Gary Marcus

(Thread) On the heels of the recent @GaryMarcus & @ylecun Twitter "debate", here's one of my gripes. I find myself constantly frustrated in any deep learning vs. symbolic debate because symbol pushers tend to claim ownership over capacities like "reasoning".

In the worst instances reasoning *capacities* and symbolic *mechanisms* are entirely conflated. In less pernicious instances reasoning capacities are presumed to require symbolic methods.

Symbolic methods do indeed have properties that would be useful for reasoning, including a natural propensity for compositionality. But these useful properties are not "owned" by symbolic methods -- they are properties that learning-based methods can have too!