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GP and the article both make clear arguments for WHY they believe this. You just asked a lazy drive-by question without providing any reasoning at all for your position. If you expect a good response, you need to provide something meaningful to respond to, as it is it just looks like you are providing knee-jerk skepticism without having engaged with the material.

> There have been large multitudes of articles by others who are arguing the opposite

Also, Nick's entire article is framed such that, yes, plenty of others have argued this, and even HE used to believe the opposite, but now does not. So your point about other articles here seems to me to be a sort of non-sequitur.

by jacquesm5 hours ago|

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I just - politely - asked you a simple question because your statement made me curious. I have also posted a longer explanation of my own thinking on this in another part of this thread.

by D-Machine5 hours ago|

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Yes, that comment is much better and appreciated. I agree post-hoc description is not the same thing as mechanistic explainability at all. The article is indeed flawed in sort of muddying the distinction between these two.

EDIT: Actually the article makes the distinction at one point, but the emotional / hopeful thrust of the article relies heavily on an assumption that understandable post-hoc descriptions of e.g. neurons and circuits (model components) are going to help lead to real mechanistic explanations and more specific model design.

This has not so clearly been the case in other fields (e.g. neuroscience, human psychology, economics, etc), because the problem of emergentism / the whole generally being much more than the sum of its parts / components.

by jacquesm4 hours ago|

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Thank you.