix any language model similar to ChatGPT to prevent the mistakes shown in the article? (I don't think you can).
- genman 4y agoHe makes irrelevant and baseless claims. First we don't really know how the mind works and therefore we really have no idea if the language models are path toward AGI or not. He really doesn't have an idea how a child obtains a language. You really need a lot of data to acquire grammar, no minuscule data is not enough. I have observed it personally with my multilingual children, their mother tongue, to what they have the least exposure and what is the most complex, is not still not fluent for them. His claims are simply false, easily refuted by empirical data.
- kgarten 4y agook, you didn't answer my first questions. I try a couple of more. your first argument is useless, as anything might be a path to AGI ... first order logic / expert systems are ... regarding empirical data, you are bringing up anecdotes that don't hold up. Humans can often learn a concept from 1-2 instances (take the face of Albert Einstein) (even your kids can do that in grammar :) , maybe check how language models are trained in comparison. do you have any references for your claims? How much data does a human need to learn grammar? do you have any estimate? you say you can refute Chomsky's claims by empirical data. please show me that data/studies, don't talk about anecdotes from your kids.
- genman 4y ago
- calf 4y agoNot only the parallels between Einstein's and Chomsky's objections, but the "shut up and calculate" historical camp in quantum mechanics bears some resemblance to perhaps Norvig's arguments for statistical, neural network-based models of computation.