zlacker

>>mef+(OP)
I confess my opinion of Noam Chomsky dropped a lot from reading this interview. The way he set up a "Tom Jones" strawman and kept dismissing positions using language like "we'd laugh", "total absurdity", etc. was really disappointing. I always assumed that academics were only like that on reddit, and in real life they actually made a serious effort at rigorous argument, avoiding logical fallacies and the like. Yet here is Chomsky addressing a lay audience that has no linguistics background, and instead of even attempting to summarize the arguments for his position, he simply asserts that opposing views are risible with little supporting argument. I expected much more from a big-name scholar.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

>>0xDEAF+g6
"Tom Jones" isn't a strawman, Chomsky is addressing an actual argument in a published paper from Steven Piantadosi. He's using a pseudonym to be polite and not call him out by name.

> instead of even attempting to summarize the arguments for his position..

He makes a very clear, simple argument, accessible to any layperson who can read. If you are studying insects what you are interested in is how insects do it not what other mechanisms you can come up with to "beat" insects. This isn't complicated.

>>foobar+Tb
Is it polite to deprive readers of context necessary to understand what the speaker is talking about? I was also very confused by that part and I had no idea whom or what he was talking about or why he even started taking about that.

I searched for an actual paper by that guy because you’ve mentioned his real name. I found “Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language”. After reading it seems even more true that Chomsky’s Tom Jones is a strawman.

>>Ludwig+tj
> After reading it seems even more true that Chomsky's Tom Jones is a strawman.

Lol. It's clear you are not interested in having any kind of rational discussion on the topic and are driven by some kind of zealotry when you claim to have read a technical 40 page paper (with an additional 18 pages of citations) in 30 minutes.

Even if by some miraculous feat you had read it you haven't made a single actual argument or addressed any of the points made by Chomsky.

>>foobar+qn
It’s certainly not a dense paper with careful nuanced derivations that you have to ponder to grasp. It’s a light read you can skim especially if you aren’t interested in LLM Trump improv and you are familiar with the general thought behind connectionism, construction grammar, other modern linguistic theories and, of course, universal grammar. The debate is as old as UG, but now with a new LLM flavor.

I don’t know which argument you expect from me. I read it and found nothing similar to “Stop wasting your time; naval vessels do it all the time.” So I concluded it’s a strawman. Being against a particular controversial approach in linguistics doesn’t mean being against science.

>>Ludwig+sv
> I read it and found nothing similar to “Stop wasting your time; naval vessels do it all the time.”

You implied in the previous paragraph that you didn't in fact read it and you only "skimmed" it. Maybe that's why you "found nothing similar to 'stop wasting your time; naval vessels do it all the time". But even in skimming the paper it's incomprehensible how you could miss it: At least the first 23 pages of the draft version I have just describe how well LLMs perform and completely ignores the relevant question of how human language works. (It doesn't get any better after the first 23 pages). So presumably you just don't know what an analogy is and are literally searching for the term "naval vessels".

Here's just one example demonstrating that Piantodosi does in fact claim what Chomsky says he does: Piantodosi writes "The success of large language models is a failure for generative theories because it goes against virtually all of the principles these theories have espoused." Rewriting that statement using Chomsky's analogy illustrates how idiotic the original statement is: "The success of naval vessels is a failure for insect navigation theories because it goes against all of the principles these theories have espoused".

>>foobar+kH
There is a difference between supporting one research paradigm over another and rejecting science altogether to focus on engineering. The first quote and the context around it implies the latter.

The success of naval vessels shows it’s possible to navigate without innate star and wind comprehension, so maybe we should think of that inner stuff as phlogiston. (Yeah, this analogy isn’t as nice but it’s quite hard to translate the nuance of linguistic debate into nautical terms.)

>>Ludwig+lN
Do you not genuinely not understand the logic of the argument? The fact that A does Y using Z doesn't entail that B does Y using Z.

>>sudden+tZ1
I genuinely don’t understand how the analogy about naval vessels is a fair simplification of the argument that Chomsky’s research programme is, heuristically, a dead-end and should be abandoned. What is A,B,Y,Z?

It’s not like it’s an outrageous position. Chomsky’s tradition is quite controversial and is outside of mainstream nowadays. And connectionism is a valid scientific approach.