entertaining academic readings

[gusl]

These are entertaining:

Reflections of a Formal Semanticist as of Feb 2005 starts with Barbara Partee's autobiographical account of how she ended up doing formal semantics, which is quite endearing.

As an undergraduate at Swarthmore College from 1957 to 1961, I majored in math and minored in Russian and Philosophy. In Honors, you were supposed to have a major and two related minors. I went to the head of the Math Department, Mr. Brinkmann, and told him that I wanted to do those three subjects but that I didn’t see any relation among them – they were just the three subjects I loved best. Mr. Brinkmann scratched his head and said he thought it might be possible to invent a story that would connect them, because it seemed to him he’d heard of a new field called “mathematical linguistics” or “machine translation” or something like that
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Patrick J. Hayes, Kenneth M. Ford, & Neil Agnew - On Babies and Bathwater: A Cautionary Tale, about how some schools of philosophy came to have wrong ideas about AI.

...
Unfortunately, some newer nannies haven’t been so careful, and the babies are in danger from their zealous ways. We will focus on two nannies who seem to be close friends and often can be seen together — Situated Nanny (called SitNanny for short) and Radical
Social Constructivist Nanny (known to her friends as RadNanny).
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