"we vote too many people into positions of power and influence as rewards for their publications instead of as endorsements for their principled stances. I hope that those who hear conversation around #MeTooSTEM and feel uncomfortable realize they should."
"I mean to make you uncomfortable. You have likely been comfortable at some else’s expense for far too long."
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It is an amazing time to work in the cognitive science of language. Here are a few remarkable recent results, many of which highlight ways in which the critiques of LLMs (especially from generative linguistics!) have totally fallen to pieces.
One claim was that LLMs can't be right because they learn "impossible languages." This was never really justified, and now @JulieKallini and collaborators show its probably not true:
One claim was that they LLMs can't be on the right track because they "require" large data sets. Progress has been remarkable on learning with developmentally-plausible data sets. Amazing comparisons spearheaded by @a_stadt and colleagues:
Yes, ChatGPT is amazing and impressive. No, @OpenAI has not come close to addressing the problem of bias. Filters appear to be bypassed with simple tricks, and superficially masked.
Yeah, yeah, quantum mechanics and relativity are counterintuitive because we didn’t evolve to deal with stuff on those scales.
But more ordinary things like numbers, geometry, and procedures are also baffling. Here’s a little 🧵 on weird truths in math.
My favorite example – the Banach-Tarski paradox – shows how you can cut a sphere into a few pieces (well, sets) and then re-assemble the pieces into TWO IDENTICAL copies of the sphere you started with.
It sounds so implausible, people often think they've misunderstood. But it's true -- chop into a few "pieces" and reassemble to two *identical* (equal size, equal shape) spheres to what you started with.
Everyone seems to think it's absurd that large language models (or something similar) could show anything like human intelligence and meaning. But it doesn’t seem so crazy to me. Here's a dissenting 🧵 from cognitive science.
The news, to start, is that this week software engineer @cajundiscordian was placed on leave for violating Google's confidentiality policies, after publicly claiming that a language model was "sentient" nytimes.com/2022/06/12/tec…
Lemoine has clarified that his claim about the model’s sentience was based on “religious beliefs.” Still, his conversation with the model is really worth reading: cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-senti…