Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!ptsfa!ames!ucbcad!zen!ucla-cs!rutgers!princeton!mind!harnad From: harnad@mind.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.ai,comp.cog-eng Subject: Re: Results of Symbol Grounding Poll: Nays (3rd of 3 parts) Message-ID: <995@mind.UUCP> Date: Wed, 8-Jul-87 23:44:34 EDT Article-I.D.: mind.995 Posted: Wed Jul 8 23:44:34 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 11-Jul-87 16:23:34 EDT References: <993@mind.UUCP> <994@mind.UUCP> Organization: Cognitive Science, Princeton University Lines: 246 Xref: utgpu comp.ai:610 comp.cog-eng:197 [These are the 37 nays in response to the poll on whether to continue the symbol grounding discussion in comp.ai/comp.cog-eng. I have removed names and addresses because I had not asked for permission to repost them. If you wish to communicate with anyone, specify by number (*and* whether "yea" or "nay") and I will forward it to the author.] ------------------------ [The first three nays (from Harwood, Minsky and Booth) preceded this poll; enumeration accordingly begins with 4.] ------------------------- 4. Please do not take this personally. I have almost stopped reading comp.ai because of the ridiculous quantity of material being posted by you and Brilliant, and others. This discussion has been completely unuseful to me and I would really like to see it stopped. It is much more like philosophy than AI to me and I am sure there are others who feel the same way but wont tell you. Please stop dominating this newsgroup. ------------------------ 5. Either you start another newsgroup or I unsubscribe to this one. I cannot take any more. ---------------------- 6. Please start your own newsgroup! ------------------- 7. My vote: *do* start your own news group or private mailing list. This discussion, however interesting it may be to the participants, has gone on too long to continue in "comp.ai". -------------------- 8. I enjoy skiming your symbol grounding writing though for my research it is totally irrelevant. However since there are relatively few people who do AI who need to consider the TTT (most people in AI are just trying to make machines more intelligent right now) I suspect that the symbol grounding problem better belongs in sci.philosophy.tech. The issues wont come up in the real world for at least 5 years because we are not even close to human emulation at the moment. On the other hand you may be working on psychological modelling. If so then there must be a news group or mailing list more close to that topic than comp.ai. All together I suspect that sci.philosophy.tech is the best place along with periodic notes to comp.ai notifying people that there is a discussion of importance to those who model human beings there. This would get your messages to the relevant people. Also if sci.philosophy.tech doesn't exist for some reason then talk.philosophy would be the next best thing. If the problem is that you can not reach the arpa world that way, I think there is a psychology mailing list. BTW about graded vs ungraded concepts, point taken. On the other hand most of the verbs in any language are regular but most of the verbs used by the speakers of a language are irregular. The dictionary is not meant to be and is not a fair sample of usage. Nor does the set of nouns in the language necessarily correspond to the set of concepts employed by its speakers, (it corresponds to the set of concepts that the speakers find convinient to convey rapidly). However you have presented inconclusive evidence that most concepts are not graded. If you had a dictionary that was sorted by usage and gave the usage of words rather than their definitions you would have better evidence that most concepts are not graded. ------------------ 9. As to your polling request regarding the symbol grounding issue: I am quite tired of all the traffic it has generated. Considering that no real information has been revealed, I feel it is time to drop it. In the recent time that these postings have filled the newsgroup, most all other worthy postings have vanished. The newsgroup should address a range of pertinent issues that will enlighten subscribers. I feel that the symbol grounding issue has only enlightened me in the use of the 'n' key! While I am on the subject, the cross-posting to 'comp.cog-eng' are atrocious. Either post to one or the other. Most every symbol grounding article has appeared in both. This generated to much traffic on the net and defeats the purpose of making special purpose groups. I thank you for your ability to notice fellow subscribers views. ------------------ 10. Can't we bag this damn symbol grounding discussion already? If it *must* continue, how about instituting a symbol grounding news group, and freeing the majority of us poor