"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
> 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.
People should just recognize, as you have done, that they don't actually care about how the human language faculty works. It's baffling that they instead choose to make absurd arguments to defend fields they don't care one way or another about.
When Chomsky says that LLMs aren't how the human faculty works it would be so easy to tell the truth and say "I don't care how the human language faculty works" and everyone can go focus on the things they are interested in, just as it would be easy for a GPS designer to say "I don't care how insect navigation works".
There is no problem as long as you don't pretend to be caring about (this aspect of) science.
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.
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.
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.
Where is the research on impossible language that infants can't acquire? A good popsci article would give me leads here.
Even assuming Chomsky's claim is true, all it shows is that LLMs aren't an exact match for human language learning. But even an inexact model can still be a useful research tool.
>That’s highly unlikely for reasons long understood, but it’s not relevant to our concerns here, so we can put it aside. Plainly there is a biological endowment for the human faculty of language. The merest truism.
Again, a good popsci article would actually support these claims instead of simply asserting them and implying that anyone who disagrees is a simpleton.
I agree with Chomsky that the postmodern critique of science sucks, and I agree that AI is a threat to the human race.
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".
It's not infants, it's adults but Moro "Secrets of Words" is a book that describes the experiments and is aimed at lay people.
> Even assuming Chomsky's claim is true, all it shows is that LLMs aren't an exact match for human language learning. But even an inexact model can still be a useful research tool.
If it is it needs to be shown, not assumed. Just as you wouldn't by default assume that GPS navigation tells you about insect navigation (though it might somehow).
> Again, a good popsci article would actually support these claims instead of simply asserting them and implying that anyone who disagrees is a simpleton.
He justifies the statement in the previous sentence (which you don't quote) where he says that it is self-evident by virtue of the fact that something exists at the beginning (i.e. it's not empty space). That's the "merest truism". No popsci article is going to help understand that if you don't already.
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.)
The same way that reddit comments arent a formal debate.
Mocking is absolutely useful. Sometimes you debate someone like graham hancock and force him to confirm that he has no evidence for his hypotheses, then when you discuss the debate, you mock him relentlessly for having no evidence for his hypotheses.
> Yet here is Chomsky addressing a lay audience that has no linguistics background
So not a formal debate or paper where I would expect anyone to hold to debate principles.
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.