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Comment by munchler | Hacker News Reader

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Not so quick with disqualifications…

Stallman was working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, long before most of us have first heard the term AI or were even born.

Also, for example: „While working (starting in 1975) as a research assistant at MIT under Gerry Sussman, Stallman published a paper (with Sussman) in 1977 on an AI truth maintenance system, called dependency-directed backtracking.“

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

working on this in 1975 doesn't neccessarily mean you're qualified to be talking about it in 2023

RMS while studying at MIT published about what's considered early/classic "AI" (for example I was very surprised and double-checked the author when I encountered a paper about Prolog backtracking / backjumping by him many years ago). I'd assume he knows the topic he is writing about very well.

Hoping to elicit one more double-take, here's someone else who wrote a paper on (implementing a genetic algorithm in) Prolog, a long time ago:

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/geneticprogramming.html

A statistical model cannot understand anything since it does not think in the first place.

That implies that thinking is not based on some kind of biological statistical system.

Counterpoint: person hears 15 arguments. 14 say one thing, 1 says another. Person agrees with the 1 argument because it resonates with them more.

I'm not saying the 14 are right and the 1 is wrong. I'm saying that the decision was not based on a statistical model.

Not so simple. Why did the argument of that one person resonate more? Likely because of some other „experience“ or data that is not necessarily expressed or codified in either of the arguments.

That experience or intuition or whatever you want to call it can itself be based on some statistical „model“.

No, it's based on a statistical model that incorporates biases, like many statistical models.

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