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> The issue with all these experts is they still think it's human nature to be able to fully understand the world before they speak about it None of the expert

> The issue with all these experts is they still think it's human nature to be able to fully understand the world before they speak about it None of the experts think this.

usui 3y ago
One of the biggest strawmen I've ever seen.
ramraj07 3y ago
Is Chomsky an expert? Try reading his infuriatingly tone-deaf NYTimes editorial.
- krainboltgreene 3y ago
  Chomsky is an expert of a few things, but I doubt that's what you actually mean to ask. Regardless his editorial matches how scientists think of the human mind and how OpenAI's own creators describe GPT's design.
  - ramraj07 3y ago
    Citation please, for where you're saying the two parties agree on?
    - krainboltgreene 3y ago
      I've not said anything contentious or secret you can literally read the article in question above and also read the OpenAI website: https://openai.com/research/instruction-following https://openai.com/research/instruction-following: > This is in part because GPT-3 is trained to predict the next word on a large dataset of Internet text, rather than to safely perform the language task that the user wants.
- avereveard 3y ago
  Well not in the field he's a professional clickbaiter targeting a specific, well defined eco chamber.
  - cubancigar11 3y ago
    That is a very common perception from people whom haven't given him any attention. I used to be in the same boat but it was eventually very interesting when I listened to him.
  - foldr 3y ago
    Accusing Chomsky of being a ‘clickbaiter’ is maybe the most absurd thing I’ve heard all month. You think he’s trying to get additional views for his TikTok videos? His recent political ramblings and Epstein-adjacency are extremely embarrassing (at best), but he's not some kind of cheap online attention whore.
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      > Accusing Chomsky of being a ‘clickbaiter’ is maybe the most absurd thing I’ve heard all month. You think he’s trying to get additional views for his TikTok videos? Chomsky has been addicted to media attention for decades. Back in the day there were literally people selling cassette tapes of his latest thoughts.
    - beebeepka 3y ago
      Stating obvious - but inconvenient - truths is political rambling to you? Guy is a treasure.
      - foldr 3y ago
        C'mon, let's not get into it here. As I'm defending Chomsky, I just wanted to be clear that I don't agree with his recent comments on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that I find his association with post-conviction Esptein extremely distasteful at best. Others may disagree, but this isn't the place to have that argument.
- awongh 3y ago
  here it is for anyone curious: https://archive.is/oGXNt https://archive.is/oGXNt (edit, archive link)
- DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
  Chomsky writes that language models lack the ability to reason. > Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence. > [...] Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. A prediction might have been the statement “The apple will fall if I open my hand.” Both are valuable, and both can be correct. But an explanation is something more: It includes not only descriptions and predictions but also counterfactual conjectures like “Any such object would fall,” plus the additional clause “because of the force of gravity” or “because of the curvature of space-time” or whatever. That is a causal explanation: “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking. I decided to ask ChatGPT why an apple falls, based on Chomsky's statement: > Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. Can you say why it falls? ChatGPT responds in exactly the way Chomsky says it cannot: > Yes, the apple falls due to the force of gravity. Gravity is a natural force that attracts objects with mass towards each other. When the apple is released from your hand, it is subject to the gravitational pull of the Earth, causing it to accelerate downward and fall to the ground. ChatGPT certainly appears to understand that apples fall because of gravitational attraction, and that gravity is universal. What makes all the discussion of whether