What It's Like to Be Noam Chomsky's Assistant | Hacker News Reader

What It's Like to Be Noam Chomsky's Assistant

chronicle.com

154 pointssamclemens69 comments

I cannot say that I don't understand why this is being upvoted: Chomsky is a significant person and quite liked on HN. But all these joyous comments make me sigh. Because, really, there's nothing informative here, at all. This piece doesn't answer question "what it's like to be Noam Chomsky's assistant" or any other questions for that matter. She doesn't tell what exactly she does and why her position is needed at all, portraying herself like a very busy nanny for a childish genius.

This reminds all these interviews after someone significant dies, given by someone insignificant who knew him in person. Except in this case significant person is still alive. The only reason why it's read and liked is the name in the headline.

Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VTxYQL2SbA - (Fall Out Boy - Uma Thurman)

If only this article was accompanied by an awesome song, it would be interesting to me.

My favorite line I then watched him do something I’ve seen a thousand times since: a subtle shift as Noam Chomsky’s mind joined his body from a faraway place, and he arrived in full.

I had the good fortune to study with Chomsky as an undergraduate in the early 90's and can confirm much of what the article says. To me he was always kind, accessible and warm, even though I was not a particularly promising student.

Has anyone seem "Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?" by the same author?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1817287

Yes, I enjoyed it very much. (Any questions I can help answer?)

The author's different though: Michel Gondry, well known for his music videos and films.

Oh, I'm sorry, she just stars in it.

I was just wondering if HN folks recommend it, I'm considering taking a look.

This is amazing:

I have no idea how Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G character sneaked through my gate to ask Noam outrageous things like, "How many words does you know?" and "What is some of them?" I do remember that Noam came to me afterward looking dazed. "No more men in gold suits," he said, sighing.

Here's the video of that interview - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fOIM1_xOSro

That's off the scale in terms of trolling - one of the funnier things I've seen in a while.

His C Everett Koop interview is amazing too. http://youtu.be/zeUtCxe-xDg

I always thought he was in on the joke, even funnier that he wasn't.

Probably he knew and the "No more men in gold suits" line was a joke

I always liked when he participated in Rap News [0], he seemed to enjoy it.

0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-rxe9Ayb8c&feature=youtu.be...

I consider Noam Chomsky one of the smartest person on Earth and his assistant obviously has to be as well, to keep up with him. Really excellent read.

be able to recite conversations from 50 years ago seems pretty amazing - he must have photographic memory

People also remember things that never happened. For example, eye witness testimonials.

I used to think I could recall conversations, but how do I know they actually happened?

Easy, you get other persons to verify them. If you can get them to do that time and again, then you know you have a good memory.

And of course it's not just conversations. One could easily verify his good memory by reciting old things he read (which he can easily check again) etc.

> I used to think I could recall conversations, but how do I know they actually happened?

That seems trivial to verify; just record details about all conversations you have with everyone. I have been doing this since 2009. I have a 5 MB yaml file with details of every conversations (mostly tags), and I might have an above-average memory but yeah I definitely forget things .... (and sometimes I get some of the details wrong even if a conversation happened just minutes ago).

Another way to verify (to yourself only) is to writeup your memory of a conversation, PGP sign it, hash it, give the hash to a friend who was originally in the conversation, then have them do a writeup, then reveal the commitment and compare the two accounts of a conversation. The writeup would be better if it was done immediately after the actual conversation, because otherwise social groups have time to mingle and confuse everyone about what actually happened.

Another way is to do a public group writeup of a conversation after it happens (or an audio/video recording), then have everyone PGP sign the writeup (to confirm their agreement), then later pick a random conversation where this setup was performed, and write down your memory of the conversation. This doesn't work if the conversations where this setup is performed are all unique; probably has to be a few thousand different setups happen before this starts to test memory in any meaningful capacity.

> That seems trivial to verify; just record all conversations you have with everyone. I have been doing this since 2009.

Only on HN...

just record all conversations you have with everyone.

I hope to hell you don't live in a two-party consent state.

EDIT: Or interact with people who do. For example, California's two-party consent law applies to people calling Californians from other states.

Out of curiosity, where did you hear about that research on false memories?

Also, how do you know you can rely on your memories of yesterday or memories of things you've learned in school?

You might find this interesting: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0674566769/

And how do you prove it if the other person doesn't remember?

