About the intro

[LifeIsStrange]

Historically, rivalry between symbolic and connectionist, or sub-symbolic, AI research has stymied collaboration
across these fields. Although it should be acknowledged that not everyone thought the two were incompatible. As
early as 1991, Marvin Minsky presciently asked “Why is there so much excitement about Neural Networks today,
and how is this related to research on Artificial Intelligence? Much has been said, in the popular press, as though
these were conflicting activities. This seems exceedingly strange to me, because both are parts of the very same
enterprise” [5].

I had read this great blog post about historical revisionism:
https://userweb.ucs.louisiana.edu/~isb9112/dept/phil341/histconn.html
It is unclear how much researchers in one field did intersect with the other, and how much there was rivalry. Anyway, the intro still remains useful as people default belief is the pre-conceivied belief of rivalry despite soft and hard computing being obviously complementary.

[kyleiwaniec]

Hi @LifeIsStrange Thank you for taking an interest in my article, and for sharing the blog post. I don't think I'm saying anything that contradicts their position. I'm not sure if you are accusing me of revisionism or pre-conceived beliefs, but I can assure you I am doing neither. There is documented rivalry, and as I point out, not everyone subscribed to this POV, so I think we're actually in agreement.

[LifeIsStrange]

To answer pedantically, we are in agreement to the extent that we agree on the structural validity of the arguments and also because it can be useful to say something wrong or half-wrong, for the purpose of intellectual exploration of the conversational space of the topic at hand.
This sentence taken alone:

Historically, rivalry between symbolic and connectionist, or sub-symbolic, AI research has stymied collaboration
across these fields.

has dubious truthfulness since the extent of how much did the perceptual incompatibility/rivalry stymied collaboration is an unknown that is hard to quantify and according to my linked blog it seems that collaboration was not much prevented during the pre 2000 era. So it's essentially about the strength of the quantifier. Moreover I would argue that symbolic AI is currently having an "AI winter" because of the revisionist belief that people automatically have since the conflict is intuitive to think about and because symbolic AI has failed to deliver results in key tasks (although it much depends on what we talk about e.g programing languages compilers can be qualified as sucessful expert systems).

So yeah we agree and I don't think you should rephrase your intro since beyond truthfulness/accuracy it is a useful narrative for your paper. However I think it would be a great idea to add this blog to the list of your paper references in order to add additional nuance/background info.