As a programmer, I find R hard to use and not very well designed, so I can see why you'd call that nonsense.
But when I was a math student, I found that in some ways R does have "a more mature package universe". There were many math algorithms that I could find packages for in R and not in Python, even as a mere grad student.
Why, does not sound too arrogant to me.
So how is the fact that this person made the observation relevant here? Are you name dropping for a particular reason?
I feel like this has been a trend lately on HN. People start mentioning others to give them more clout for some mysterious reason.
> Brief bio: I started out studying math (Princeton AB ‘10, Yale PhD ‘15, focusing on applied harmonic analysis) and then spent some time in the world of data science and machine learning (Palantir, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Starsky Robotics.)
My experience with ChatGPT thus far is that it is as intelligent as a very broadly read person who just doesn't reeeally get the complex or nuanced aspects of the content it reads - much like many real Humans.
"After eighteen years of being a professor, I’ve graded many student essays. And while I usually try to teach a deep structure of concepts, what the median student actually learns seems to mostly be a set of low order correlations. They know what words to use, which words tend to go together, which combinations tend to have positive associations, and so on. But if you ask an exam question where the deep structure answer differs from answer you’d guess looking at low order correlations, most students usually give the wrong answer."
I think this is false, but if you're reading quickly, it sounds cogent enough. As Sarah Constantin observed about GPT2 [0]:
> if you skim text, you miss obvious absurdities. The point is OpenAI HAS achieved the ability to pass the Turing test against humans on autopilot...The mental motion of “I didn’t really parse that paragraph, but sure, whatever, I’ll take the author’s word for it” is, in my introspective experience, absolutely identical to “I didn’t really parse that paragraph because it was bot-generated and didn’t make any sense so I couldn’t possibly have parsed it”, except that in the first case, I assume that the error lies with me rather than the text. This is not a safe assumption in a post-GPT2 world. Instead of “default to humility” (assume that when you don’t understand a passage, the passage is true and you’re just missing something) the ideal mental action in a world full of bots is “default to null” (if you don’t understand a passage, assume you’re in the same epistemic state as if you’d never read it at all.)
[0] https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/humans-not-concentrat...