Well, you can't prove it, but if two people can both recall the same thing independently then it seems likely that it's the truth. Here by independently I mean something like both people write down what they remember before speaking to the other person.

It sounds more to me like the techniques world memory champion Dominic O'Brien [0] uses to memorize lists and other events on the fly.

His inspiration was (I believe) Aristotle (if not Aristotle, another ancient Greek) who, after a church collapsed, recalled the names of every person who was present at the moment of collapse.

His filing cabinet method and Aristotle's (slash O'Brien's) memory palace methods sound very similar in that they give each memory a concrete place to exist and relate the memories to other memories around them thus securing their place within the information hierarchy.

I'm sure there is more to it than he says, and if I had to guess, I'd imagine it's a very sensory process (as sensory perceptions provide something much more analog to grasp onto than the relatively digital description a person can provide with words).

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_O%27Brien

The weird thing is that I too can speak backwards fluently AND I can juggle lit torches while riding a unicycle. I have only done it once though, and I don't recommend it, because while moving on a unicycle, the inherent wind associated with the forward motion causes the flames to blow into your face.

This may be the most pretentious HN comment I've seen to date.

Unless it is true. The previous time someone made a 'very pretentious comment' it ended in a quite surprising way:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

Sadly, it is very true.

That is pretty darn cool. I don't see it as coming off as pretentious at all fyi.

Can you speak backwards while juggling lit torches on a unicycle?

I remember a talent show where someone first juggled three balls while reciting 100 digits of pi, and then juggled 100 balls while reciting three digits of pi. (The second demonstration, by design, didn't go quite as well as the first...!)

I really hope this is tongue-in-cheek humour..?

Nope...I'm a geek and ex-juggler/magician.

Chomsky can't even have a email dialogue with Sam Harris without becoming oozing contempt and incivility for no discernible reason.

To be fair, I don't think I could have an email dialogue with Sam Harris without oozing contempt and becoming uncivil.

Civility is overrated. It is also the usually first complaint at hand to dismiss people, rather than their arguments.

Have you read Sam Harris's post on the dialogue? With Chomsky's permission he posted both sides, and Chomsky does come across as overly rabid:

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse

Chomsky has spent most of his life debating so his aggressiveness in this case seems to stem from how other people view the discourse (or how he agrees or disagrees with Sam) initially.

I would put that to an 87 year old academic who's vast library jammed in his head makes discourse with Sam (who I've listened to his podcast and doesn't typically source arguments and occasionally comes across as an ideologue) a little frustrating. Or maybe he's just old and crotchety.

"Comes across as..." is, of course, subjective; to my eye, Chomsky comes across as justifiably skeptical at the outset, and reasonably irritated as the exchange continues. Doesn't, to me, seem anything like "rabid" (much less "overly rabid" -- a description that is quite odd, as it seems to suggest that there is an appropriate degree of "rabid"; when you've chosen "rabid" as your metaphor, you've kind of ruled out "overly" being a useful modifier.)

Thanks for posting this, just read the whole exchange. Wow, Chomsky is certainly in an entirely different league here. I don't think Harris even understood what Chomsky was trying to emphasize.

It is no wonder that Chomsky didn't treat him as an equal, given that Sam Harris is really in no position to discuss anything with him...

>>Civility is overrated. <<

Its always interesting to learn something new from the "tolerance" brigade.

Chomsky has never been a part of the "tolerance brigade," his left-libertarian syndicalist views notwithstanding. In fact, he has always been brutally critical of postmodernism.

Who said anything about being tolerant?

If anything, that "civility is overrated" is exactly what you'd hear from the NON tolerance brigade (which I'm all in favor of).

Have you never heard of a "tone argument" before.

> Chomsky can't even have a email dialogue with Sam Harris without becoming oozing contempt and incivility for no discernible reason.

I have no trouble discerning a reason for the tone of Chomsky's responses; when given the benefit of the doubt -- despite Chomsky clearly expecting that he was about to have his time wasted by in the professional equivalent of message-board trolling -- he proceeded with what was clearly the exact thing that Chomsky expected and which made him reluctant to engage at the outset.

Personally, I think Chomsky showed admirable restraint for the way his time was being wasted.

