Chomsky's argument is not terribly long, nor is it difficult to understand, nor is it nearly as harsh as some people (Aaronson and Norvig, possibly among others) seem to be taking it, nor does he spend much oxygen talking about his own work or preferred approaches (although Aaronson and Norvig seem interested on emphasizing that he mentioned it at all). It is probably worth just reading it:<p><a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PinkerChomskyMIT.html" rel="nofollow">http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PinkerChomskyMIT.html</a><p>Really this is the core of what Chomsky said:<p>>There is a succ- notion of success which has developed in
uh computational cognitive science in recent years
which I think is novel in the history of science.
It interprets success as uh approximating unanalyzed data.
Uh so for example if your were say to study bee communication this way,
instead of doing the complex experiments that bee scientists do, you know like
uh having fly to an island to see if they leave an odor trail and this sort of thing,
if you simply did extensive videotaping of bees swarming, OK,
and you did you know a lot of statistical analysis of it,
uh you would get a pretty good prediction for what bees are likely to do next time they swarm,
actually you'd get a better prediction than bee scientists do,
and they wouldn't care because they're not trying to do that.
Uh but and you can make it a better and better approximation by more video tapes
and more statistics and so on.
Uh I mean actually you could do physics this way,
uh instead of studying things like balls rolling down frictionless planes, which can't happen in nature,
uh if you uh uh took a ton of video tapes of what's happening outside my office window, let's say,
you know, leaves flying and various things,
and you did an extensive analysis of them,
uh you would get some kind of prediction of what's likely to happen next,
certainly way better than anybody in the physics department could do.
Well that's a notion of success which is I think novel,
I don't know of anything like it in the history of science.<p>Now this contrasts powerfully with Norvig's "Galileo" picture. Copernicus and Galileo were excellent mathematicians by contemporary standards. They had data, models, predictions, and criteria for the validity of those models.<p>How do we <i>measure</i> the success of GPT-3? That is the key question Chomsky raises. Galileo's conviction, and his willingness to die defending the truth, was not based merely on the profound experience of looking through a telescope.