The Chomsky Puzzle
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
It also didn't really convey just how critical the scientific community is of Wolfe's take on linguistics. There's a pretty good takedown here: http://facultyoflanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/the-sludge-a...
Uh, the article literally has a link to the takedown you posted. I agree though, the premise of the article is flawed.
A celebrity?
I've seen him interviewed once on Charlie Rose.
In May 2002 CNN put him on with Bill Bennett.
In 1986 he debated Boston university president John Silber on local Boston TV.
How is he a celebrity?
He mentioned in a speech once how someone on NPR wanted to talk to him, and how the higher-ups at NPR canceled and then limited his appearance, as he was apparently banned.
He also was prevented by the IDF from attending a talk at Birzeit university in the West bank, something he said hadn't happened (being refused admittance to a country he was to give a unievrsity talk to) since he tried to enter Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Even The Nation has spiked positive reviews of his books.
Someone with so little exposure on US airwaves over the decades is not a celebrity.
> http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0159008/ 165 credits as himself on different programs. 155 in the last 20 years.
Well this makes my point. Let me look at the earliest ten.
Third from bottom is UK. Fourth from the bottom is a Canadian documentary. Sixth and seventh from the bottom are Canadian. Eighth from bottom is Australian. Ninth from bottom is the UK. Tenth from bottom is UK.
Second and fifth from bottom appear to be musical programs, not sure of the country.
Which leaves the earliest, Chomsky's 1969 discussion with William F. Buckley. So 1969 to 1996 that's one credit.
If you look at the other credits, many of them are for non-American programs, or very independently made films (not on the US airwaves as I said).
More recent documentaries like "Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?" are made by Europeans.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has been on NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN etc. much more than Chomsky has in the past decade. He is much more of a US celebrity.
That... seems like an odd choice, when the question is whether he's a celebrity now. He could have had no exposure until a few years ago and still be a celebrity, so I'm not sure why looking at his oldest media appearances is relevant.
Maybe you would prefer google trends?[1] For a real treat, change it from US to world wide. Chomsky is a global name, NGD is more of a US phenomenon. NGD has eclipsed Chomsky in recent times, but event at half or more of the current exposure NGD has, I think that points towards a celebrity status.
> Neil deGrasse Tyson has been on NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN etc. much more than Chomsky has in the past decade. He is much more of a US celebrity.
That doesn't actually prove that Chomsky isn't a celebrity though, as it's still possible for NGD to be more famous and for Chomsky to be a celebrity. Also, I think you have a fairly narrow view of what "celebrity" is, if it's mostly informed by television exposure. Sure, television is a quick way to celebrity, but there are other ways (and those used to be the only ways). Einstein was a celebrity. Stephen King is a celebrity. Being well known is the definition, not being an entertainment personality.
1: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm...
Dan Everett is a primarily media-phenomena and fraud (in a whole variety of ways). His claims about the Pirahã has been debunked at this point. The main thing is that Everett used the tactic of presenting himself as an outsider challenging a "great" man (who naturally has many enemies). In considering Everett's dubious claims, take into account that Everett isn't an expert on tropical languages but a missionary who got an impression of one language and leverage this into an entire career.
Are you saying Chomsky is the underdog?
Is Chomsky the archbishop of the Cathedral?
Now, HERE is a great article on "Moldbug" http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis
Take a look at how Chomsky writes emails, see his correspondance with Sam Harris https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse - the arrogance in his reply to a genuine offer of conversation is staggering.
The Soviets are very different from the Islamic State. The former at least claimed to be concerned with this world, while the latter explicitly does not (this is what their religion tells them).
Although there were instances where we came perilously close to nuclear war due to chance events, the fact is that no nuclear war took place. Thanks to mutually-assured destruction and good luck, there has been a lasting nuclear peace for seven decades.
This all goes right out the window when the other side believes that heaven is fundamentally real, and that blasting infidels with the biggest weapon they can get will get them to heaven fastest.
