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Chomsky and the two cultures of statistical learning (2011)

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Peter Norvig's essay responding to Noam Chomsky's criticism of statistical models in linguistics and machine learning, defending probabilistic approaches to language.

What HN thinks

A 2011 essay returns for its sixth lap, now with LLMs, birds, and turboprops arguing over who learned to fly first.

Engineering success isn't cognitive science
LLMs work but need vastly more data and compute than children, so they say little about how humans actually acquire language, much as planes say little about birds.
Statistical success is real evidence
Others argue that modeling a system well with statistical methods is Bayesian evidence it is statistical, and that sample-efficiency comparisons ignore evolution's priors and children's rich multimodal input.
Chomsky's legacy is contested
Some see generative grammar as hermetic normal science, while others defend its empirical findings, its role in founding cognitive science, and the Chomsky hierarchy.

Consensus: No consensus; most agree LLMs show language can be learned from data, but disagree on whether that tells us anything about human minds.

Recommended in the comments

BabyLM ↗ (other): Shows the gap between LLM data needs and what humans learn from.

Summarised by Claude from the comment thread 7 days ago.

Points: 137
Comments: 105
Best rank: #16
Posted: 2026-11-06 by andsoitis
Category: AI & ML

statistical-learning noam-chomsky linguistics language-models philosophy-of-science peter-norvig nlp

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