Masoud
langloglearn.bsky.social
Masoud
@langloglearn.bsky.social
Assistant Professor of linguistics at UC Davis Researching language, logic, and learning in humans & sometimes machines
thank you! i enjoyed it too!
February 28, 2025 at 1:11 AM
that's why I would not say such claims are place holders. they may be imprecise, but that is just a function of our current state of the field
February 27, 2025 at 12:50 AM
I agree! :DA claim like "negation is innate" is underspecified and can be made precise in the three ways you mentioned and many more. I'd say all innateness claims ultimately require genetic evidence + specification of neurodevelopmental mechanisms that result in the learning, processing, & behavior
February 27, 2025 at 12:50 AM
makes sense. It could be just terminological differences but once we separate them, innateness claims about each is substantial. Someone that claims "negation is innate" is making a substantial and (in principle) verifiable claim about representational constraints, regardless of onto/philogeny
February 26, 2025 at 2:42 PM
2. learning mechanism (Bayesian update, trigger setting, gradient descent, etc) 3. Learning biases (e.g. priors over symbols or rules in a Bayesian system, hyper-parameter settings etc).As far as I can see these are quite separate components of learning that can be innate/learned to varying degrees
February 26, 2025 at 1:52 PM
I'm not sure if we are using the immune system example the same way so I'll set it aside to avoid confusion. More generally, any learning system can have more or less of the following innate/inbuilt components: 1. representations (e.g symbols & combinatorial rules, vector space, etc) ...
February 26, 2025 at 1:52 PM
or specific learning mechanisms. A good analogy may be the immune system. We have innate immunity that targets pathogens based on innate representations of what pathogens look like from evolutionary exposure and we have adaptive immunity that learns new representations of pathogens in our lifetime
February 26, 2025 at 1:49 AM
I'm using innate knowledge to refer to all that is in a system prior to learning e.g. representations, learning mechanisms, biases... As Locke said no one should doubt some learning mechanisms and some capacity to represent ideas is innate. At issue is if specific ideas/representations are innate
February 26, 2025 at 1:49 AM
I agree that inductive bias is a good term for a subclass of innate knowledge but not all innate knowledge is reducible to inductive bias obviously. In the extreme case a system can have innate stored information literally. Or innate knowledge of what info is computed how etc
February 25, 2025 at 6:21 PM
not sure."X is innate" is a verifiable claim independent of how it evolved or developed. More clear in cases like innate vs. learned/adaptive immune system. It is currently harder to verify for cognitive constructs than biological ones but still a claim worth verifying or falsifying in its own right
February 25, 2025 at 6:14 PM
how much of that is private funding/grants vs the federal government?
January 25, 2025 at 4:33 PM
oh absolutely
January 24, 2025 at 7:18 PM
each proposition is a note? a cord is a conjunction? disjunction and negation would be hard to play but maybe we gotta limit it to one octave :))
January 16, 2025 at 11:17 PM
sorry you make a good point I had no disagreement there. Just added a thought :)
December 5, 2024 at 8:41 PM
a lot of ppl warned the industry that AI models are not ready to be deployed for high stakes tasks. They simply didn't listen. Many still don't listen or care. And it makes sense. the end game for a business is increasing revenue and profits not better decisions
December 5, 2024 at 8:38 PM
Yeah my bet would be that we just don't know. I also don't know what to make of a language having or not having a word for a concept. It seems like people make obvious inferences based on that information which to me seems not straightforward
November 30, 2024 at 11:21 PM
I'd really doubt that claim can be properly substantiated. First, not having a word for X is hard to verify for a language. Second across many understudied languages with no written form! what's the book?
November 30, 2024 at 7:12 PM