Occam’s Razor and Bender and Koller’s Octopus

AbstractWe discuss the teaching of the controversy surrounding Bender and Koller’s prominent 2020 paper, “Climbing toward NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data” (ACL 2020)We present what we understand to be the main contentions of the paper, and then recommend that the students engage with the natural counter-arguments to the claims in the paper.We attach teaching materials that we use to facilitate teaching this topic to undergraduate students.