ChatGPT does or does not truly understand this or that so frustrating is that it's based on pure assertion. ChatGPT responds exactly like someone who understands gravity would, so I'm very strongly inclined to believe that it understands gravity. Otherwise, what does "understanding" even mean? It's not some magic process. Again, turning to ChatGPT to define "understanding," here is what it says: > [Understanding] involves making connections, integrating information, and gaining insights or knowledge about a particular subject or concept. Understanding goes beyond simple awareness or recognition; it involves interpreting, analyzing, and synthesizing information to form a coherent mental representation or mental model of the subject matter. It often involves the ability to apply knowledge in new or different contexts, make connections to prior knowledge or experiences, and make sense of complex or abstract ideas. ChatGPT definitely fulfills that definition of "understanding."
- leobg 3y ago
  He’s doing the same to ChatGPT that he did to Skinner in the 1960s. Back then, it put him on the map, and he lives in the illusion that he was right. Now ChatGPT is pretty much Skinner’s work come to life. The BFS book Chomsky critiqued was literally “Verbal Behavior” - a book about how intelligence arises from “dumb” reinforcement learning of words. Obviously Chomsky must now claim that ChatGPT only pretends to be intelligent. Else his entire life’s work is proven wrong.
  - Al0neStar 3y ago
    There is a difference between text and language and so far LLMs have told us nothing about language. LLMs being able to generalize to languages with a much smaller training corpus shows that maybe Chomsky is right about universal grammar.
  - foldr 3y ago
    It’s a significant misunderstanding of Chomsky’s life’s work to think that ChatGPT would prove it wrong. Chomsky’s primary claim is a claim about how language acquisition works in humans. He argues, for example, that certain locality constraints on linguistic dependencies are ‘built in’ and not learned inductively. Thus a human does not ‘learn’ that (i) is ambiguous and (ii) is not: (i) How often did you tell John that he should take out the trash? [how often did you tell, or how often to take it out] (ii) How often did you tell John why he should take out the trash? [only means how often did you tell] Nothing that ChatGPT can do suggests that Chomsky was wrong about this kind of thing. It’s really more of a blow to a certain kind of work in AI that was partly inspired by Chomsky – but not something that he himself ever took much interest in. Now it’s true that Chomsky appears to be in the camp that says ChatGPT doesn’t really understand anything. But the focus of his own work has never been on debunking AI, or making claims about the true nature of understanding, or anything of that ilk.
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      > He argues, for example, that certain locality constraints on linguistic dependencies are ‘built in’ and not learned inductively. Checking in late here, but one of the pillars of Chomsky's argument is the so-called "poverty of the stimulus" -- basically, that human babies simply don't receive enough training data to acquire language as rapidly and correctly as they demonstrably do. Chomsky therefore concludes that there must be some kind of pre-existing "language module" in the brain to account for this. Now, not everyone accepted this idea even at the time, but surely the argument is much less plausible for an LLM which is likely exposed to more training data than even an adult human.
- foldr 3y ago
  I see that Watumull is one of the coauthors. I'm not sure what's going on with that, but Watumull is the common thread running through other bad papers with otherwise-sensible linguists' names tacked on to them, such as this bizarre paper about recursion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3884515/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3884515/ I haven't had a chance to read the NYTimes editorial, but I would be skeptical how much of it is really coming from Chomsky. He's 94 at this point, and while he's not senile in a medical sense, I don't think his judgement is what it used to be.
bheadmaster 3y ago
Actually, at least one expert thinks that.
sgt101 3y ago
Especially Rodney Brooks.

