In fact you can have note-perfect, sophisticated, convincing style without coming one inch closer to making sense.
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Style and sense may just be two disjoint capacities. If I’m speculating I tend to think the “cortical algorithm” is for style, and sense is extrapolated from something striatal or related to motor/kinaesthetic learning.
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Personally it’s frustrating because I have awesome style and just enough sense to keep up, and most of the people I know are sorta “sense-supremacists” who think that skill profile is a hallmark of bad people.
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A lot of people just don’t believe in their hearts that different skills are a thing, that you can be good at one thing and bad at another. And people especially don’t like the notion that you can be better at the stylistic part of writing than the “making sense” part.
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But look: my mom, who worked in academic publishing, could do a brilliant job editing a math manuscript for style without knowing calculus.
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She also subconsciously imitated the accent of whoever she was speaking to. And picked up Romanian by listening to phone conversations. She had a freakishly good ear. I’m convinced this is a single phenomenon.
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If I watch an episode of Peaky Blinders I’ll acquire an Irish accent by osmosis for the next hour. I subconsciously pastiche whichever writer I’ve been reading lately. I can’t *not* mirror conversational tone & emotion. One phenomenon.
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I claim Scott Alexander has the same thing: writes compulsively, great at style pastiche, nobody believes him when he says he’s bad at math.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
There are posts on Scott's blog which are Scott being extremely good at math (but not noticing, because he thinks math is something it's not). So count me as someone who doesn't believe he's "bad at math".
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Replying to @michael_nielsen @s_r_constantin
I'm not sure of all of what you are referring to since I am not an ML researcher, but I am a trained linguist & read the paper out of curiosity. I don't think he is being reasonable to the state of machine transalation and UG in the 2000s. Everyone thought the paradigm wld work.
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They thought which paradigm would work?
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