Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
24 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I can give you a math formula for why each one of them is bad and where, and that’s kind of cool. I think that’s very neat.”
02 / uncertainty
“The space, the world space is a little different from my world space, so I don’t know what the things they talk about, things it’s going to have to do with their life as opposed to my industrial life, which is going to be different.”
03 / belief
“How do I frame the form of the meaning is all I’m talking about. You’re talking about a harder thing, I think.”
04 / belief
“I believe as you hinted, that language is an invented system by humans for communicating their ideas.”
05 / belief
“In every language, I think everyone agrees that all sentences are trees at some level.”
06 / belief
“I want languages to survive because they’re so interesting for so many reasons. But I mean, I find them fascinating just for the language part, but I think there’s a lot of connections to culture as well, which is also very important.”
07 / belief
“I’d say the dependency structures aren’t that hard generally, I think there’s a lot of agreement of what they are for almost any sentence in most languages.”
08 / uncertainty
“I just say words. Your words are morphemes between, we don’t know that. Actually that’s a very good question.”
09 / belief
“I agree with you that it would be nice to figure out… So, there’s some way to figure out the cost.”
10 / uncertainty
“Correctly, meaning they’ll do a three-verb phrase. I don’t know what’s correct or not.”
11 / uncertainty
“People will do the same thing. And so it’s like, “I don’t know what it means exactly, but it’s doing something.”
12 / belief
“We probably don’t want to treat them all as the same. And so I think that the right model, a better model of a noisy channel would have three different sources of noise, which are background noise, speaker-inherent noise and listener-inherent noise.”
13 / uncertainty
“Oh, another fascinating little tidbit is that even if they’re these constructed languages like Klingon or I don’t know the languages from Game of Thrones, I’m sorry, I don’t remember those languages.”
14 / belief
“We think that that’s the kind of a style which tells you it’s legalese, it’s a reasonable guess.”
15 / belief
“As a kid in school, when we had to structure sentences and English grammar, I found that process interesting.”
16 / belief
“There’s a bilateral network, which I think she tends to call the multiple demands network, which does anything kind of hard.”
17 / belief
“There’s this sort of weird view, well, odd view, I think that to think that human language is somehow special.”
18 / observation
“We can figure those out very well. The problem is the when. It’s measuring oxygen.”
19 / evaluation
“We can’t see how languages change or anything because we’ve got these snapshots of a few hundred or a few thousand languages.”
20 / prediction
“Should I trade for door number two, even though I know the good prize in door number one? And then the large language model say, “Yes, you should trade,” because it just goes through the forms that it’s seen before so many times on these cases where yes, you should trade because your odds have shifted from one in three now to two out of three to being that thing.”
21 / uncertainty
“I mean, we don’t know. This is one of those problems with the snapshot of just current languages is that we don’t know what causes a culture to discover/ invent accounting system.”
22 / preference
“I like dependency grammar because it’s more perspicuous, it’s more transparent about representing the connections between the words.”
23 / evaluation
“Now, you’re saying is it a good theory? Well, probably not because I want a smaller theory than that.”
24 / prediction
“That’s one center embedding of a clause, and turns out they’re massively center embedded. So, I think in random contracts and in random laws, I think you get about 70%, something like 70% of sentences have a center embedded clause, which is insanely high.”