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Comment by francesca | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Ironic that Chomsky still teaches at MIT

Not sure about his linguistics, but his politics is adolescent.

Norvig (Director of Research at Google, and author of the most popular AI book [1]) has written a criticism of Chomsky's linguistics in relation to AI: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

tl;dr: Norvig argues that language is best modeled statistically, Chomsky's model is deterministic. He also disagrees about what makes good science (usefulness for engineering is a valid criterium & gathering facts over developing theories).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mode...

Norvig has written criticism about specific ideas that Chomsky uttered in some convention (which are also reflected in some of his written works on natural languages and their computational models).

But Chomsky's contribution to linguistics in general and computational linguistics in particular goes well beyond anything like that, e.g. [1]. I'm not sure, but I suspect that linguistics and computational linguistics where unrelated fields before Chomsky tied them together.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

You are minimizing the criticism, which isn't just about some utterance at a convention, it's about the core premise on which Chomsky's entire work rests, namely determinism. And more generally, that success of a model should be tested empirically rather than that it should "provide insight" in some abstract way. There is no doubt that Chomsky has done great work in the area of formal languages, it's just that the relationship with natural language is not as strong as initially hoped.

The scientific pedigree of Chomsky is beyond doubt. From a purely academic POV, with all respect due to Norvig, they are in a different league.

(that does not mean that Norvig may be wrong and Chomsky right on that point you are quoting. It seems you're suggesting that Chomsky is not a great linguist because he disagress with Norvig - that would be a mistake).

At worst, he is guilty of unrealistic idealism, in the same fashion as the original democratic philosophers. But his knowledge and understanding of real power (perception management) is more sophisticated than any adolescent, and for that matter, most adults.

Now explain to the world why you think that his politics is adolescent without the world thinking that you are behaving adolescent.

you're going to have to take that argument a bit farther for it to be convincing.

Are you suggesting that older people are not allowed to have ideals?

Adolescent in what way?

My CSS must be broken. I would expect such a useless, non-content-contributing comment to be greyed out by now.

He likes to be at the nerve of it all. It's an honest place for him to be and work, and in all fairness, they have really supported his enterprise there.

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