Noam Chomsky and the Bicycle Theory | Hacker News Reader

Noam Chomsky and the Bicycle Theory

nytimes.com

43 pointsbetolink48 comments

Chomsky has interesting ideas whether you fully agree or not.

On language, human language has intricate rules that we can't fully explain in terms of the underlying neurobiology. But Chomsky's assertion that this implies some sort of underlying mechanism in the brain strikes me as excessively reductionist. Maybe neural networks are inherently capable of learning arbitrary rules, and the kinds of rules that comprise natural languages are constrained not by the brain, but by something else, e.g. maybe only some kinds of grammatical rules are stable over time as languages are subject to random drift.

On politics, Chomsky gives a very thorough critique of US foreign policy, but it is excessively materialist, i.e. it assumes the main driving force in politics is money and power, not ideology. Often this seems far fetched, e.g. US politicians are clearly very eager to please the Jewish lobby (e.g. AIPAC) but according to Chomsky it's the Jewish lobby that has been co-opted by the US in order to use Israel as a tool for US foreign policy. And yet in all the private discussions of all US presidents, all we hear is them being pushed to the right by the Jewish lobby. We never hear them saying "the Middle East is too stable, Jews and Arabs are starting to form solidarity and oppose US imperialism. Quick, pressure Israel to take a harder line".

That's a great example for ideology > material interest, but in both the Middle East and the world as a whole it's an exception to the general rule. It's amusing that Chomsky resorts to epicycles rather than simply making an exception...

It's all about oil, land and water. Ideology is about your country being the best. Everything else is irrelevant.

That seems naive in an anti-naive way? :-)

When I look at the foreign policy of my country (Sweden), it seems a large part of it is decided as part of internal political posturing. Tail wagging the dog, etc.

I'm not as knowledgeable about the US politics, but it seems to not be as bad -- but still a large influence.

> a large part of it is decided as part of internal political posturing

I agree that not "everything" on the lowest level (single politicians) is simply "oil" but even looking at your example the motivation on the lower level is surely to keep the power and influence by these who already have it and to get the power and influence for these who don't have it. The next step is to ask what the power and influence does in total, what are the interests of the whole systems.

There's quite the difference in priorities, objectives, means and constraints between some small and insignificant country and the world's hegemon.

How "powerful" would the Jewish lobby be if support for Israel among Americans was not at 62%[1]?

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/189626/americans-views-toward-isr...

It's kind of chicken and egg though, isn't it?

There are instances where Chomsky does show that US policy often is ideologically motivated, for instance the Vietnam war which he notes, "could have ended in 1965" as the major aims had been achieved - the region had been inoculated as Indonesia had fallen and Vietnam was devastated.

>How do you account for your amazing stamina and energy level at age 87?

>The bicycle theory. As long as you keep riding, you don’t fall.

Talk about burying the headline.

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

― Albert Einstein

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/28/bicycle/

I have listened to hundreds of hours of Noam Chomsky lectures and talks on Youtube. Even if you don't agree with his politics seeing what his perspective is on issues is always interesting.

Its funny to see this as Noam often remarks that there is an active ban on him being mentioned in the New York Times newspaper.

NY Times didn't really go much into the political stuff, which they really don't write about.

Do you have any recommendations after those hundreds of hours of Chomsky? I have problems reading/listening. To me, Chomsky's politics seems to not be written as an honest academic -- but just to change people's opinion.

For instance, there are gigantic double standards in how different sides are evaluated by Chomsky. In an interview I found (no link saved, sorry) Chomsky was asked about criticizing Israel thousands of times more than the hateful antisemitic groups around Israel, which routinely use civilians for targets (while Israel follows the laws of war, more or less).

Chomsky answered. The reason (at least then) was that Israel ignored an Egyptian peace initiative in the early 70s, so they deserved what they got... Uh... WTF?! Neither I nor Chomsky have a clue if that was a real initiative or just a trap ("give us X and we will sign a peace paper and follow it.") Even assuming the initiative was real and that it was realized on the Israeli side, but the Israeli politicians at the time were militaristic expansionists (maybe as bad as their neighbours) -- it is just not serious to hence you judge the future governments for decades because of that!

After seeing that, I stopped reading/listening to Chomsky again.

Edit: Two minus votes in 5 minutes for asking about references and explaining why Chomsky's political writing seemed weird? :-)

There are multiple reasons why your comment would be downvoted, chiefly that it is off topic and fails to cite a source.

Citing a source for your claims would better allow the reader to evaluate whether you are accurately characterizing your subject. Being somewhat familiar with Chomsky's extensive body of work I know of exactly zero cases of him claiming that Israel "deserved" civilian casualties, while Israel's frequent violation of the "laws of war", e.g. use of white phosphorous and extensive targeting of civilian areas, is a frequent topic.

