From: Noam Chomsky <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, June 22, 2015 4:57 PM To: jeffrey E. Subject: RE: Re: Interesting perspective. I don't really see how it applies to Yang's work, but best I think would be to contact him directly. I presume he'd be most interested in discussing these matters, and I think you'd find him interesting to talk to. A smart and competent guy. Noam From: jeffrey E. [mailto:[email protected] Sent: Monday, June 22, 2015 8:21 AM To: Noam Chomsky Subject: Re: Re: lye read ten of yangs recent papers. I firmly believe that his computer science perceptions , limits his breadth. many in the past years on probabilistic learning. probabilities in language. . etc. not rigorous to say the least. .. complex formulas that ignore that statistics are not probabilities. .. over and over.. to have probability one needs . symmetry, entropy, repetition. . the space of probabilities must be defined. the lens into that space needs to be constrained. the law of large numbers applies as a miracle formula to test the accuracy of prediction.. IT does not exist in language.. one can toy with the statistic generated all they like , but arriving at the structure of the space, using that method is hopeless. it is the mathematics of computation. thinking is not computation though it shares many similarities. thinking I believe requires exploring fully the space of what is NOT the answer. When the military was trying to better their targeting ability , years of trying to hit the bulls eye with missiles became easier when they turned the equation on its head , and focused instead of not missing. 1 minus the probability of failure. equals success.. biology seems to behave as exploring the space and eliminating what does not work in order to find the solution. computing goes directly for the target. all possible combinations minus the nonsense , equals coherent sentences. On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 11:13 PM, Noam Chomsky > wrote: I follow up to the point where you write "the organizing principle of the shape is language..." No doubt it can (partially) be described in language, but that's not what you mean. Zipf's law is a rank-frequency distribution. And also meaningless, as Mandelbrot showed 60 years ago. I hope Yang is clear about this. He surely knows. EFTA_R1_01623727 EFTA02498362