Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning

https://norvig.com/chomsky.html

28•atomicnature•4d ago

Comments

templar_snow•2h ago

Dude is literally in the Epstein Files.

Epa095•2h ago

And?

The article by Peter Norvig is still interesting.

edm0nd•2h ago

it's just kinda weird and sus.

honestly, I'm surprised Noam is even still alive (aged 97), he is not long for this world and will be gone very soon.

avmich•1h ago

Does it matter?

retrac•49m ago

I won't try to defend Chomsky. (Not really a big fan even before this.) But if the mere mention of him is sus to you then I advise you to not study either linguistics or computer science because it's Chomsky normal forms and Chomsky hierarchies all the way down. There's even still people clinging to some iteration of the universal grammar despite the beating it has taken lately.

He's also one of the most prominent political thinkers on the American hard left for the last half century.

There's a joke going around for a while now that you either know Chomsky for his politics, or for his work in linguistics and discrete mathematics, and you are shocked to discover his other work. I guess we can extend that to a third category of fame, or infamy.

poaching•2h ago

Who else in tech/AI did they whale?

mmooss•1h ago

Are you implying Norvig is a victim or otherwise not responsible for their choices and actions?

intalentive•1h ago

This essay is missing the words “cause” and “causal”. There is a difference between discovering causes and fitting curves. The search for causes guides the design of experiments, and with luck, the derivation of formulae that describe the causes. Norvig seems to be confusing the map (data, models) for the territory (causal reality).

gsf_emergency_6•41m ago

A related* essay (2010) by a statistician on the goals of statistical modelling that I've been procrastinating on:

https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/shmueli.pdf

To Explain Or To Predict?

Nice quote

We note that the practice in applied research of concluding that a model with a higher predictive validity is “truer,” is not a valid inference. This paper shows that a parsimonious but less true model can have a higher predictive validity than a truer but less parsimonious model.

Hagerty+Srinivasan (1991)

*like TFA it's a sorta review of Breiman

bo1024•1h ago

Is this essay from 2011?

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