Long-time lurker, first time commenting. Without necessarily disagreeing on any object-level details, I want to give an alternate perspective. I’m a PhD in computational cog sci, have interacted with most of the top cognitive science departments in the US (e.g. through job search, conferences, etc), and I know literally zero people who use ACT-R for anything. It was never mentioned in any of my grad classes, has never been brought up in any talk I’ve been to—I don’t even know if I’ve even seen it ever cited in a paper I’ve read. I know of it, obviously, and I know that it was super influential back in the 90s, but I’d always just assumed that the research program withered away for some reason (given how little I’d seen it actually being used in top-level research at this point).
This post made me curious how I could have such a different perspective! I don’t know whether academic cognitive science is just really segregated and I’m missing all the ACT-R researchers still out there; whether ACT-R was actually amazing and people have been silly to drop it; whether “top-level” research is misleading and actually the good research is being published in lower-tier journals while flashy fad-based results get published in top journals; or whether ACT-R really did fail for some deep reason. I’ve asked some colleagues why nobody around us uses it anymore, but I haven’t gotten any detailed responses yet.
(Also, this is a small thing, but “fitting human reaction times” is not impressive—that’s a basic feature of many, many models.)
So while I don’t have any object-level disagreements with this post, it feels like helpful context to know that many, many active computational cognitive scientists would strongly disagree that ACT-R is essentially the one best-validated theory of cognition (to the point where they’d be like “huh? what are you talking about?”). This paper gives what I think is a much more contemporary overview of overarching theories of human cognition.
Pretty much all the writing I’ve read by Holocaust survivors says that this was not true, that the experience was unambiguously worse than being dead, and that the only thing that kept them going was the hope of being freed. (E.g. according to Victor Frankl in “Man’s Search for Meaning”, all the prisoners in his camp agreed that, not only was it worse than being dead, it was so bad that any good experiences after being freed could not make up for it how bad it was. Why they didn’t kill themselves is an interesting question that he explores a bit in the book.) Are there any Holocaust survivors who claim otherwise?