It is true that America has its own religious fundamentalists, and they are a growing long-term threat. But they are not yet anywhere near the point where the Islamic State is right now. Furthermore, America's religious fundamentalist have serious opposition (you and I, for example) and we can therefore expect that they will continue to be restrained in the future. In the Islamic State, there is no opposition to religious fundamentalism of any kind, and there is no prospect of it emerging from within.
That's the context he's speaking of, and I think it's dishonest for you to make it appear as if he's talking about attacking a peaceful Islamic country such as Jordan.
This is a flat-out lie. This interview between Sam Harris and Dave Rubin is very long, but it shows in detail how some people (who know better) are spreading this in an effort to shut down fair and honest discourse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQqxlzHJrU0
Edit: just to clarify, I'm not accusing you personally of dishonesty, just the people you heard this from.
I don't and I'm a little tired of seeing this argument trotted out anytime Chomsky is mentioned. It's one email chain, not 60 years of activism and linguistics.
Chomsky starts the entire chain and every subsequent email with some equivalent of "we don't have enough common ground on these subjects to have a reasonable conversation, so let's not have a stupid back-and-forth in which we do nothing but loudly contradict each other's basically axiomatic interpretations".
And then there's a lot of back-and-forth that's frustrating to everyone involved (and particularly to the third party reading the exchange). It's frustrating because Sam and Noam are talking past one another, and clearly don't have enough common understanding to take part in a productive discourse, and one party is trying the entire time to just get out of the damned stupid back-and-forth of nothing but mutual contradiction.
To me this reads like a very common occurrence at parties I attended in college: two people who disagree, with one person trying to avoid a public argument that's bound to be fruitless and irritating to all involved, and the other one insisting on having the argument anyways. I never had much sympathy for the Sam character when the Noam character finally snapped and told them to change the topic or fuck off.
> so full of themselves that they don't entertain anyone challenging their ideas.
There's a HUGE difference between realizing a particular conversation is pointless and refusing to have any conversations with dissenters. The latter is arrogance, but the former is an important social skill.
> to a genuine offer of conversation...
1. Noam's primary complaint is that he doesn't believe this is a genuine offer of conversation, and that even if it were, he doesn't think the conversation would be remotely productive.
2. Noam has far more patience in this thread than I or most people would've displayed. I probably wouldn't have replied beyond the second email with anything other than "We obviously disagree on some pretty basic facts. Any further conversation on this matter would therefore be fruitless to both of us. Have a great day!"
A religious person telling a scientist that a debate about religion with him would be "pointless" is indeed dismissive. It may end up being pointless to the people making the arguments but not necessarily for the listeners.
I'm still trying to work out for myself the extent to which intent matters when it comes to condemning an act, which is why I struggle to think of your statement as a fact.
And of course they knew that there would be major casualties. They are not imbeciles, but rather adopt a stance that is arguably even more immoral than purposeful killing, which at least recognizes the human status of the victims, not just killing ants while walking down the street, who cares? (...)
It is inconceivable that in that brief interim period evidence was found that it was a chemical weapons factory, and properly evaluated to justify a bombing. And of course no evidence was ever found. Plainly, if there had been evidence, the bombing would not have (just by accident) taken place immediately after the Embassy bombings (along with bombings in Afghanistan at the same time, also clearly retaliation). There’s no rational way to explain this except by assuming that he intentionally bombed what was known to be Sudan’s major pharmaceutical plant, and of course he and his advisers knew that under severe sanctions, this poor African country could not replenish them (...)
1. Your original charge was that Noam is arrogant, not that he is dismissive. Dismissiveness and arrogance are not the same thing.
2. Noam isn't dismissive in this particular. Refusing the reply to the email or replying only with terse non-acknowledgements would be dismissive. Spilling hundreds of words worth of ink to elucidate why you don't want to have a conversation is anything but dismissive.
3. Charging Noam with being dismissive toward his critics is a different claim with a different burden. It requires analyzing the preponderance of evidence, not one specific case. Just because Noam is dismissive of one particular critic doesn't mean that he's dismissive of his critics in general.
