4 ms·

I read the first 9 pages, it claims to refute it but I don't agree with the premise. The author admits the status quo is like when doctors discovered lemons cur

by calf 4y ago

I read the first 9 pages, it claims to refute it but I don't agree with the premise. The author admits the status quo is like when doctors discovered lemons cured scurvy, but nobody knew why. So Noam's position is basically that doctors will never discover Vitamin C unless they develop chemistry. Both positions are true, they're just talking past each other.

naasking 4y ago
Then you missed the actual refutation, which starts on page 14, "The refutation of key principles". LLMs undermine many of the principles that Chomsky's position depends on. > So Noam's position is basically that doctors will never discover Vitamin C unless they develop chemistry. I disagree with this analogy. LLMs and machine learning is playing with chemistry, and Noam's position is more like, "You'll never understand any chemistry unless you first figure out subatomic physics". That's just obviously false, we can understand and do quite a bit of chemistry without a full understanding of quantum field theory. At best, such knowledge impacts our understanding at the fringes of chemistry.
- calf 4y ago
  You're missing the admission of the author who wrote the paper. If you didn't get that then you're just overselling the refutation, by not understanding the stated premise more critically. Literally the author used the analogy so I have no idea what your point is if you disagree with the author's analogy. It tells me you are not thinking through the piece analytically. It's not an uninteresting paper, but by the author's own admission, he doesn't give an astute reader good reason to proceed to the next section, since that was the analogy that he tried to draw.
  - naasking 4y ago
    I'm saying the author's analogy is not nuanced enough, and the analogy I presented is a better fit. I also fail to see how his informal, throw-away analogy analogy could possibly undermine the arguments presented in the remainder of the paper. Those arguments and the empirical data that follows are exactly why I think my analogy is better, but it seems silly to dismiss the remainder of a paper based on that flawed analogy.
    - calf 4y ago
      I'm not dismissing the paper, I still have it bookmarked. But I already don't like an author who can't write the first 9 pages convincingly and then require the reader to read the rest of it. I'm also seeing this paper circulated on social media so I automatically start squinting when random people start promoting it that way. A quick search on Google shows that the author has had a 10 year long back and forth disagreement with cognitive linguists such as Chomsky's colleagues. That's a bit of omitted context that this social media amplification does not help with when portraying ongoing research debates.

by calf 4y ago

naasking 4y ago

Then you missed the actual refutation, which starts on page 14, "The refutation of key principles". LLMs undermine many of the principles that Chomsky's position depends on. > So Noam's position is basically that doctors will never discover Vitamin C unless they develop chemistry. I disagree with this analogy. LLMs and machine learning is playing with chemistry, and Noam's position is more like, "You'll never understand any chemistry unless you first figure out subatomic physics". That's just obviously false, we can understand and do quite a bit of chemistry without a full understanding of quantum field theory. At best, such knowledge impacts our understanding at the fringes of chemistry.

calf 4y ago
You're missing the admission of the author who wrote the paper. If you didn't get that then you're just overselling the refutation, by not understanding the stated premise more critically. Literally the author used the analogy so I have no idea what your point is if you disagree with the author's analogy. It tells me you are not thinking through the piece analytically. It's not an uninteresting paper, but by the author's own admission, he doesn't give an astute reader good reason to proceed to the next section, since that was the analogy that he tried to draw.
- naasking 4y ago
  I'm saying the author's analogy is not nuanced enough, and the analogy I presented is a better fit. I also fail to see how his informal, throw-away analogy analogy could possibly undermine the arguments presented in the remainder of the paper. Those arguments and the empirical data that follows are exactly why I think my analogy is better, but it seems silly to dismiss the remainder of a paper based on that flawed analogy.
  - calf 4y ago
    I'm not dismissing the paper, I still have it bookmarked. But I already don't like an author who can't write the first 9 pages convincingly and then require the reader to read the rest of it. I'm also seeing this paper circulated on social media so I automatically start squinting when random people start promoting it that way. A quick search on Google shows that the author has had a 10 year long back and forth disagreement with cognitive linguists such as Chomsky's colleagues. That's a bit of omitted context that this social media amplification does not help with when portraying ongoing research debates.