Noam Chomsky irritates me here's why - he's vague, so astonishingly vague that he can hide his uselessness within it. > Chomsky derided researchers in machine

Noam Chomsky irritates me here's why - he's vague, so astonishingly vague that he can hide his uselessness within it. > Chomsky derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that mimics something in the world, but who don’t try to understand the meaning of that behavior. Chomsky compared such researchers to scientists who might study the dance made by a bee returning to the hive, and who could produce a statistically based simulation of such a dance without attempting to understand why the bee behaved that way. -- http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-ai http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-f... What does that even mean? > But the number of parameters in his theory continued to multiply, never quite catching up to the number of exceptions, until it was no longer clear that Chomsky’s theories were elegant anymore. In fact, one could argue that the state of Chomskyan linguistics is like the state of astronomy circa Copernicus: it wasn’t that the geocentric model didn’t work, but the theory required so many additional orbits-within-orbits that people were finally willing to accept a different way of doing things. AI endeavored for a long time to work with elegant logical representations of language, and it just proved impossible to enumerate all the rules, or pretend that humans consistently followed them. Norvig points out that basically all successful language-related AI programs now use statistical reasoning > But his fundamental stance, which he calls the “algorithmic modeling culture,” is to believe that “nature’s black box cannot necessarily be described by a simple model.” He likens Chomsky’s quest for a more beautiful model to Platonic mysticism, and he compares Chomsky to Bill O’Reilly in his lack of satisfaction with answers that work. “Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that,” O’Reilly once said, apparently unsatisfied with physics as an explanation for anything. -- http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-ai http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-f... AI went wrong when Chomsky came around with his rule based translation ideas that were hideously wrong and probably set us back 20 years - see here: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html He's a more irritating linguistic version of Richard Dawkins (who doesn't have an active research career). > Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Jelinek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Jelinek