Sunday, June 30, 2013

A suggested entry for "Big Data" in the philosopher's lexicon

For those that have never perused the Philosopher's Lexicon, you are in for a treat (here). I have just come across the following proposed definition for "Big Data," that I found as revealing as it is amusing (here):

Big Data, n: the belief that any sufficiently large pile of shit contains a pony with probability approaching 1.

There is no substitute for thinking, not even very large amounts of data.

The idea that Big Data can be theory free is not a bug, but a feature (here). If it catches on it might really change what we consider to be the point of science. There has always been a tight relation between the cognitive pursuit (why) and the technological one (can I control it). Good technology often builds on theoretical insight. But sometimes not. Big Data seems willing to embrace the idea that insight is overrated. This is why people like Chomsky and Brenner a.o. are hostile to this move towards Big Data: it changes the goal of science from understanding to control, thus severing the useful distinction between science and engineering.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Teaching Minimalist Syntax

I am teaching an Intro to Minimalism course here at the LSA summer institute and I have just taught my first class. It got me thinking about how to teach such a course (I know, I should have done that weeks/months ago). As you may know, I am part of a trio who have tried to address this question by writing an intro text (here). However, this was sometime ago (2005) and it is worth rethinking the topic afresh. When we wrote the book, our idea was to use GB to lever ourselves into minimalist issues and concerns. This follows the pattern set by Chomsky in his 1993 paper, the one that that set things going in earnest.  However, I am not sure that this is the right way to actually proceed for the simple reason that it strikes me that many younger colleagues don’t know the rudiments of GB (it’s even worse for earlier theories: when asked how many have read Aspects chapter 1, only a handful of hands popped up) and so it is hard to use that as stage setting for minimalist questions. But, the larger question is not whether this is useful but whether this is the best way to get into the material. It might have been a reasonable way of doing things when students were all still steeped in GB, but even then minimalist ideas had an independent integrity and so, though convenient to use GB scaffolding, this was not necessary even then and now it might be downright counter-productive.  I confess that I don’t really believe this. Let me explain why (btw, the reasons depart from those pushed in the book, which, in retrospect, iss far too “methodological” (and hence, misleading) for my current tastes).

I believe that MP has some real novel elements.  I don’t just mean the development of new technology, though it has some of this too. What I mean is that it has provoked a reorientation in the direction of research. How did it do this? Roughly by center-staging a new question, one that if it existed before, rose considerably in prominence to become a central organizing lens through which analyses are judged.  The new question has been dubbed ‘Darwin’s Problem’ (DP) (I think Cederic was the first to so dub it) in proud imitation of that lovable, though still unanswered, ‘Plato’s Problem’ (PP). Now, in my view, it is only sensible to make DPish inquiries (how did a particular complex system arise?) if we have a complex system at hand. In linguistics the relevant complex system is FL, the complexity adumbrated by UG. Now to the GB part: it provided the (rough) outlines of what a reasonable UG would look like. By ‘reasonable’ I mean one that had relatively wide empirical coverage (correctly limned the features of possible Gs) and that had a shot of addressing PP satisfactorily (in GB, via its Principles and Parameters (P&P) organization.  So, given GB, or something analogous, it becomes fruitful to pose DP in the domain of language.[1]

Let me state this another way: just as it makes little sense to raise PP without some idea of what Gs look like, it makes little sense to raise DPish concerns unless one has some idea of what FL/UG looks like.  If this is correct, then sans GB (or some analogue) it is hard to see how to orient oneself minimalistically. Thus, my conclusion that one needs GB (or some analogue) as that which will be reanalyzed in more fruitful (i.e. more DP congenial) terms.

