Recently here has been a lot of excitement around this paper by Piantadosi claiming that Chomsky's approach to language is now refuted by large language models (https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/007180). And I am quite sympathetic to this idea, so I decided to give it a read. But... am I the only only one to find this paper deeply flawed? (1/4)
@leovarnet Interesting recent discussion of #LLM. A couple of things strike me too on a quick read:
1. There is a big claim in there (based on the Baroni 2022 reference) that essentially "fitted model = theory". To me that feels like a way of not just moving, but actually redefining the goalposts.
2. A lot of the criticism of Chomsky's work is based on weak arguments. Lots of "Chomsky says A but we see B, therefore A is undermined." But as far as I can tell A and B are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The Chomsky criticism in the paper reminds me a little of the Bayesian/Frequentist conflicts that I use to see when I was in academia (statistics).
@aebrockwell I couldn't agree more
