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I hate that whole intro - the first four sentences - so much. It’s nothing but unsupported assumptions. Basically, a strawman that they can do battle with in th
by antonvs 1mo ago
I hate that whole intro - the first four sentences - so much. It’s nothing but unsupported assumptions. Basically, a strawman that they can do battle with in the paper. Not an auspicious start.
- andytratt 1mo agogot to top 2 HN tho lol
- andytratt 1mo ago-1 karma jesus guess i should never make meta commentary lol
- suddenlybananas 1mo agoThese aren't really strawmen, they're more or less than mainstream opinion in the cognitive sciences from the 80s to maybe 2015-2020 or so.
- jephs 1mo agoPaul Smolensky is a cognitive science titan from that era. He worked with Hinton, Rumelhart, and McClelland on parallel distributed processing, and literally wrote the book on tensor product representations in cognition, with Geraldine Legendre: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516198/the-harmonic-mind-volume-1/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516198/the-harmonic-mind-vol... He's the axis of this particular group of researchers, being the most senior at the place where they all met, Johns Hopkins. So this is less a straw man and more a quick reminder to his peers: "Right, so, remember this particular thread we've spent the last 40 years hashing out, here we've got another contribution to that particular conversation."
- antonvs 1mo agoIf it was supposed to be sarcasm, that does help.
- antonvs 1mo agoI’m aware, but it was a bad mainstream opinion which was contradicted by every bit of evidence ever since early LISP efforts in the late 1960s (still waiting for the release of SHRDLU 2.0!) 65 years is a long time to be beating your head against an obvious dead end. The article intro presents the claims as self-evident, when they’re not at all. But, someone rise pointed out this may have been a dig at those attitudes, which makes more sense.