Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Perceptron Controversy, published by Yuxi Liu on January 11, 2024 on LessWrong.

Connectionism died in the 60s from technical limits to scaling, then resurrected in the 80s after backprop allowed scaling. The Minsky-Papert anti-scaling hypothesis explained, psychoanalyzed, and buried.

I wrote it as if it's a companion post to Gwern's The Scaling Hypothesis.

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