So, that’s why I think that MP needs GB. However, I suspect that this view of things may be somewhat idiosyncratic.  Not that there isn’t a fair amount of backing for this interpretation in the MP holy texts. There is. However, there are other minimalist values that are more generic and hence don’t call for this kind of starting point.  The one that most strongly comes to mind (mainly because I believe that I heard a version of this yesterday and it also has quite a bit of support within Chomsky’s writings) is that minimalism is just the application of standard scientific practices to linguistics. I don’t buy this. Sure, there is one sense in which all that is going on here is what one finds in science more generally: looking at prior results and considering if they can be done more simply (Ockham has played a big role in MP argumentation, as have intuitions about simplicity and naturalness). However, there is more than this. There is an orienting question, viz. DP, and this question provides an empirical target as well as a tacit benchmark for evaluating proposals (note: we can fail to provide possible solutions to DP). In effect, DP functions within current theory in roughly the way that PP functioned within GB: it offers one important dimension along which proposals are evaluated as it is legitimate to ask whether they fit with PP (it is always fair to ask what in a proposal is part of FL, what learned and how the learned part is learnable?). Similarly, a reasonable minimalist question to ask about any proposal is how it helps us answer DP.

Let me say this another way: in the domain of DP simplicity gains an edge.  Simple UGs are preferred for we believe that it will be easier to explain how simpler systems of FL/UG (one’s with fewer moving parts) might have evolved. The aim of “simplifying” GB makes a whole let of sense in this context, and a lot of work within MP has been to try and “simplify” GB; eliminating levels, unifying case and movement, unifying Phrase Structure rules and transformations, unifying movement and construal (hehe, thought I’d slip this in), deriving c-command from simpler primitives, reducing superiority to movement, etc.

Let me end with two points I have made before in other places but I love to repeat.

First, if this is correct, then there is an excellent sense in which MP does not replace GB but presupposes it. If MP succeeds, then it will explain the properties of GB, by deriving them from simpler more natural more DP-compatible premises.  So the results, though not the technology or ontology of GB will carry over to MP.  And this is a very good thing for this is how sciences make progress: the new theories tend to derive the results of the old as limit cases (thing of the relation between Einstein’s and Newton’s mechanics or classical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics). Progress here means that the empirical victories of the past are not lost, but they are retained in a neater, sleeker more explanatory package.  Note, that if this is the correct view of things, then there is also a very good sense in which minimalism just is standard scientific practice, but not in any trivial sense.

Second, if we take this view seriously, it is always worth asking of any proposal how it compares with the GB story that came before: how’s its coverage compare? Is it really simpler, more natural? These are fair questions for unless we can glimpse an answer, whatever their virtues, the analyses raise further serious questions. Good. This is what we want from a fecund program, a way of generating interesting research questions. Put enough of thsee together and new minimalist theories will emerge, ones that have a new look, retain the coverage of earlier accounts and provide possible answers to new and interesting questions. Sounds great, no? That’s what I want minimalist neophytes to both understand and feel. That’s what I find so exciting about MP, and hope that others will too.

[1] Let me say again, that if you like a theory other than GB then that would be a fine object for DPish speculation as well. As I’ve stated before, most of the current contenders e.g. GB, LFG, HPSG, RG etc. seem to me more or less notational variants.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

The Economy of Research

Doing research requires exercising judgment, and doing this means making decisions. Of the decisions one makes, among the most important concern what work to follow and what to (more or less) ignore. Like all decisions, this one carries a certain risk, viz. ignoring that work that one should have followed and following that work that should have been ignored (the research analogue of type I and type II errors).  However, unless you are a certain distinguished MIT University Professor who seems to have the capacity (and tenacity) to read everything, this is the kind of risk you have to run for the simple reason that there are just so may hours in the day (and not that many if, e.g. you are a gym rat who loves novels and blog reading viz. me). So how do you manage your time? Well, you find your favorites and follow them closely and you develop a cadre of friends whose advice you follow and you try to ensconce yourself in a community of diversely interesting people who you respect so that you can pick up the ambient knowledge that is exhaled.  However, even with this, it is important to ask, concerning what you read, what is its value-added. Does it bring interesting data to the discussion, well-grounded generalizations, novel techniques, new ideas, new questions?  By the end of the day (or maybe month) if I have no idea why I looked at something, what it brought to the table, then I reluctantly conclude that I could have spent my time (both research and pleasure time) more profitably elsewhere, AND, here’s the place for the policy statement, I note this and try to avoid this kind of work in the future. In other words, I narrow my mind (aiming for complete closure) so as to escape such time sinks.

