In the New Yorker’s Newsdesk blog last week, Gary Marcus expresses his skepticism of “deep learning,” an approach to artificial intelligence pioneered by Geoffrey Hinton that received some unusually high-profile coverage in the Times. I honestly don’t know enough about deep learning models to evaluate … Read More →
Tag Archives: popularization
Daniel Everett’s Recent Book is Mostly Not About Recursion and the Pirahã
It’s odd that the release of this book served mainly as an occasion for the re-ignition of the “Universal Grammar (UG) is recursion/Pirahã has no recursion, so UG is wrong/no it isn’t/and also UG isn’t just recursion/oh and also starlings do recursion/etc.” debate, when the … Read More →
Science and capitalism: the Roaring Twenties and now
One consequence of being on sabbatical is never having to say TL;DR, and feeling free to read things that would normally accumulate in my pile of things to get around to one day. Another, less unambiguously positive consequence is a mild disorientation with respect … Read More →
Visions of Jonah
JZ: I’m so glad you could make time to talk to me. It must be a crazy time for you, with all the brouhaha about your book. JL: I wrote it mostly in hotel rooms and in the backs of buses. I was moving pretty much through … Read More →
Implied audience in high-profile psychology papers: Beyond the “nice lady on the subway.”
My dad emailed to say he didn’t quite follow last week’s post. I did a gut check and decided I was OK with this. Part of what I’m trying to do with this blog is learn to communicate with a broader audience about science. But … Read More →