This is before we even address your rather disturbing implication about what it means to be an "honest academic".

Edit: Is it off topic to ask for a reference to what someone writes they've spent hundreds of hours on?! :-)

>> I know of exactly zero cases of him claiming that Israel "deserved" civilian casualties

I did not write that, I claimed the standards were very different.

(To be absolutely clear: I am not claiming Israel is perfect, I'm claiming the differences in volume of criticism is weird. Sure, keep higher standards for democracies -- but how many factors of thousands more criticism is serious?)

>> Israel's frequent violation of the "laws of war", e.g. use of white phosphorous and extensive targeting of civilian areas, is a frequent topic.

Uh, you complained about lacking references..?

White phosphor is legal for smoke screens. Used by NATO too. [Edit: Link. Also note that there will be failed shells e.g. reaching the ground in any artillery barrage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus_munitions#Arm... ]

It is legal according to the war laws to target civilian areas if the other side hide in them (a complex legal situation).

This is my favorite reference on this subject, since it is critical of the US -- and shows what the standards are. The difference between the sides criticized heavily here (Israel) and the non criticized side is quite obvious: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n04/michael-byers/the-laws-of-war-u...

Edit: Clarity and got a link to remove an "Afaik".

I did not write that, I claimed the standards were very different.

You wrote "Chomsky answered. The reason (at least then) was that Israel ignored an Egyptian peace initiative in the early 70s, so they deserved what they got..."

How is this not saying that Chomsky claimed that Israel deserved it?

My claim was about Chomsky's volume of criticism of Israel, compared to other groups/countries in that conflict. If that really is unclear, criticize my grammar (not using my native tongue).

I answered this:

>> [Chomsky never claimed] that Israel "deserved" civilian casualties

I was obviously discussing volume of criticism. See the paragraph directly previous from the one you quoted, which I (tried to) reference in what you quote:

>> Chomsky was asked about criticizing Israel thousands of times more than [..]

I agree, but it's also very depressing. He lays bare all the ugliness in our current system, but suggests no solution. Which is ok, it's good to separate the two things, or perhaps there simply isn't a solution. But still, I always need to cheer myself up after listening to him.

He does suggest a solution, it's just not an easy one. But it is simple: Organize and get shit done. He often uses the womens liberation movement, civil rights movement and anti-vietnam-war movement as historical examples. There's still work to be done, and it takes a lot of effort and a long time to get anywhere, but we continue to progress towards the better.

"I never looked around, never second-guessed

Then I read some howard zinn now I'm always depressed

And now I can't sleep from years of apathy

All because I read a little noam chomsky"

- NOFX, Franco Un-American

>Chris Knight explores “the Chomsky problem” — the paradox of a thinker who belongs to the “professional and scientific elite” even as he espouses populist political ideas.

Ok, this work is not the substance of the interview, but what is the paradox? Should I believe that it is strange that scientists studying fluid dynamics use conventional toilets and sinks outside of the lab?

The problem is Chomsky claims that the "professional and scientific elite" are compromised by their role in society, and end up taking up self-serving political views that seek to preserve this role. So the natural question is what make Chomsky different.

He's not different, and he openly acknowledges that a lot of his linguistic research was funded by the Pentagon.

Edit: He also thought that his activism would get him fired, and so his wife started going back to school.

>Edit: He also thought that his activism would get him fired, and so his wife started going back to school.

No, not get him fired. Get him imprisoned!

His wife went back to school so she would be able to support the family, if he ended up in stir.

I always find this criticism silly. It's a form of normalization. "Elites must have elitist opinions or they and their opinions are not elite." No, there's usually more than one way to arrive at the same position. Not all paths will be equally complicated or well founded.

I think one of the preeminent examples was his initial and sustained support for Pol Pot [ignoring evidence of wrongdoing [1]] while there existed much evidence for not supporting them [the KR] because it clashed with his sympathies for the Communist movement in SEAsia at the time.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...

This is a total mischaracterization and unsupported by the citation. Chomsky and Herman examined mass media coverage of U.S. enemies vs friends, finding that similar atrocities by enemies would be trumpeted and exaggerated beyond their already atrocious reality (e.g. Cambodia), while those by friends would be ignored or downplayed (e.g. East Timor). To call this "support" or "sympathy" for enemies is a commissar mentality.

>> Chomsky and Herman examined mass media coverage of U.S. enemies vs friends

That is not exactly how Wikipedia discuss the Pol Pot and Chomsky subject?

