by tripletao | 2025-12-23 18:24:15+00:00
> Andrew Wiles has not produced any result evaluable by me or by almost anyone else.

Fermat wrote the theorem in the margin long before Wiles was born. There is no question that many people tried and failed to prove it. There is no question that Wiles succeeded, because the skill required to verify a proof is much less than the skill required to generate it. I haven't done so myself; but lots of other people have, and there is no dispute by any skilled person that his proof is correct. So I believe that Wiles has accomplished something significant.

I don't think Chomsky has any similar accomplishment. I roughly understand the grandiose final goal; I just see no evidence that he has made any progress towards it. Everything that I'd see as an interesting intermediate goal is dismissed as out of scope, especially when others achieve it. On the rare occasion that Chomsky has made externally intelligible predictions on the range of human language, they've been falsified anthropologically. I assume you followed the dispute on Pirahã, which I believe clarified that features like recursion were in fact optional, rendering the theory safely non-falsifiable again.

So what's his progress? Everything that I see turns inward, valuable only within the framework that he himself constructed. Anyone can build such a framework, so that's not an accomplishment. Convincing others to spend years of their lives on that framework is a sort of an achievement, but it's not a scientific one--homeopathy has many practitioners.

> I expect anyone learning Japanese as a second language will get a chuckle out of this one. It’s in fact a common scenario.

I think this view is just as wrong applied to a human as to a model. A beginning language student probably knows a lot more grammar rules than a native speaker, but their inability to converse doesn't come from their inability to quickly apply them. It comes from the fact that those rules capture only a small amount of the structure of natural language. You seem to acknowledge this yourself--if nothing Chomsky is working on would help a machine generate language, then it wouldn't help a human either. This also explains my teachers' usual advice to stop studying and converse as best I could, watch movies, etc.

Humans clearly learn language in a more structured way than LLMs do (since they don't need trillions of tokens), but they learn primarily from exposure, with partial structure but many exceptions. I don't think that's surprising, since most other things "designed" in an evolutionary manner have that same messy form. LLMs have succeeded spectacularly in modeling that, taking the usual definition in ML or other math for "modeling".

It's thus strange to me to see them dismissed as a source of insight into natural language. I guess most experts in LLMs are busy becoming billionaires right now; but if anything resembling Chomsky's universal grammar ever does get found to exist, then I'd guess it will be extracted computationally from models trained on corpora of different languages and not any human insight, in the same way that the Big Five personality traits fall out of a PCA.