Why do I mention this? Well, a recent paper, out on LingBuzz, by Legate, Pesetsky and Yang (LPY) (here) vividly brought it to mind. I should add, before proceeding, that the remarks below are entirely mine. LPY cannot (or more accurately ‘should not,’though some unfair types just might) be held responsible for the rant that follows. This said, here goes.

LPY is a reply to a recent paper in Language, Levinson (2013), on recursion.  Their paper, IMO, is devastating. There’s nothing left of the Levinson (2013) article. And when I say ‘nothing,’ I mean ‘nothing.’ In other words, if they are right, Levinson’s effort has 0 value-added, negative really if you count the time lost in reading it and replying to it. This is the second time I have dipped into this pond (see here), and I am perilously close to slamming my mind shut to any future work from this direction. So before I do so, let me add a word or two about why I am thinking of taking such action.

LPY present three criticisms of Levinson 2013. The first ends up saying that Levinson (2103)’s claims about the absence of recursion in various languages is empirically unfounded and that it consistently incorrectly reports the work of others. In other words, not only are the “facts” cited bogus, but even the reports on other people’s findings are untrustworthy.  I confess to being surprised at this. As my friends (and enemies) will tell you, I am not all that data sensitive much of the time. I am a consumer of other people’s empirical work, which I then mangle for my theoretical ends.  As a result, when I read descriptive papers I tend to take the reported data at face value and ask what this might mean theoretically, were it true.  Consequently, when I read papers by Levinson, Evans, Everett a.o., people who trade on their empirical rectitude, I tend to take their reports as largely accurate, the goal being to winnow the empirical wheat from what I generally regard as theoretical/methodological chaff. What LPY demonstrate is that I have been too naïve (Moi! Naïve!) for it appears that not only is the theoretical/methodological work of little utility, even the descriptive claims must be taken with enough salt to scare the wits out of any mildly competent cardiologist. So, as far as empirical utility goes, Levinson (2013) joins Everett (2005) (see Nevins, Pesetsky and Rodrigues (NPR) for an evisceration) as a paper best left off one’s Must-Read list.

The rest of LPY is no less unforgiving and I recommend it to you. But I want to make two more points before stopping.

First, LPY discuss an argument form that Levinson (2013) employs that I find of dubious value (though I have heard it made several times). The form is as follows: A corpus study is run that notes that some construction occurs with a certain frequency.  This is then taken to imply something problematic about grammars that generate (or don’t generate) these constructions. Here’s LPY’s version of this argument form in Levinson (2013):

Corpus studies have shown that degree-2 center embedding
"occurs vanishingly rarely in spoken language syntax", and degree-3 center embedding is hardly observed at all. These conclusions converge with the well-known psycholinguistic observation that "after degree 2 embedding, performance rapidly degrades to a point where degree 3 embeddings hardly occur".

Levinson concludes from this that natural language (NL) grammars (at least some) do not allow for unbounded recursion (in other words, that the idealization that NLs are effectively infinite should be dropped).  Here are my problems with this form of argument. 

First, what’s the relevance of corpus studies?  Say we concede that speakers in the wild never embed more than two clauses deep. Why is this relevant?  It would be relevant if when strapped to grammatometers, these native speakers flat-lined when presented with sentences like John said that Mary thinks that Sam believes that Fred left, or this is the dog that chased the cat that ate the rat that swallowed the cheese that I made. But they don’t!  Sure they have problems with these sentences, after all long sentences are, well, long. But they don’t go into tilt, like they generally do with word salad like What did you kiss many people who admire or John seems that it was heard that Frank left. If so, who cares whether these sentences occur in the wild?  Why should being in a corpus endow an NL data point with more interest than one manufactured in the ling lab?

Let me be a touch more careful: If theory T says that such and such a sentence is ill formed and one finds instances of such often enough in the wild, then this is good prima facie evidence against T. However, absence of such from a corpus tells us exactly nothing. I would go further, as in all other scientific domains, manufactured data, is often the most revealing.  Physics experiments are highly factitious, and what they create in the lab is imperceptible in the wild. So too with chemistry, large parts of biology and even psychophysics (think Julesz dot displays or Muller-Lyer illusions, or Necker cubes).  This does not make these experiments questionable. All that counts is that the contrived phenomena be stable and replicable.  Pari passu being absent from a corpus is no sign of anything. And being manufactured has its own virtues, for example, being specially designed to address a question at hand. As in suits, bespoke is often very elegant!