Chomsky's exchange with Harris struck me as out of character. I've seen dozens, maybe hundreds, of Chomsky's interviews and Q&A sessions. What always comes across, besides his luminous and discerning intellect, is his patience. Even when I've seen random people angrily question him about silly fringe theories - Bush did 9/11; chemtrails - he calmly, respectfully, and methodically points out what he believes are the flaws in those theories step-by-step.

I don't know Chomsky personally so I can't speculate about his interaction with Harris, but it is unfair to judge a man on the basis of a single interaction.

I understand that Chomsky's defensiveness / crotchety behavior can be very off-putting, but I highly suggest ignoring his eccentricities and focusing on the content of his writings. Chomsky is a deeply sensitive person whose mind is a paragon of receptive and careful attention to word choice, tone, and message-- that's why he's one of the best. The factual analytical power that Chomsky has is absolutely mind-opening, and his methodical explanations lend themselves to increasing your understanding of the issues being discussed, even if you don't agree with his interpretation.

Harris is a publicity-hound and self-promoter. Chomsky is a public intellectual and dissenting voice.

Sam Harris is pretty sophomoric and smug. It's hard not to have contempt towards him, even if one is an atheist.

yea I find he can poison viewpoints that I totally agree with in his phrasing and argumentative style of "Not aligning entirely with my opinion is not only incorrect but imbecilic."

That said, though, his joint podcast with Dan Carlin was actually pretty good link here --> http://www.dancarlin.com/product/common-sense-293-sitting-do...

Agreed. His intellect pales in comparison with Chomsky's.

Harris's single skill lies in persuasively making arguments that contain significant logical leaps.

Perhaps his attitude is filtering away people who take intellectual arguments personally.

Then he would filter himself.

He's not debating himself anyway.

Here, have a look at this: http://www.alternet.org/books/what-happened-when-sam-harris-...

It might help with discern a reason.

I think famous outspoken thinkers (Chomsky and Harris.. RMS comes to mind, Hitchens, Buckley, etc) can sometimes harbor off-putting personalities as a side effect of the situation they find themselves in: being a symbolic figurehead of a particular ideology. Or sometimes perhaps it's part of the reason they got to that place.

There is a certain level of social decorum most people keep that prevents no-holds-barred exploration of ideas. On the tails of the bell curve faith-based orthodoxy and intellectual orthodoxy.. rude but incredibly sharp instruments of exploring thought.

I'm not advocating for being an asshole... but rather for a select few we should try to see through the incivility to the ideas they're contributing.

RMS isn't really an asshole, though he has some infamous quirks that some people tend to overemphasize because they find his otherwise straightforward ideas to be highly disagreeable to begin with.

Hitchens was inflammatory, but also flexible in his thinking.

Buckley was an interesting case. To some extent, he was more acerbic towards those he mostly agreed with than those who he had further ideological skirmishes with. For instance, he was friends and associates with Galbraith, but infamously brutal towards Rothbard over his non-interventionist views on foreign policy.

> Buckley was an interesting case. To some extent, he was more acerbic towards those he mostly agreed with than those who he had further ideological skirmishes with. For instance, he was friends and associates with Galbraith, but infamously brutal towards Rothbard over his non-interventionist views on foreign policy.

Buckley probably realized that without vigorous pruning of the anti-Semites, libertarians, Randians and John Birchers, American conservatism would collapse into a fairly terrifying fringe movement; something which has been borne out since his passing.

Why would the libertarians need to be vigorously pruned?

Ask Buckley. There's still kind of a libertarian wing to American conservatism, but libertarianism is the kind of thing that can easily be taken to extremes, as we've seen with the Tea Party lately. Rothbard in particular was an anarcho-capitalist, which is a fairly fringe position.

>To some extent, he was more acerbic towards those he mostly agreed with than those who he had further ideological skirmishes with.

At the start of his interview with Chomsky he threatens that if Chomsky loses his temper he (Buckley) will "smash [Chomsky] in the goddamned face."

One of those people in your list is one of the most important thinkers of our time, the others are...not.

How is this comment relevant to this article? Or is your fanboy love for Sam Harris so deep that you can't help mention him as soon as you see the name "Noam Chomsky"?

How is that related to the article in OP?

Snore. That comment was pretty low-effort.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by posting another bad (uncivil and/or unsubstantive) comment. That just makes the thread worse. Instead, downvote and/or flag it.

We detached this from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10772438 and marked it off-topic.

Will keep that in mind for the future, my apologies!

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