(Also, a later quote by Chomsky, at the end of that discussion of him, notes that Pol Pot's atrocities were "I think it would be hard to find any example of a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury." which directly contradicts comparing with East Timor. But sure, during the Cold War lots of dictators that was needed got off easy for human rights violations.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...

You misunderstand. That directly supports the comparison with East Timor. When enemies commit atrocities there is outrage and fury in the mass media, and when friends commit similar atrocities there is silence and downplaying. Also, the Wikipedia article does not support the claim that Chomsky offered "support for Pol Pot".

What?!

This is the early international reaction of Pol Pot criticism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide#Internation...

Chomsky, according to the w-pedia link I gave in the GP, criticize that and call it probable anti communist propaganda. And then they write supportive/neutrally of communist Pol Pot defenders.

He wrote that with the information he could get at the time. Later when the evidence of the genocide was better known, he criticised the US government for its recognition and support of the DK government. https://chomsky.info/199903__/

  The US recognized the expelled DK as the official government of Cambodia, because of its “continuity” with the Pol Pot regime, the State Department explained.

According to w-pedia, Chomsky wrongly dismissed the eye witnesses as an anti communist propaganda conspiracy...

And evaluated as more trustworthy the supporters of dogma/regimes that already before the "Killing Fields" had a history of mass murderers.

If you dismiss whatever you want as a conspiracy, you can motivate any conclusion. (Here: "Country X used propaganda in a war, I'll assume they do exactly the same amount of propaganda when not in a war.")

Mind the context: The Vietnam invastion of the U.S. happend just then, with massive atrocities committed by the U.S. (2 million civilians were killed in North Vietnam alone, Agent Orange killed an additional 400000 after the war ended). At that time, that was hardly mentionened in the press, or, if mentioned, framed as a necessary price to pay to archieve freedom.

In 1969, Nixon also dropped over 100.000 tons of bombs over Laos and Cambodia (Operations MENU and Freedom Deal), killing many thousands of civilians.

Even now, 40 years later, the English Wikipedia entry for the Vietnam War and the casualities portrays a completely different image than e.g. the German entry (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamkrieg#Tote_und_Verletzt...). The english entry downplays the U.S. atrocities and e.g. doesn't mention the Agent Orange aftermath. The majority of pictures in the U.S. entry show Viet Cong victims, despite the fact that the U.S. killed way more civilians.

Of course Chomsky and Herman, being aware of that, were sceptical about the Pol Pot press coverage in 1977. And, according to your link, they reverted their scepticism when the facts became clearer, calling it the "great act of genocide in the modern period".

Context is very important in understanding commentary written in the 1970s. In today's world, people on various parts of the political spectrum are writing things about various Middle Eastern actors which they are sure to regret in future. I have a certain degree of sympathy for someone like Hildebrand - the coauthor of a book heavily dependent on Khmer Rouge sources which one of Chomsky's more controversial articles on Cambodia praised - who subsequently admitted that he'd been guilty of "intellectual arrogance" in being too quick to assume based on his Vietnam experiences that popular media accounts were fabrications and Southeast Asian leftist groups were relatively honest about the situation. I have somewhat less for Chomsky, who switched from insisting that Cambodian refugee reports were unreliable, casualties owed more to US bombing than the Khmer Rouge and that nitpicking over mainstream estimates of death tolls was entirely appropriate if they were out by a "factor of 1000" to accusing the CIA of Cambodian genocide denial (by deliberately misrepresenting a report which actually attributes 1.2-1.8m deaths to "the savagery of that regime") almost as soon as Cambodia was successfully invaded by North Vietnam, and who continues insist to his commentary in the 1970s was entirely balanced and justifiable.

>> people on various parts of the political spectrum are writing things about various Middle Eastern actors which they are sure to regret in future.

Interesting, what do you think will be heavily reevaluated? Frankly, I have no clue. The whole place seem too complex to have a serious opinion.

Do you expect that ~ friends of different democratic groups will do genocides? [Edit: It ought to be quite a time before a US president flirts with the Brotherhood in Egypt again, right?]

Do you think the acceptance of extremists will be embarrassing? When the whole "don't be a friend of a non believer" etc gets through to the left?

Or the opposite, that the Middle East will be less intolerant and easier to live with and gets modernized?

He never supported Pol Pot. I do not understand why everybody keeps saying that and keeps relying solely on those who have no evidence to support that position. Let's go the source: I have the book Manufacturing Consent in front of me. I have used it on a few occasions for two research projects and am pretty familiar with its contents. I have emailed him directly regarding this book, too.

