Verbal behavior

What Hacker News says

1. leobgJun 2024
   Chomsky, of all people? Chomsky rose to fame by attacking BF Skinner’s book “Verbal Behavior”. Which is the book that made exactly the case you’re making now, only some 60 years ago.

   Skinner would marvel at today’s LLMs. They are the most elegant proof that intelligence is not just shaped by external contingencies, but that it is identical with those contingencies.

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2. leto_iiJun 2024
   He has discussed this in recent interviews and talks e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...

   > his critique of BF Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior” had been wrong after all

   btw, this is in no way proven (or true imo).

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3. leobgMay 2023
   He’s doing the same to ChatGPT that he did to Skinner in the 1960s. Back then, it put him on the map, and he lives in the illusion that he was right. Now ChatGPT is pretty much Skinner’s work come to life. The BFS book Chomsky critiqued was literally “Verbal Behavior” - a book about how intelligence arises from “dumb” reinforcement learning of words. Obviously Chomsky must now claim that ChatGPT only pretends to be intelligent. Else his entire life’s work is proven wrong.
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4. leobgMay 2023
   BF Skinner, “Verbal Behavior”. Critiquing that book is what put Chomsky on the map.
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5. foldrMay 2023
   Skinner (and behaviorists in general) did establish various 'laws' of behavioral reinforcement that do tend to hold in simple cases such as pigeons pecking at levers in return for food, etc. etc. Of course these laws had nothing interesting to say about language acquisition. I challenge anyone who thinks otherwise to actually try reading Verbal Behavior. It's an incredibly turgid and uninsightful book.
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6. leobgMar 2023
   Sounds a bit like Chomsky’s critique of Skinners “Verbal Behavior”, which kind of put him on the map back in the 60s. Though Skinner gave us teaching machines, ping pong playing pigeons, clicker training and, indirectly, ChatGPT.
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