> A religious person telling a scientist that a debate about religion with him would be "pointless" is indeed dismissive
I fail to see how this is necessarily the case. For example, if the scientist's point is to change the religious person's mind, and the religious person is firm in their faith, then the religious person isn't being dismissive. On the contrary, the religious person is saving both parties from a fruitless and frustrating endeavor.
> It may end up being pointless to the people making the arguments but not necessarily for the listeners.
More analogous to Noam/Sam, if the scientist's point is to demonstrate the falseness of religious by disproving transubstantiation, and if the religious person explicitly said they do not believe in transubstantiation, then the religious person is well within reason to refuse an invitation, because regardless of the outcome of the conversation, the end result won't be informative to anyone.
3. If the Scientist pushes for a debate even though the religious person is not interested, he's most likely being a bit of jerk.
1. Neither would insisting that someone have a public debate with you. The entire situation was not at all like "real life".
2. I've been on both sides of "we should stop talking about this because we'll never agree and won't learn anything". I've never felt uncomfortable or rude on either side of that conversation.
It's just that readers tend to not agree on whether it was Chomsky or Harris who is the bad guy.
I'd recently endured the 3.5 hour trainwreck of a conversation Sam attempted to have Omar Aziz. Concluded that nobody could reasonably take Omar's side in it, and was sadly not surprised to see the crowds of people on Twitter concluding that Omar had "won" the conversation.
I sought out the Chomsky conversation because I even though i'd heard it was disappointed from Sam's perspective, I was expecting it to be more nuanced. Neither came off particularly well, but I was especially frustrated by Chomsky.
The source of my frustration was that I was constantly felt he would have been able to make a point that would give Sam pause for thought, to take the conversation down an interested road. But he wasn't willing to even briefly humour Sam's need to explore contrived thought experiments. If they'd just been able to get that out of the way, they could have gotten somewhere. I actually like Sam's thought experiments because they're a device to establish a dispassionate common ground on which to build the more nuanced (and challenging) conversations, but they seem to fall flat with the people who I'm most interested in him going head-to-head with.
Of course, this is unnecessary because it's arguing against a straw-man of Chomsky's position.
The problem isn't with Chomsky, it's with Sam Harris.
Sadly for Stallman it happened mostly in his own life and Chomsky will have at least a good decade after he passes.
Neither of them have been "left alone in their high castles". Both have a large following, are well respected (and controversial), and people have built upon their philosophies or used them to better understand the world.
You can go back as far as the late 2000's and the GPL still had a huge following. With the mobile boom F/OSS was still embraced, but the GPL has steadily fallen to the wayside. You can only be so uncompromising when people need a means to eat.
Now we have an entire generation of CS grads who'll use MIT as their de facto license.
This is an objectively ridiculous assertion. His works are extensively cited with primary sources. He regularly has hundreds of footnotes per book. Manufacturing Consent and Necessary Illusions are just two examples of a scientific, ideology-free approach to political analysis. There he compares and contrasts how the U.S. media covers similar international events -- by state friends vs. foes -- and it is quite damning.
Who is the expert on how the pie should be divided up?
I think that's a real problem for his political views. Political philosophy is about how you design a good society, and that means a society in which people treat each other well. To do that you have to have a good understanding of human psychology.
But people with Asperger's are very low in their psychological understanding skills. With Chomsky, I get the impression that leads him to fall into a simplistic moralism for explaining why people behave in good or bad ways.
I do think he has a powerful analytical brain and is very dry in his descriptions, they are consciously unemotional and descriptive in nature. However he has a real deep sympathy with the sufferer of his fellow man.
Chomsky is actually an extremely pleasant and kind person, not (detectably) autistic, and has written extensively on the topic of organizing societies where people treat each other well -- see his countless works on Anarchism and Libertarian Socialism, extraordinarily well-researched critiques of foreign and domestic policy, and even-handed application of the principle of universality in human affairs.