As a person of caste who has numerous criticism about Spivak's work and politics, I'll keep iterating that this fiasco was nuanced. The [man] in question is extremely disrespectful, didn't try to engage with her work. Defending him is nonsense
@PratitiTiyas
@sagnikdutta
Spivak is by no means above criticism, but Anshul was incredibly disrespectful. the pronunciation of WEB Dubois matters bc he was a Haitian man and not a french man. and Anshul came to the hall to pick a fight, not ask a question.
A group of doctoral and pre-doc students, including myself, are running a Discord channel focused on theoretical neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy of science. We discuss/ read papers on these topics and hang out in this commune.
I'm 26, I'll be moving to a different country to do my PhD. I topped one of the prestigious linguistics gradschool merit list yesterday. But I still panic like a little kid if I have to do stats/ quants in a time bound exam.
I sent this as an English major in 2019, feeling stuck in a rut. I picked up new horizons and it changed my life. Now I'm going to do PhD in cognitive neuroscience. I precisely asked what I should do to get to research on cogsci. Here's to me.
Chomsky here talking about semantics, internalism, and how event semantics is on the right track because it's syntax. But I'm curious to what extent chomsky is aware of pietroski's conjunctivist semantics and what's his take on it.
Has anybody switched from humanities to sciences? Telling my friends that I'm going to do a PhD in neurobiology sounds either pretentious or daunting. I need that phrase where you can explain.
Took a break from studying neuroanatomy to read 'The Math is not the Territory: Navigating the Free Energy Principle' by
@bayesianboy
. Every minute was worth it. The takeaway: The free-energy principle is just math, purely non-representational. 🧵
Here Chomsky critiquing "theories of everything", semantic and epistemic externalism and hilariously suggested if you've to write about human life (by which he means a general account of everything), you might write a novel. Lmaao
It's a weird feeling (being trained as a linguist) to get your application accepted by Cognitive Science , Neuroscience and philosophy depts and rejected by most linguistics department, lol.
This is a long rant about being in academia. So if you're not in a situation to hear it. Don't.
I'm not being bitter but if you don't have generational wealth and come from not so well off families academia is hard. Now someone would throw a success story at my face. 1/
In one of my grad-school interview i was asked how I got interested in CogSci. I admitted it was through european philosophy in a literature department and studying maths, then a ling degree. She remarked: "..[You] found your own cognitive science".
It was surprisingly wholesome.
I know twitter is nice and comfy until it comes to very nuanced lived experience. So my father is very likely going to have a surgery/ at worse live with a terminal illness. We figured it out today. That very much means I might not be able to go abroad to do a PhD and be sad.
Fundamental texts in cognitive science are so fun to read. Less models, more explanatory adequacy. It was a good mix of linguistics, mentalist psychology, philosophy of mind ( RTM and CTM mostly)
Context :
This Bob Berwick presentation makes me want to stop wasting time and learn more automata theory, abstract algebra, neurobiology and syntax. Will I be able to do it? Stick around to find out. Good night.
Once upon a time CogSci had this Keynesian motto: a good cog scientist is trained in philosophy, computation, psychology, linguistics. We shall unravel the underlying mechanism of mind
Now: LLMs talked to me. Great discovery. Journals, conferences.
Ling/ CogSci
I finished my master's in linguistics concentrating on formal semantics and Psycholinguistics. Primary interest are event structure, aspect and telicity. Also questions about representation, complexity and modeling in CogSci. Which schools should I consider?
Excited that I've been accepted to the critical theory workshop (2024) Atelier de Théorie Critique, an amazing opportunity to interact with sociologists, political economists, critical theorists across the globe.
Thanks for bearing with me for the last few days. My father's health is stable and out of danger. Few things matter more than this. Love you all, sweethearts.
Linguistics/ ComSci/ CogSci twitter? Where and when did syntax tree originate in the history? I'm asking about the pictorial representation, not the concept, like which paper did it use first? Is it in computer science literature or linguistics literature?
@vishnusreekr
I would suggest (which I followed)
1) MIT Courseware: Computing with python
2) Python for everybody (UMich)
3) Angela Yu's Python course in Udemy
For books, i followed Guttag's book as a reference. I'm also interested in other people's suggestions.
This is an amazing read. Both Rey's book and Collin's review should be read not only by philosophers but linguists and cognitive scientists. I think philosophical issues in linguistics at this stage of the discipline is just foundations of linguistics.
Happy that I have been selected for the Computational Neuroscience track of the Neuromatch summer school, sad that I might not be able to pay the fee ://
Congratulations to my friends
@jks_jay
and
@saaaahiiiil
for getting accepted to linguistics grad program in the US. Watch out y'all! Semantics and experimental syntax people are coming from India.
Maybe I'm quoting out of context but one of the famous tenured professors said this live on a debate about LLM:
"There's no theory in linguistics and computer science which can generate long coherent grammatical sentence"
What? I mean what ?