AILIST readers from the burden of flipping past the symbol grounding stuff every morning. ---------------------- 11. I generally do not read the SGP articles simply because I do not understand them (and they are so looong!). If there are a few people interested in reading and discussing SGP, there is no reason to prevent such postings. But if there are also many people who do not want to read that sort of things in comp.ai, then it would be wise to consider the possibility of creating a news-subgroup `comp.ai.sgp'. -------------------- 12. The ramblings on this topic passed my threshhold of boredom long ago. I'm not proposing censorship, but if you choose to continue the discussion with a smaller group of people who find this topic of interest, I will applaud your good manners. --------------------------- 13. I vote you start your own newsgroup--I was bored with "Symbol Grounding" about 500 kilo-bytes ago. Ditto "The Total Touring Test" or whatever your last filibuster was called. . . . --------------------- 14. My vote is for ending the discussion on the symbol grounding problem. Thanks. p.s. If you are interested in finding out why I voted against continuing the discussion, please let me know -- I will be glad to oblige. ----------------------- 15. Thank you for taking a poll on whether the symbol grounding problem discussion should or should not continue in comp.ai. My vote is to remove the discussion from this newsgroup. Maybe it could be moved to a new newsgroup talk.symbolgroundingproblem ??? ----------------------- 16. I think that the discussion has been out of hand for a long time now. It doesn't seem to contain any useful insights, and is taking up inordinate resources. Not the least of which is the time spent by the authors expounding their viewpoints. I think that this sort of disagreement is better done in position papers in and letters to journals. The odd use of terms hasn't helped keep the discussion on a high level. Not to point fingers, but your nonstandard use of "analog" made a large number of your posts completely incomprehensible to me until you said that you meant something other than the usual meaning of the term. So, I vote to flush this discussion. -------------------- 17. Personally, I have been skiping most of the articles in this discussion. I was referred to this newsgroup as a forum for other discussion but have seen little other than what appears to be a war of words from two opposing camps. By now the sides must be set--perhaps it is time to move the discussion from "news" to an e-mail mailing-list. ---------------------- 18. Definitely neither useful nor worth continuing. ------------------- 19. The manner in which the issue was raised *was* rather rude, but I regret to say that I find much of what was stated about your extended discussions very much to the point. I tried to keep up with discussion; I found it rather interesting at first. But it rapidly became clear that you were all talking at cross purposes, refusing to accept conventional usage or even common-usage-for-the-purpose-of-debate of the key words in question. The appalling level of quotation made things much, much worse and it became well-nigh impossible to ferret out the pearls of insight in the flood of verbiage. I do not wish your discussion to completely vanish from the airwaves, as it were, but without a bit of self-restraint all round, together with some sincere efforts to try to answer one another's objections, I don't think the discussion is particularly useful. (e.g. wrt all-or-none categories: pointing to concrete nouns in the dictionary or to the very special categories that have "hardware support" is not, in my opinion, a sincere effort to meet the objections to the contention that categories are all (or mostly) all-or-none, a rather contrary-to- common-observation position.) Perhaps the new policy on quotation will help: there has been a modest improvement in a couple of the recent postings. I remain hopeful. All I can say is, until things improve quite a bit, I will probably be flushing all the digests with "Symbol Grounding" in the topics list. Sorry. ------------------ 20. I do not find the symbol grounding problem discussion worthwhile. Thank you for (politely) asking. ---------------------- 21. I vote for discontinuing the discussion. It would be interesting except that there is far too much confusion over who's using what terminology. Probably dozens of articles have been wasted over "well, I don't know what *you* mean by 'analog', but when *I* say 'analog' I mean etc etc etc". ------------------------------ 22. You have made an unseemly attempt to bias this vote. The question is not whether your discussion is ``useful and worth continuing,'' but whether we *ALL* need to read or even be sent the truly amazing volume that you seem able to generate on this one topic !?! ** Please remove your discussion from the AI-list (to a new bboard?). ** {And if you find it absolutely necessary to be mad at how stupid and unjust the rest of the world is, go ahead and tally this as a vote for your discussion being useless and not worth continuing} -------------------- 23. 