
100 most influential works in cognitive science of the 20th century - brennannovak
http://www.cogsci.umn.edu/OLD/calendar/past_events/millennium/final.html
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baguasquirrel
It's kind of ridiculous that Chomsky is #1. You can't deny it was influential.
Chomsky singlehandedly split the linguistics field into two camps, and it's
taken the better half of the century to put his ideas to rest.

He basically argued that all languages are governed by the same set of rules,
that such rules were innate, and that languages could thus be parsed into
trees. The problem arises that a lot of primitive languages don't even seem to
support the notion of recursion, let alone something that parses to a syntax
tree. And the statistical NLP folks have a major bone to pick with such ideas,
because real language apparently isn't so clean.

What seems more plausible is that more advanced societies developed rules of
logic that they then imposed on their communication, hence the property that
well-written English ought to be pars-able to a syntax tree. But even then you
have ambiguities in how the tree is structured.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity>

The flip side is that Chomsky's framework hasn't been useless to science. You
can do some interesting things if you can parse a piece of text's syntax tree
with halfway decent accuracy. One example would be idiom-finding. If a word
seems misplaced, or used out of its usual context (e.g. "kicked the bucket"),
then it is likely an idiom. One could simply do an analysis using the
frequencies of the words as they appear next to each other, but applying a
filter on only those phrases that are likely to be idioms improves your
results by quite a bit.

~~~
andreyf
Did you just say Noam Chomsky is just a really good troll? He _does_ seem fond
of meeting his critics as having "virtually no comprehension of the work they
are discussing", being "technically correct, but completely irrelevant", etc.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
chomsky adulation within the academic community is a huge pet peeve of mine.
the man is a hypocrite. he makes wide ranging commentary on fields he has no
background in.

~~~
andreyf
Ditto regarding the pet peeve, but I just don't like his attitude - I've
repeatedly seen him be combative in completely unnecessary ways. Also, he uses
complicated words when simple ones would do.

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Groxx
Sadly, of the top 10, only 1 has a link to the text. And the link doesn't
work. And a basic search for the title of the article doesn't work on the
website (though it is hosted there, by that identical title. And an advanced
search-by-title finds it).

It also seems to imply that most of the judges haven't read everything, even
the top 10, as there are so few comments on the works, and few have usefully
descriptive nominator's comments. Basically, if you haven't read the works,
you don't really know why they're influential.

Some nominator statements include:

URLs to the content, with no description.

"This one is a must!"

"An important book, but certainly not what launched cognitive psychology! At
best, it helped baptize it with a name."

"For more information on Brunswik and current work in the Brunswikian
tradition...".

Gee, thanks for those eloquent descriptions of why you nominated that
particular item.

~~~
yters
Do you have any better recommendations? I'm interested in cognitive science,
possibly a PhD.

~~~
mbubb
Wow - nice list. Many/ most I do not know. If I were in school today I would
look for a cognitive science program. It seems like a rich field. \- and your
question:

>Do you have any better recommendations? I'm interested in cognitive science,
possibly a PhD.

I know you are specifically asking about recommendations of books - and I
might be tempted to add works by Teodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch
to get some of the more 'Hegelian' approaches to history and consciousness.

Adorno's "Aesthetics" and "the Dialectic of the Enlightenment"

Walter Benjamin's general essays and the "Arcades Project" (a genesis of the
idea of the hyperlink)

Bloch's "The Spirit of Utopia"

But is also makes me think about a built-in danger - the implicit warning in
this post:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1030437>

would apply to a field like CogSci to some extent.

Looking back on my college and gradschool years I grazed in different areas:
Biology, Comparative Lit, Political Theory and played around with the Apple
computers in the little used Rutgers computer lab... But I didnt have the
'wherewithall' to knit these different interests into a curriculum. I had a
friend who finished majors in BioChem, English Lit and Art (Sculpting).

In my case I followed my interests in a hermetic way - cognitive science would
have been a good platform to do it differently.

The problem with a cross-disciplinary program can be that you come out as a
dilettante - able to have good conversation s in a few areas but no depth. I
made it through graduate level classes based on difficult and interesting
works of literature, philosophy, literary/political theory and math. But in my
40s I realize I know little of depth. And I don't mean this in the Socratic 'i
know that I know nothing' way. I am really not an expert in anything at a time
in my career where I should be. I am a generalist. A mid-level Linux SysAdmin.
Which is by no means the end of the world. But there is a lot unexpressed, a
lot undone and if you do not develop the tools to do this when you are young -
it is only harder later.

There is a Nietzsche quote that has always haunted me. The opening lines of
"On the Use/Misuse of History"

    
    
       "We do need history, but quite differently from the jaded idlers in the garden of knowledge, however grandly they may look down on our rude and unpicturesque requirements...we need it for life and action, not a convenient way to avoid life and action, or to excuse a selfish life and a cowardly or base activity. We should serve history only so far as it serves life."
    

Alot of stuff from Nietzsche feels like it was written 'Just For You' but that
is how it has been for me. A jaded idler in the garden of knowledge. Eternal
student - still catching up on novels bought a decade ago.

Even in computer science - I can really enjoy reading the classics - Kernighan
and Ritchie, Knuth, Stevenson, Eric Raymond, etc. But I am not sure if I have
ever applied stuff that I have learned to work.

As Nietsche says - "...we need it for life and action, not a convenient way to
avoid life and action".

What is the point of reading a book on Lisp if I am likely to never use it? I
don't know. I am continually drawn to topics like this but it is all mental
activity and no action.

A dilettante.

Which is not to say that many prosper in these programs. People get PhDs in
comp lit or anthropology and work in advertising firms.

What drew me to Hacker News is the figure of Paul Graham - his essays and the
synthesis of Ars and Techne are teh way it should be...

But the falloff is steep. Be relevant. Or content in a life of 'jaded idling'.

~~~
yters
No fear, I have a very specific goal in mind.

------
panic
It seems like Douglas Hofstadter should belong somewhere on this list.

------
nik61
Surprised that none of Pinker's 5 nominations got through to the top 100.
Perhaps he writes too clearly?

------
wisty
OT, which do people think will replace economics - cognitive science or
quantitative finance?

~~~
kiba
Why would cognitive science or even behavioral economics would replace
mainstream economics at all?

At best, behavioral and cognitive economics would complement it, rather than
replace it. Incentives, marginal utility, and scarcity and other concepts
would still exists.

Quantitative finance? That doesn't deal with economic. It is just counting
money.