So, with the book in front of me, I will quote the one statement that has everybody's dicks hard for hating Chomsky: "The victims of Pol Pot, a Communist leader, were worthy, although after he was ousted by the Vietnamese in 1978, Cambodians ceased to be worthy, as U.S. policy shifted toward support of Pol Pot in exile. The East Timorese remained unworthy in the 1990's, as the table suggests." So, without reading the book, you would think he's talking about worthy and unworthy the way that we normally mean it. However, he munificently describes the difference: "Our prediction is that the victims of enemy states will be found 'worthy' and will be subject to more intense and indignant coverage that those victimized by the United States or its clients, who are implicitly 'unworthy'."

But, it's a lot easier for all of you with single digit IQ's to look up secondary-source material like Wikipedia which is essentially a mashup of opinions and has never been considered a reliable academic medium. No book or publication can ever be sourced by Wikipedia yet you all do this all day long.

Manufacturing Consent is not an easy read, but if you would actually read the entire thing you would understand that he never even closely supported Pol Pot.

I find linguistics one of those topics that I have questions about but don't know enough to use the correct terms to find an answer. - Is there an objective metric for 'efficiency of communication of an idea'? If so, what is it? - Are some languages more efficient at communicating ideas than others? - What is the most efficient language? - Are there any attempts to create a new language using all the best features of historical languages? like how programming languages take the good features from one another?

As far as efficiency in communication, there is a metric, though I can't recall the name.

There's a general idea that less information dense languages lead the speakers to talk faster (e.g. Spanish vs. English) implying that humans have a type of ideal information density regardless of how that information is packaged.

/Not a linguist. Took a class once...

Apparently, they're is a time article about it

http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,0...

They talk about information density:

With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together to arrive at two critical values for each language: the average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information-dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.

For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and thus the slower the speech. English, with a high information density of .91, was spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, ripped along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edged past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.

Further googling got me this PDF http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegri...

That depends on what you mean by "efficiency". The most natural understanding of the question for me would be to look at the information density of spoken language with respect to time, as was done in [1].

The linked findings looked at 7 different languages and found that all of the studied languages had about the same rate.

However, the languages vary significantly in the density of information with respect to syllables, and the speed at which syllables are produced.

EDIT: chart on page 7 (544)

[1]https://muse.jhu.edu/article/449938/pdf

> I find linguistics one of those topics that I have questions about but don't know enough to use the correct terms to find an answer.

I can't help answer your questions, unfortunately, but I agree completely that it's difficult for outsiders to even formulate the right questions.

I find linguistics to be fascinating, in that language really is foundational to what it means to be human, and yet it seems like we still only understand so little about it. And linguistics is such a huge and broad field that is so complex once you scratch the surface, I feel like outsiders (like myself) just have a very poor grasp about what it's about. And that's only compounded by the fact that we all, as 'expert users' of languages on a daily basis, feel like we have some intuition or knowledge into how it works that very often turns out to be completely incorrect when studied rigorously. So we're often not even aware of just how ignorant we are.

In many ways modern linguistics is such a young field too. I can only expect that we have exciting times ahead... I only wish it were taught more often in schools; I wish I'd studied it myself. As a sort of 'meta' subject, it seems like it'd be useful for young people to think more about what it means to communicate.

This is not a question that really would be of much interest to most working linguists, who aren't really willing to make value judgments about language any more than chemists are to talk about their favorite molecules.

Constructed languages are also generally considered "mostly harmless" but not really an object of scientific inquiry.

If you're interested in languages, you may want what people who study languages for a living are interested in. Or you dive into conlanging...there's probably a subreddit for that.

> Are there any attempts to create a new language using all the best features of historical languages? like how programming languages take the good features from one another?

Unlike programming languages, natural languages are really, really complicated. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, one of the most comprehensive treatise on the grammar of English (and probably one of the most comprehensive work on any human language), runs 1700+ pages, and that's considering mostly just syntax. Imagine: a native English speaker keeps most of the rules explained in this book in their head.

So, I believe any attempt to "create a new language using the best features" will either (1) fail, or (2) end up being accidentally successful, where the speakers of the new language will pile additional layers of complication by simply using the language in the same way we use any human language.

IANAL, so read it with a grain of salt.

I was introduced[1] to Lojban[2] by a friend through my shallow interest in programming. I don't know much about it, but maybe it comes close to providing an answer to your 'new language' question. Their website[3] provides links to learn about it's architecture.

1. https://youtu.be/QdlGxgKt7nc 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban 2. https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban

Edit: updated video link

Time for another Noam Chomsky AMA?

Is there any way to read the article without logging in?

For NYT, just open the article in an incognito tab. They're nice about it. I ended up subscribing because I read so many of their articles and I like their coverage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com