1. I find it neither interesting nor useful. 2. The arguments, until I stopped following it, somtimeseveral weeks ago, are circular if not repetitive. 3. I've speculated privately that the argruments were cranked out by a machine in someone basement as a Turing Test on the rest of the net. Either that or ... 4. But none of this justifies setting up another news group. comp.ai isn't being used for anything else. For a heavily used group, see comp.sys.ibm.pc. 5. Personally, I'd suggest that you take all of the correspondence. Put it in a folder, and open it again at New Years. Reread it, and write a real paper. ------------------------ 24. Please stop! ------------------------ 25. NO! Please take this discussion to e-mail. It's gone far beyond the point where it's interesting to anyone other than you and the few people still arguing. --------------------- 26. Stop it! -------------------- 27. The symbol grounding problem - please start your own newsgroup. DEFINITELY! ------------------------- 28. Although I don't think that AI-list should be strictly limited to discussions of algorithms and similarly down-to-earth items, I do think that the symbol grounding discussion has gotten a bit out of hand and should be conducted privately among the three or four major participants, with perhaps a summary to appear at some future date. ------------------------- 29. In article <977@mind.UUCP> you write: >David Harwood has made two very rude requests (Yes, he was way out of line.) As a former philosophy undergrad and current A.I. grad student, I've found the topic in general to be interesting. BUT . . . I think it should in fact be moved to its own newgroup. Comp.ai is now completely dominated by exchanges between you and Marty Brilliant, Anders Weinstein, etc. After a while, "listening" to a few other people argue gets tedious, no matter how interesting the topic. Frankly, I think people have been frightened away from the newsgroup in the past few months, with the result that there have been no discussions other than this one, unless you count a few requests for info on some language. P.S. I enjoyed your "uncomplemented categories" talk at the Phil/Psych meetings. ------------------------- 30. I vote to cease the endless symbol grounding discussion! ----------------------- 31. I find the discussion neither useful or worth continuing. ------------ 32. Please stop it. I agree with Law that most of the discussion can be carried thru private mail. I can see that R is easier to type than mail ...%....@...... etc but, then use the facilities provided by Unix like aliases etc. I am looking forward to your results. --------------------------- 33. You asked for votes. Mine is... no more on the symbol grounding problem. Thanks for asking. ----------------------- 34. I for one would greatly appreciate having the discussion removed from subsequent AIlists. As in a conference presentation, if a heated topic goes on for too long, the people involved should agree to meet later and discuss the issue amongst themselves without burdening the whole group. You must know by now who the interested parties are; can't you just send mail to each other? -------------------------- 35. It not the discussion per se that I think people object to as much as it is the size of the discussion. The replys are very large, each addressing 15 points of reply to the previous reply. It takes a while to read through the text, and extract some salient points of interest. Having real work to do, I sometimes just file the message, thinking I'll get to it later. I save ALL my mod.ai mail for a time in the near future when I attempt to complete my MS and want to scan back over the current "hot" topics. Unfortunatly I've had to start a special archive just for this discussion, and it's chewing my disk drive all to bits with saved mail. I find the disscussion interesting, and informative but... (Now for the poll): If discussion continues to involve ginormous reply's: END IT If discussion stops taking over whole digests: KEEP IT. -------------------------- 36. I'm sorry but for me the discussion is no longer interesting. ---------------- 37. I think that this discussion belongs to philosophy, not to AI. I hope that it will relocate itself accordingly. ---------------------------- -- Stevan Harnad (609) - 921 7771 {bellcore, psuvax1, seismo, rutgers, packard} !princeton!mind!harnad harnad%mind@princeton.csnet harnad@mind.Princeton.EDU