Contrary to the popular view that linguistics (modern linguistics imu) is an esoteric niche field, it actually equips students with skillet (if done well) ,easily transferrable to other domain. We've examples like Leila Gleitman, James Pustejovsky, Paul Elbourne to make a few 1/
Please bring back formal language theory and good Neurolinguistics in the generative tradition to the forefront of language research (fore because there are plenty good research, but bad PR) so that we stop fighting things which are just based on bad foundations.
Why the heck will linguists be called "language specialist"? Are physicists called idk "physical object specialists" or a paleontologist dinosaur specialist?
I'm really grateful to everybody who reached out regarding the last post. I don't want to give up or give in. I want to keep posting about cogsci, linguistics, brain, computing and keep doing my research. Thanks everyone who has made this space safer and inclusive.
A today year old me getting excited to see Joseph Dietzgen' work on dialectics and thinking to myself "Chomsky must have read it given its emphasis on faculty of thought and non-coercive anarchism" -- Mayday bookstore, Delhi, India
@notsomeritorios
Btw add that a dalit (me) is calling you a misogynist. You need some diversity to tell you how reactionary you are and how anti-dalit your politics is.
After skimming some works by
@gershbrain
,
@drmichaellevin
, Randy Gallistel, Neil Burgess (on the shallowest level) , I'm sort of convinced that generative linguistics is more like molecular biology + computational neuroscience than physics.
Seeing the situation of theoretical foundations of cognitive science, i want to have a reading circle/ interest group for people interested in the theoretical cognitive science. I can run a discord.
Doing cognitive neuroscience is like understanding psychobiology and math/ engineering but feeling lost how to implement them. The age old question still haunts me : is cognition inherently mathematical or mathematical intuitions are just a modelling tool?
The UBC application is 10k in my currency and India is not on the list of the least developed country. I am just ranting but have you ever thought about how it feels to be born in South Asia and poor and ambitious. Also, don't give me the "take a student loan" bs.
I've cited linguists, philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists in a proposal. I'm a proper cognitive scientist now. Established. No deep thinking anymore.
Exactly. Coming from a country which barely has any resources for linguistics, philosophy, computer science and cognitive science Twitter is one of the best places to keep in touch with recent works by scholars worldwide.
Science twitter please don’t leave. We have great community here. I know no other place to keep up and interact with ideas from neuroscience, psychology, physics, mathematics, machine learning, philosophy, economics & linguistics. No reason to stop; just block others if needed
Hi everybody. I really hope you're feeling well, taking care of your health, enjoying the sunshine, listening to Bach. A virtual space has lots of dimensions I don't understand but if I leave twitter someday I hope to find everybody as enthusiastic as I experienced
If someone is interested in natural language metaphysics, plural logic, formal syntax, event structure, philosophy of mind, and everything at the intersection which department they should go between linguistics/ philosophy for graduate school? Asking for a friend.
What is this bizarre interchangeability b/w Chomsky and generative grammar among tech bros? There were/ are/ will be researcher(s) who shape(d) the field: Turing, Post, Miller, Lenneberg, Kayne, Fodor, to Norbert, Berwick, to Heim, Kratzer. Whose demolition we are talking about?
I explained modern linguistics (mostly minimalist program, evolution of language, pragmatics) to my biologist father. He got very excited and said oh "this is actually legit" lol
Fodor actually did a postdoctoral stint at a psychology lab and then headed a psycholinguistics lab at MIT for a while. Just saying for "experimental people".
CS (AI) twitter has never been so annoying until LLMs took over the industry. Discussion about algorithm, learning and computation are gone. Most of the posts are annoying little bad ethics or how sam Altman wants to save the world by exploiting people.
Resolution for 2024
1) Linguistics: Intensional logic, Algebraic semantics, minimalism and skeletal.
2) CogSci: LOT, Internalism, core cognition, Social choice theory
2) Philosophy and Politics: agricultural economy, MMT, Indian Materialism, Matte blanco's Bi logic.
Seeking accommodation as a doctoral candidate starting at the University of Geneva in September. Delayed documents have set back my search. Any leads from those in Switzerland or at the University of Geneva would be appreciated. Please retweet/quote to help. Thank you.
Doctoral students : if you are doing research on something without knowing every prerequisite, do you start by reading relevant papers and learn the technical stuff on the job or take a more bottom up approach?
"Why study physics ? Ball still rolls". Why study 'X' is the stupidest trend on twitter. Get a life. Study anything that interests you. If you think philosophy is not worth studying, just don't. Not a single philosopher is going to stop their life for that.
I dont understand this entire "linguistics should take LLMs seriously". I mean linguists back in the 50s through 80s; from Harris, Chomsky to Joshi and Steedman all took the question of accepted language , statistics very seriously. Idk why are these headlines
My twitter consists of generative grammarians, ANN evangelists, neurosymb apostles, continental phil pilgrims, analytic phil missionaries, lit theory and comp lit flâneurs, comp neuro stalkers, evobio explainers, Marxist radicals, ambedkarite anarchists, Bayes flat minders
Based!
