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| ▲ | retrac a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I won't try to defend Chomsky. (Not really a big fan even before this.) But if the mere mention of him is sus to you then I advise you to not study either linguistics or computer science because it's Chomsky normal forms and Chomsky hierarchies all the way down. There's even still people clinging to some iteration of the universal grammar despite the beating it has taken lately. He's also one of the most prominent political thinkers on the American hard left for the last half century. There's a joke going around for a while now that you either know Chomsky for his politics, or for his work in linguistics and discrete mathematics, and you are shocked to discover his other work. I guess we can extend that to a third category of fame, or infamy. | | |
| ▲ | cma a day ago | parent [-] | | The merge operation in the later Chomsky modern linguistics program is similar in a lot of ways to transformer's softmax merging of representations to the next layer. There's also still a lot to his arguments that we are much more sample efficient. And it isn't like monkies only learn language at a gpt-2 level, bigger brains take us to gpt-8 or whatever. There's a step change where they don't really pick things up linguistically at all and we do. But with a lot more data than we ever get, LLMs seem to distill some of the broad mechanisms what may be our innate ability, though still seems to have a large learned component in us. |
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| ▲ | eru a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not sure that's relevant? People still discuss what Einstein did, and he's long dead. (I don't like Chomsky for other reasons, but having an obituary ain't no reason to disregard someone's thoughts.) | |
| ▲ | avmich a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Does it matter? | | |
| ▲ | derriz a day ago | parent [-] | | A lot of Chomsky’s appeal I believe is due to his politics as his universal grammar theories turned out to be an academic dead end. But his politics centers around the moral failings of the West so I think yes, if he was involved in the sexual exploitation of trafficked children, then this would devalue his criticism of the morality of the Western political system. | | |
| ▲ | plastic-enjoyer a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > But his politics centers around the moral failings of the West so I think yes, if he was involved in the sexual exploitation of trafficked children, then this would devalue his criticism of the morality of the Western political system. Why would it devalue his criticism assuming he was right? | | |
| ▲ | derriz 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | Moral arguments for me don’t stand alone like a mathematical proof or scientific findings which can be examined as some sort of platonic form. Morality arguments are social and contextual. That 2+2 is 4 won’t change and captures some sort of eternal truth while what is deemed moral is constantly changing over time and differs across different societies and social groupings. So morality arguments require and appeal to a particular shared sense of right and wrong. If Chomsky was guilty of sexually abusing children, then I do not share his moral foundation and so his appeals to morality arguments do not convince me. | | |
| ▲ | plastic-enjoyer 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do you have an example where Chomsky might be right but you disagree with him because of his moral depravity? | | |
| ▲ | derriz 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why? There are some of Chomsky’s positions I’m sure I agree with and some I disagree with. What’s the relevance to my point? | | |
| ▲ | plastic-enjoyer 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | If it turns out that Chomsky was sexually abusing children would you start disagreeing with Chomskys positions you agreed previously? |
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| ▲ | breppp a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | His criticism of the Western political system was always way too simplicist and why it has immense appeal to college students. Essentially it can be summed as any Western action must be rationalized as evil, and any anti-west action is therefore good. This is also in line with Christian dualism so the cultural building blocks are already in place. Then you get Khmer Rouge, Putin, Hezbollah, Iran apologetism or downright support | | |
| ▲ | throwaway_dang 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I doubt you can find any essay or such where he said anti-Western action was good on the sole grounds that it was anti-Western. It's difficult to summarise so many years of writing in a few sentences but from my own reading, he pointed out a) many things done by the US lead to death or destruction
b) many of these things are justified in the name of good that doesn't stand up to scrutiny
c) the US government is often hypocritical
d) US citizens are heavily propagandized both for foreign policy and domestic policy
e) as a US citizen, it his duty to try and oppose these actions and since he's not a citizen of Iran, he isn't in a position to do anything about Iran
f) a) through d) explain why he is often seen as an apologist, to use your word, for Iran; he tries to explain, from his point of view, why Iran etc. do the things they do
g) a strong support of freedom of speech and opposition to censorship, including what he regards as private censorship as opposed to merely government censorship. | | |
| ▲ | breppp 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | That doesn't explain why he visited Hezbollah and showed overwhelming support, probably aware of the organization roots and past actions such as kidnapping journalists or killing politicians or its self professed goal of creating a theocracy in Lebanon. He of course has very complex rationalizing but essentially he assumes the opposite of mainstream western opinion and then tries to build ideological structures upon that. That creates a very simplified version of reality wrapped in a nice intellectual wrapping |
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| ▲ | derriz a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I am not a fan of Chomsky - the opposite in fact. I was deliberately avoiding judging his actual arguments - to make the point that his own morality undermines his lecturing others on their moral failings. |
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