Machines agree that those special Talmud tractates are special

ALGORITHM WATCH: Rashi was right: Machine learning confirms unique status of some Talmudic tracts. New study shows that the ‘special tractates’ of the Babylonian Talmud have distinct linguistic features, as commented on by medieval sages (Gavriel Fiske, Times of Israel.)

Rabbinical commentators on the Talmud noted in the medieval era that a handful of sections of the great corpus stood out linguistically from the rest. Over generations of scholars, the existence of these so-called “special tractates” was considered to be a clue that could further elucidate how the Talmud was compiled and edited.

Now via modern data analysis, a team of contemporary researchers has shown that these “special tractates” do indeed display a distinct use of language. After feeding nearly the entire Talmudic corpus into machine learning algorithms to parse the Aramaic, they confirmed the theories of Rashi and other medieval scholars.

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It is worth underlining that these insights came originally from human intuition, which is the normal source of major advances in human knowledge. AI can test and confirm the ideas, but it isn't capable of original intuitions itself. We don't even know where they come from.

In this case it is telling that the machine learning can recognize what the human scholars saw, but it brings us no closer to understanding what the idiosyncratic language in these tractates and passages means. We need human insight to make progress on that.

It is of course possible that some future AI will be able to replicate human intuition, but nothing that currently passes for Artificial Intelligence is going to do so. AI as we have it can only rearrange what we already know.

I commend the researchers for recognizing and acknowledging all this. They are doing good work and are aware of its limitations.

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