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Chomsky's remarks were in response to Steven Pinker's question about the success of probabilistic models trained with statistical methods. This essay is a response to Pinker and Chomsky, and will address these questions:
A Go board has 19 × 19 points, each of which can be empty or occupied by black or white, so there are 3 (19 × 19) ≅ 10 172 possible board positions, but "only" about 10 170 of those positions are legal. Here are some of them:
Here's what we can do with today's computing power (using publicly available data and the processing power of my own personal computer; I'm not relying on access to corporate computing power):
When an experimental study states "The group with treatment X had significantly less disease ( p = 1%)", many people interpret this statement as being equivalent to "there is a 99% chance that if I do treatment X it will prevent disease." This essay explains why these statements are not equivalent. For such an…
To demonstrate the problem, I did a simulation where I generated 480 random numbers per subject, representing the 480 time slices in the experiment. I repeated this generation of random numbers 20 times. I compared the send and no-send intervals of random numbers using a T-test; none of the 20 trials found a…