Good question! Here are some places to start: jonathancook.substack.com
chrishedges.substack.com
substack.com/@caitlinjohn...
substack.com/@arnaudbertr...
substack.com/@mate

They seem to have point: "Around a fifth (21%) do not feel free to discuss challenging or controversial topics in their teaching. This rises to a third (34%) of academics from ethnic minority backgrounds". My colleague David Miller at Bristol was fired despite court dismissing antisemitism charges.

Good question! Here are some places to start: jonathancook.substack.com
chrishedges.substack.com
substack.com/@caitlinjohn...
substack.com/@arnaudbertr...
substack.com/@mate

Think that would be a good point to make in paper. Many people will not know of the alternative approach.

Really interesting work! Hope to go into the details in our lab group. Just one initial comment – Grossberg has addressed many of these effects in his models. Would be interesting to relate your work to his. e.g.:
link.springer.com/content/pdf/...
sites.bu.edu/steveg/files...

There is an alternative press that is better than back then by far. Check it out. And get more people to move on.

Although we disagree on some points, @rtommccoy.bsky.social has been really helpful in responding to my comments.

@rplevy.bsky.social @rylanschaeffer.bsky.socia @mcxfrank.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social @melaniemitchell.bsky.social @lampinen.bsky.social @jeanremiking.bsky.social and others, my list just a quick check through who I follow.

@spiantado.bsky.social @tallinzen.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social
@mschrimpf.bsky.social @brendenlake.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @tonyzador.bsky.social @garymarcus.bsky.social @neuranna.bsky.social @bayesianboy.bsky.social @cocoscilab.bsky.social @mpshanahan.bsky.social

Curious what people think about what LMs are telling us about innate priors, and human language more generally.

The failure of LMs with language-priors does not undermine the importance of innate domain-specific priors for humans. But it does suggest that LMs are not going to be a good model of human language anytime soon.

Although this would appear to lend support to the importance of language-priors, their findings do not support this conclusion either. Most basically, their prior-trained LMs still need orders more magnitude of data to learn.

McCoy and Griffiths (2025) argue that distilling LMs with a language prior through meta-learning allows LMs to learn natural languages (English) quickly and flexibly: www.nature.com/articles/s41....

In Bowers (in press; Psychological Review) I challenged the claim that LMs can learn a language when trained on human-scale diet of words; consistent with the need for language-specific priors: osf.io/preprints/ps...

WhatsApp wouldn’t let me write the word genocide in a text this week. It kept changing it to ‘Genie I’ (?) I slowed right down and realised the word isn’t in its dictionary. I found that weird.

The papers you started with are not inconsistent with grandmother cells, for reasons detailed in many of the papers I've linked above. But please feel free to send papers you think are inconsistent. Again, my claim is simply the current evidence does not rule them out. bsky.app/profile/tyre...

You assert the data support distributed processing. I show through simulations that the data are consistent with grandmother cells (and that we should not rule out localist models based on current data). I guess we can leave it there.

You assert the data support distributed processing. I show through simulations that the data are consistent with grandmother cells (and that we should not rule out localist models based on current data). I guess we can leave it there.