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A comment on On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning (2011).

Re:On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning (... by rooundio on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @02:17AM (#11951907)
tl;dr "Classical" (natural) scientist: "X is only understood once I found first principles that x can be reduced to." "Modern" scientist: "X might be so complicated that there are no first principles that x can be reduced to. Rather, finding a neural network that can do x is the best I can do, and it explains why x can be done."
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Re:On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning (... by foldr on Thursday June 23, 2016 @06:24AM (#11959920)
I think you should delete the "first" in both cases. Chomsky merely wants a principled model. He's not making any pretense that we're anywhere close to understanding language at a fundamental level. Norvig isn't really interested in principled models at all.
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Re:On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning (... by mcguire on Wednesday June 22, 2016 @08:29PM (#11958096)
See also

* Statistical mechanics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_mechanics

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