@tallinzen
Just thinking about global south and under developed countries who can't attend conferences physically to begin with because they simply can't afford financially. But yeah it makes sense.
I think Hornstein's linguist/ languist distinction is crucial and in only doing linguistics you can do some cognitive science; a theory of language (theory of vision) IS theory of cognition.
Sometimes I feel all of my academic nerdy interests is just another expression of vulnerability, to engage in something which I know is bigger than me, does not revolve around me. I wish my social life would have been less anxious and I really enjoyed my life. But you have some.
Gave my first NLP job interview. Transitioning from Linguistics to CL/ NLP is not easy, but I enjoyed it. Don't know whether I'll get selected , but I enjoyed the interview process and I felt confident.
Even if generative grammar turns out to be completely wrong, isn't useful for NLP, (although no clue how that's a criteria), is too restrictive etc, I'm still glad we didn't hand over language to Hinton or Rumelhart. What a weird "scale everything" cult we would have gotten.
@Khushbu68906378
I don't have a good grasp of fellowship qualification test but the NET/ JRF exam is anything but a qualification exam for a scholar/ researcher. Bunch of formulaic MCQs with no real scope for creativity, rigorousness etc.
Billionaires getting threatened by "pronouns" proves how insecure and fragile you can despite having (read exploiting/ extorting) money. A truly postmodern comedy.
I'm staying at a friend's place and they are super nice. We talked about everything under the sun and I felt like a human being after ages. If you've friends, just tell them how much they mean to you. Once the trigger is pulled you'll be 35 and lonely (okay it's just me).
LeCun for the last couple years or so catered to these techbros, didn't ask his right wing jingoist followers not to harrass people from marginalized community, took every chance to ad hominem scientists. Now another gutterwit techbro is blatantly insulting him. Once a sellout..
This is one of the best introduction to minimalist formalism (Greg Kobele). The teaching style is kind of abstract which makes it easier to understand imo.
Did my first presentation at ICOLSI, AMU. With the fear and expectation that I'll be victim-blamed I'm going to share my experience. I worked with a researcher who is 37, finishing his PhD. The decision of doing collaborative research were absolutely mutual. Things were fine but.
@gualtieropicc
throwing shade on my favourite cognitive scientists but this time it is legit and nuanced. The paper pushes for neuroscience-based, multi-level mechanistic accounts explaining how cognition arises from brain processes.
I hope to write a textbook on mathematical methods for unified cognitive science targeted towards non-math undergraduates. End of all panick stricken searching on the internet and library.
@notsomeritorios
Shut the fuck up, you moron. Why do you even go to a lecture and waste few seconds to ask questions which have no bearing on the topic discussed? Spivak is rude and arrogant people who know me know my opinion of her. But you're a ethnofasist misogynist troll.
Source: Pietroski, Chomsky on Meaning and Reference.
This is the clearest review (I have read) of Chomsky's views on meaning. Paul made a careful case for Chomsky's "theory of meaning". Going back to doing syntax again.
Linguist twitter: Are there works on how "knowledge of an E-language" might help work on that E-language? Like, are there any effects of knowing a language on working on that language (it's syntax, morphology, phonology etc.). Does there exist similar problem in other sciences?
Could anyone (pref. Asian immigrants) from University of Geneva, Switzerland get in touch with me?
I've few things to figure out about rent, logistics etc. I'm a first gen PhD and I want to have a better understanding of the overall situation. Any help/lead is much appreciated
The best thing about me is i don't understand both Spivak(s): neither the subaltern studies queen nor the catagory theory, tapos theory king. I'm the best.
Hi Twitter Network,
I'm seeking job opportunities in NLP engineering, analytical linguistics, data annotation, digital humanities, data linguistics, and research assistance in psycholinguistics. Any leads would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
My father got hospitalized today. There might be a return or exit. My brown mom says something very interesting. When I got my first offer from my PI we were kind of shocked as she believes God doesn't grant happiness to people like her and us. I tried...
Me after preparing for an interview, getting rejected by grade schools, waiting to avail my scholarship, trying to learn neuroscience, automata, intensional logic, waiting to read econ and political phil readings, being completely exhausted and emotionally empty.
Many are interested in the idea. Implementation should be straightforward. We need to decide on the platform: Zulip or Discord, as suggested by
@julngrv
. Timing is crucial due to global time zone differences.
Seeing the situation of theoretical foundations of cognitive science, i want to have a reading circle/ interest group for people interested in the theoretical cognitive science. I can run a discord.
A friend and I, while talking about semantics realised how differently CS people and linguists, philosophers of language conceptualize semantics. , Are there works which lay out the connection between semantics of natural language and formal language? Except 1/
Today onwards my twitter will be less CogSci and more unsolicited personal side of me and I'm sorry. But I also wanted to acknowledge that I'm grateful for each and every scientists , humanists who have been here. There's more to life and it's people. Thanks a lot.