I should add, that LPY question Levinson (2013)’s assertion that three levels of embedding are “relatively rare,” noting that this is a vacuous claim unless some baseline is provided (see their discussion). At any rate, what I wish to reiterate is that the relevant issue is not whether something is rare in a corpus but whether the data is stable, and I see no reason to think that judgments concerning multiple embedded clauses manufactured by linguists are unstable, even if they don’t frequently appear in corpora.

Second and final point: Chomsky long ago noted the important distinction “is not the difference between finite and infinite, but the more elusive difference between too large and not too large” (LSLT:150).  And it seems that it doesn’t take much to make grammars that tolerate embedding worthwhile. As LPY notes, a paper by Perfors, Tenenbaum and Regier (2006)

… found that the context-free grammar is favored [over regular grammars,NH] even when one only considers very simple child-directed English, where each utterance averages only 2.6 words, and no utterance contains center embedding or remotely complex structures.

It seems that representational compactness has its own very large rewards. If embedding be a consequence, it seems that this is not too high a price to pay (it may even bring in its train useful expressive rewards!).  The punch line: the central questions in grammar have less to do with unbounded recursion than with projectability; how one generalizes from a sample to a much larger set. And it is here that recursive rules have earned their keep. The assumption that NLs are for all practical purposes infinite simply focuses attention on what kinds of rule systems FL supports. The infinity assumption makes the conclusion that the system is recursive trivial to infer. However, finite but large will also suffice for here too the projection problem will arise, bringing in its wake all the same problems generative grammarians have been working on since the mid 1950s.

I have a policy: those things not worth doing are not worth doing well. It has an obvious corollary: those things not worth reading are not worth reading carefully. Happily, there are some willing to do pro bono work so that the rest of us don’t have to. Read LPY (and NPR) and draw your own conclusions. I’ve already drawn mine.

Friday, June 21, 2013

More on MOOCs

The discussion on MOOCs is heating up. There is an issue of the Boston Review dedicated to the topic.  The five papers (here) are all worth reading if you are interested in the topic, which, as you may have guessed, I am. For what it’s worth, I suspect that the MOOCs movement is unstoppable, at least for now. The reason is that various different elite groups have reached a consensus that this is the elixir that will energize pedagogy at the university all the while reducing cost, enhancing the status, influence and coffers of leading private institutions and making excellence available to the masses. So exciting, cheap, “quality” led, elite enhancing and democratic. Who could resist?  Well, as you know, beware when something sounds too good to be true.  Here are some of my reservations.

First, I believe that there is an inherent tension between cheap and pedagogically effective.  There is a large group of powerful people (e.g. politicians, see the Heller here) who see MOOCs as a way of solving the problem of overcrowding (a problem related to the fact that public funding of universities has declined over the last 20 years). But if you want courses with high production values that entertain the young it costs. The idea behind MOOC’s potential cost savings seems to be that a one-time investment in an entertaining course will pay dividends over a long period of time. I’m skeptical. Why? Well, old on line material does not weather well. If one’s aim is to engage the audience, especially a young one, then it needs a modern look and this requires frequent update.  And this costs.  Of course, there are ways of containing these costs. How? By reducing faculty and making them adjuncts to the MOOCs.  William Bowen, past president of Princeton, believes that cost containment could be achieved as follows: “[i]f overloaded institutions diverted their students to online education it would reduce faculty, and associated expenses.” It is of course possible that this will be done well and education will be enhanced, but if a principle motivation is cost containment (as it will have to be to make the sale to the political class), I wouldn’t bet on this.

Second, there is a clear elitism built into the system. Read Heller’s paper (p.9) to get a good feel for this. But the following quote from John Hennesy, the president of Stanford, suffices to provide a taste:

“As a country we are simply trying to support too many universities.  Nationally we may not be able to afford as many research institutions going forward.”

