Connectionists: The symbolist quagmire

[Asim Roy]

I met Tsvi at the SBIR conference in Washington DC today and found out that he, in fact, has received an SBIR grant from NSF to do further work on his algorithm and commercialize it.

Congratulations to Tsvi. His work is getting attention.

Asim

-----Original Message-----
From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> On Behalf Of Prof Leslie Smith
Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2022 8:00 AM
To: Tsvi Achler <achler at gmail.com>
Cc: Connectionists List <connectionists at cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Connectionists: The symbolist quagmire

I presume the paper to which Tsvi Achler refers is

T. Achler,  Symbolic neural networks for cognitive capacities, Biological Inspired Cognitive Architectures, 9, 71-81, 2014.

and it certainly seems relevant to this discussion.

--Leslie Smith

Tsvi Achler wrote:
> Going along with the thread of conversation, the problem is that 
> academia is very political. The priority of everyone that thrives in 
> it is to maintain or increase their position, so much so that they 
> refuse to consider alternatives to their views.  This is amplified 
> with a multidisciplinary background.
> My experience is neither Marcus and associates nor Hinton and 
> associates are willing to look at systems that:
> 1) are connectionst
> 2) are scalable
> 3) use so much feedback that methods like backprop wont work
> 4) have self-feedback helps maintain symbolic-like modularity
> 5) are unintuitive given today's norms This goes on year after year, 
> and the same old stories get rehashed.
> The same is true of related brain sciences fields e.g. theoretical 
> neuroscience & cognitive psychology.
> In the end only those who are entrenched and tend to the popularity 
> contest can get funding and publish in places where it will be read.  
> It is not worth pursuing or publishing anything novel in academia.
> The corporate world is all that is left because of the awful politics.
> Moreover Marcus and Hinton themselves enjoy the less political 
> environment in corporate as well.
> -Tsvi
>
>
Prof Leslie Smith (Emeritus)
Computing Science & Mathematics,
University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA Scotland, UK Tel +44 1786 467435
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