> The issue with all these experts is they still think it's human nature to be able to fully understand the world before they speak about it None of the experts think this.

usui 3y ago

One of the biggest strawmen I've ever seen.

ramraj07 3y ago

Is Chomsky an expert? Try reading his infuriatingly tone-deaf NYTimes editorial.

krainboltgreene 3y ago
Chomsky is an expert of a few things, but I doubt that's what you actually mean to ask. Regardless his editorial matches how scientists think of the human mind and how OpenAI's own creators describe GPT's design.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  Citation please, for where you're saying the two parties agree on?
  - krainboltgreene 3y ago
    I've not said anything contentious or secret you can literally read the article in question above and also read the OpenAI website: https://openai.com/research/instruction-following https://openai.com/research/instruction-following: > This is in part because GPT-3 is trained to predict the next word on a large dataset of Internet text, rather than to safely perform the language task that the user wants.
avereveard 3y ago
Well not in the field he's a professional clickbaiter targeting a specific, well defined eco chamber.
- cubancigar11 3y ago
  That is a very common perception from people whom haven't given him any attention. I used to be in the same boat but it was eventually very interesting when I listened to him.
- foldr 3y ago
  Accusing Chomsky of being a ‘clickbaiter’ is maybe the most absurd thing I’ve heard all month. You think he’s trying to get additional views for his TikTok videos? His recent political ramblings and Epstein-adjacency are extremely embarrassing (at best), but he's not some kind of cheap online attention whore.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    > Accusing Chomsky of being a ‘clickbaiter’ is maybe the most absurd thing I’ve heard all month. You think he’s trying to get additional views for his TikTok videos? Chomsky has been addicted to media attention for decades. Back in the day there were literally people selling cassette tapes of his latest thoughts.
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    Stating obvious - but inconvenient - truths is political rambling to you? Guy is a treasure.
    - foldr 3y ago
      C'mon, let's not get into it here. As I'm defending Chomsky, I just wanted to be clear that I don't agree with his recent comments on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that I find his association with post-conviction Esptein extremely distasteful at best. Others may disagree, but this isn't the place to have that argument.
awongh 3y ago
here it is for anyone curious: https://archive.is/oGXNt https://archive.is/oGXNt (edit, archive link)
DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
Chomsky writes that language models lack the ability to reason. > Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence. > [...] Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. A prediction might have been the statement “The apple will fall if I open my hand.” Both are valuable, and both can be correct. But an explanation is something more: It includes not only descriptions and predictions but also counterfactual conjectures like “Any such object would fall,” plus the additional clause “because of the force of gravity” or “because of the curvature of space-time” or whatever. That is a causal explanation: “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking. I decided to ask ChatGPT why an apple falls, based on Chomsky's statement: > Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. Can you say why it falls? ChatGPT responds in exactly the way Chomsky says it cannot: > Yes, the apple falls due to the force of gravity. Gravity is a natural force that attracts objects with mass towards each other. When the apple is released from your hand, it is subject to the gravitational pull of the Earth, causing it to accelerate downward and fall to the ground. ChatGPT certainly appears to understand that apples fall because of gravitational attraction, and that gravity is universal. What makes all the discussion of whether ChatGPT does or does not truly understand this or that so frustrating is that it's based on pure assertion. ChatGPT responds exactly like someone who understands gravity would, so I'm very strongly inclined to believe that it understands gravity. Otherwise, what does "understanding" even mean? It's not some magic process. Again, turning to ChatGPT to define "understanding," here is what it says: > [Understanding] involves making connections, integrating information, and gaining insights or knowledge about a particular subject or concept. Understanding goes beyond simple awareness or recognition; it involves interpreting, analyzing, and synthesizing information to form a coherent mental representation or mental model of the subject matter. It often involves the ability to apply knowledge in new or different contexts, make connections to prior knowledge or experiences, and make sense of complex or abstract ideas. ChatGPT definitely fulfills that definition of "understanding."
leobg 3y ago
He’s doing the same to ChatGPT that he did to Skinner in the 1960s. Back then, it put him on the map, and he lives in the illusion that he was right. Now ChatGPT is pretty much Skinner’s work come to life. The BFS book Chomsky critiqued was literally “Verbal Behavior” - a book about how intelligence arises from “dumb” reinforcement learning of words. Obviously Chomsky must now claim that ChatGPT only pretends to be intelligent. Else his entire life’s work is proven wrong.
- Al0neStar 3y ago
  There is a difference between text and language and so far LLMs have told us nothing about language. LLMs being able to generalize to languages with a much smaller training corpus shows that maybe Chomsky is right about universal grammar.
- foldr 3y ago
  It’s a significant misunderstanding of Chomsky’s life’s work to think that ChatGPT would prove it wrong. Chomsky’s primary claim is a claim about how language acquisition works in humans. He argues, for example, that certain locality constraints on linguistic dependencies are ‘built in’ and not learned inductively. Thus a human does not ‘learn’ that (i) is ambiguous and (ii) is not: (i) How often did you tell John that he should take out the trash? [how often did you tell, or how often to take it out] (ii) How often did you tell John why he should take out the trash? [only means how often did you tell] Nothing that ChatGPT can do suggests that Chomsky was wrong about this kind of thing. It’s really more of a blow to a certain kind of work in AI that was partly inspired by Chomsky – but not something that he himself ever took much interest in. Now it’s true that Chomsky appears to be in the camp that says ChatGPT doesn’t really understand anything. But the focus of his own work has never been on debunking AI, or making claims about the true nature of understanding, or anything of that ilk.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    > He argues, for example, that certain locality constraints on linguistic dependencies are ‘built in’ and not learned inductively. Checking in late here, but one of the pillars of Chomsky's argument is the so-called "poverty of the stimulus" -- basically, that human babies simply don't receive enough training data to acquire language as rapidly and correctly as they demonstrably do. Chomsky therefore concludes that there must be some kind of pre-existing "language module" in the brain to account for this. Now, not everyone accepted this idea even at the time, but surely the argument is much less plausible for an LLM which is likely exposed to more training data than even an adult human.
foldr 3y ago
I see that Watumull is one of the coauthors. I'm not sure what's going on with that, but Watumull is the common thread running through other bad papers with otherwise-sensible linguists' names tacked on to them, such as this bizarre paper about recursion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3884515/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3884515/ I haven't had a chance to read the NYTimes editorial, but I would be skeptical how much of it is really coming from Chomsky. He's 94 at this point, and while he's not senile in a medical sense, I don't think his judgement is what it used to be.

bheadmaster 3y ago

Actually, at least one expert thinks that.

sgt101 3y ago

Especially Rodney Brooks.