Heller comments:


So MOOCs will serve to “streamline” the educational system by moving research and direct teacher contact to elite institutions. This will also serve to help pay the costs of MOOC development as these secondary venues will eventually pay for their MOOCs. As Heller notes (p. 13): “One idea for generating revenue [for MOOCs, NH] is licensing: when a California State University system, for instance, used HarvardX courses, it would pay a fee to Harvard, through edX.” This is the “enticing business opportunity” (p. 4) that is causing the stampede into MOOCs by the elite schools (As the head of HarvardX says: “This is our chance to really own it.”). So state schools will save some money on public education by (further) cutting tenured faculty and some elite players stand to make a ton of change by providing educational content via MOOCs. A perfect recipe for enhanced education, right? If you ansered ‘Yes,’ can I interest you in a bridge I have? Of course my suspicions may come from bias and self-interest, coming as I do from a public state institution, I am less enthusiastic about this utopian vision than leading lights from Stanford and Harvard might be.

MOOCs also have a malign set of potential consequences for research and graduate education in general. I hadn’t thought of this before, but the logic Peter Burgard (from Harvard) outlines seems compelling to me (Heller:14-15):


So, a plausible consequence of the success of MOOCs is a massive reduction in graduate education, and this will have a significant blowback on even elite institutions. Note that the logic Burgard outlines seems particularly relevant for linguistics. We are a small discipline, many linguists teach in English or langauge departments, and we tend to fund our grad programs via TAships. Note, further, that according to Hennesy (above), this downsizing is not a bug, but a feature. The aim is to reduce the number of research institutions, and this is a plausible consequence of MOOCing undergraduate education.

It gets worse. Were MOOCs to succeed, this would result in greater centralization and homogenization in higher education (imagine everyone doing the same HarvardX course across the US!).  Furthermore, to extend MOOCs to the humanities and behavioral sciences (linguistics included) will require greater standardization. In fact, simply aiming for a broad market (Why? To make a MOOC more marketable and hence more economically valuable) will increase homogeneity and reduce idiosyncracy. Think of the text book market, not a poster child for exciting literature.  Last, if the magic of MOOCs is to be extended beyond CS and intro bio courses to courses like intro to linguistics, it will require standardizing the material so that it will be amenable to the automatic grading, an integral part of the whole MOOC package. Actually one of the things I personally find distasteful about MOOCs is the merger of techno utopia with BIG DATA. Here’s Gary King’s (the MOOC guru at Harvard according to Heller) “vision” :

We could not only innovate in our own classes…but we could instrument every student, every classroom, every administrative office, every house, every recreational activity, every security officer, everything. We could basically get the information about everything that goes on here, and we could use it for students (9-10).

Am I the only one that finds this creepy?  Quick: call Edward Snowdon!!

As I said at the outset, I doubt that this is stoppable, at least for now. This is not because there is a groundswell of popular support bubbling up from the bottom, but because there is a confluence of elites -educational, technical, political, economic- that see this as the new big thing.  And there’s money in them thar hills. And there are budget savings to be had. And MOOCs can be sold as a way of enhancing the educational experience of the the lower classes (and boy does that feel good: doing well by doing good!). In addition, it is an opportunity for elite institutions to be come yet more elite, always a nice side benefit.

Let me end on a slightly optimistic note.  I personally think that the benefits, both educational and economic, of MOOCs is being oversold. This always happens when there is money to be made (and taxes to be shaved).  However, I suspect (hope) that what will sink MOOCs is their palpable second class feel. I just don’t see Harvard/Princeton students taking MOOCs in place of courses taught by high priced senior faculty (certainly not for $65,000/year). But if it doesn’t sell there, then it will be a hard sell in universities that serve the middle class. It will seem cheap in an in your face sort of way. And this, in the end, won’t play well and so MOOCs will run into considerable flak and, coupled with the fact that cost savings won’t materialize, the MOOCification of higher Ed will fail. That’s my hunch, but then I may just be an incurable optimist.   

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Formal Wear Part II: A Wider Wardrobe

Formal Wear Part II: A Wider Wardrobe






