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Comment by pmkary | Hacker News Reader

I have many books from Chomsky, and I want to throw them away because it disgusts me to have them. Then I think, why should I throw away things I spent so much on? It makes me more angry. So I have pilled them up somewhere to figure out what ti do with them and each time I walk past it I feel sad to ever passed by his work.

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There's an interview with Dan schmachtenberger where he talks about the worst book ever written (his opinion is that it's 'the 48 laws of power'). He made the point that being consistently wrong is actually pretty impressive, and there are worthwhile lessons from watching someone getting taken seriously despite being wrong. Maybe you could revisit them with that approach.

> There's an interview with Dan schmachtenberger where he talks about the worst book ever written (his opinion is that it's 'the 48 laws of power').

Could it be this?

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIzRV4TxHo8

I don’t think they’re disgusted by Chomsky’s work because it’s wrong. They’re disgusted because of the recently surfaced ties with Epstein.

Not sure the approach holds.

Actually, it's both. I wanted to study media theory, and it was interesting that his work both appeared in compilers and philosophy, so I thought, “Let’s buy some books and dig into them.” The content was stupid, but I didn't need to throw the books away. After writing that comment here, I actually went and sent all of them to paper recycling...

Are you reacting with as much intensity when you walk past any scientific work older than 20 years?

It's not about the science, I keep all the deprecated or rendered wrong/irrelevant books because they shaped me at some point and I'm proud of that. But finding out an author sitting on your bookshelf can possibly be a child abuser and definitely in-ties with Epstein disgusts me and I no longer keep anything from them.

So that's what it is, isn't it? A FUD campaign against the old political rival who is now dying and unable to defend himself?

I guess there is no point for me asking you if you even cared to look at the "evidence ".

I actually put in the time and searched many times. Again and again. I'm more confident of his guilt than of innocence. The very fact that he even walked past Epstein devalues his work altogether. I don't need to hear of his guilt, just the fact that he required Epstein's help with his finances makes him no one to talk about the elites in power.

Make sure to vet your entire circle - friends, relatives, books, movies, everything... it's going to take a while. In the meantime you'll stop learning/growing too.

Mine is as ludicrous a suggestion as it is to damn by association.

I assume this comes from his views in politics and/or association with things like Epstein. I would say, independent of that, some works of him can be very valuable. Private life of persons and their work, are better put in totally different context, and not mixed.

The thing is, nothing that usually changes things applies to Chomsky. What he did was most certainly not a normal thing to do in his time. Like one might say about George Washington or even further back, like Clovis. By today's standards they were morally wrong, but not by the standards of their time and they advanced morals. They made things better.

Chomsky is wrong by the standards of his time and is making things worse rather than better.

It was very much the opposite of Chomsky's ideology as well. So it additionally means he's fake. BOTH on his morals and politics/activism, from both sides (ie. both helping a paedophile, and helping/entertaining a billionnaire).

So it's (yet another) case of an important figure that supposedly stands for something, not just demonstrating he stands for nothing at all, but being a disgusting human being as well.

> It was very much the opposite of Chomsky's ideology as well.

On the contrary. Chomsky was open about his civil-libertarian principles: If you are convicted, and you complete your court-ordered obligations, you have a clean slate.

Tell me, did that attitude extend to helping billionnaires who are having sex with minors? Because that's what he did. Is that what this ideology stands for?

Yes, of course. It is the whole point. Nobody cares about your 20 year old parking tickets.

Is that a Werner von Braun quote?

I don't understand. What is it about Chomsky's work that disgusts you? Or is this a reference to his political opinions?

Read the article above. There is a link at the top of this submission to an essay by Peter Norvig, arguing (correctly, in retrospect) that Chomsky's approach to language modelling is mistaken.

Obviously I did read the article. And I know how the hn site works.

I have a passing familiarity with the debate over Chomsky's theories of universal grammar etc. I didn't notice anything in the article that would cause disgust, and so I wondered what I was failing to understand.

If you have read many books by Chomsky, it might make you angry that you have wasted so much time on what turned out to be a fundamentally mistaken theory.

The people who downvoted this apparently didn't read the article.

Isn't "theory turned out to be wrong" just the price of doing science? And its a good thing: something has been learned.

The fact that he wrote volumes about manufacturing consent, death of the American dream and Israel's invasion of Palestine while he used to travel in luxurious jets with Epstein who was everything that he pretended to fight against.

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