Has Chomsky been right about anything?
In the decade(s) since I kinda think "Chomsky was wrong" is pretty much the only reason people bring him up.
When Chomsky proposed generative grammars, his theory of universal language acquisition, and so on, they were radical ideas that upturned the central cannon of linguistics.
Time has been on his side - entire schools and subfields of linguistics went extinct as more evidence emerged that Chomsky was fundamentally right. Basically every computer language and data format in existence is parsed/lexed in ways inspired by his models of language.
But now Chomsky is considered the stodgy old establishment, and whenever one of his theories is contradicted somewhere on the margins people shout "Aha! He was wrong the whole time!" and ignore the 99% of cases where his models are still the best ones we have.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...
But might be missing something more specific, would love to read that.
Here's an argument otherwise, that they really are developing some sort of model: https://the-decoder.com/stochastic-parrot-or-world-model-how...
“ Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence.”
Isn’t that just plainly true of LLMs? Sure they can produce text that looks like an explanation, and sure putting in a header telling it to spell out its reasoning will get it to output text that looks like reasoning, but I feel the nature of its hallucinations make it clear that it’s not actually performing those steps anywhere in the net.
But maybe I’m just a Luddite? These technologies are amazing and transformative, I’m just shocked to see hate on HN of CHOMSKY of all people, the father of modern linguistics and cognitive science…
The communism support doesn't seem to quite stick either if WP is to be believed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Noam_Ch...
In Britannica and WP he's labeled an anarcho-syndicalist, so seems to be against both capitalism and noncapitalist authoritarian systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...
Did you skip my first link or are you disagreeing with it? It's about the same subject. And in your WP link has a second quote writing about the genocide as fact.
Another I think credible seeming article about it that seems to judge against denialism in an academic journal called "Genocide Studies and Prevention": https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
Chomsky's skepticism in the media criticism article talking (among other things) about a book about the then-contemporary events of course looks quite unfortunate in retrospect, but given the volume of work and constant writing about world events over a long career it seems to be a error in judgement in the moment, rather than denying history, especially as he evidently updated his views later as more evidence came about.
It was completely unjustified at the time. There was absolutely no reason to doubt the testimony of refugees coming from Cambodia, other than they didn't fit into Chomsky's strange worldview that the US is the cause of all problems in the world.
Even today his views on Russia's invasion of Ukraine are completely moronic.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/12/22/russia-ukraine-war-left...
For ‘Peace Activists,’ War Is About America, Never Russia Their own hard-left worldview is so absorbing that they will take the side of any aggressor in the anti-Western camp.
https://www.e-flux.com/notes/470005/open-letter-to-noam-chom...