If Chomsky were known only as a mathematician and computer scientist, then my view of him would be favorable for the reasons you note. His formal grammars are good models for languages that machines can easily use, and that many humans can use with modest effort (i.e., computer programming languages).

The problem is that they're weak models for the languages that humans prefer to use with each other (i.e., natural languages). He seems to have convinced enough academic linguists otherwise to doom most of that field to uselessness for his entire working life, while the useful approach moved to the CS department as NLP.

As to politics, I don't think it's hard to find critics of the West's atrocities with less history of denying or excusing the West's enemies' atrocities. He's certainly not always wrong, but he's a net unfortunate choice of figurehead.

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thomassmith65 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I have the feeling we're focusing on different time periods.

Chomsky already was very active and well-known by 1960.

He pioneered areas in Computer Science, before Computer Science was a formal field, that we still use today.

His political views haven't changed much, but they were beneficial back when America was more naive. They are harmful now only because we suffer from an absurd excess of cynicism.*

How would you feel about Chomsky and his influence if we ignored everything past 1990 (two years after Manufacturing Consent)?

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* Just imagine if Nixon had been president in today's environment... the public would say "the tapes are a forgery!" or "why would I believe establishment shills like Woodward and Bernstein?" Too much skepticism is as bad as too little.

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thomassmith65 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wrote "when America was more naive" but that isn't entirely correct. Americans are more naive today in certain areas. If my comment weren't locked, I would change that sentence to something like "when Americans believed most of what they read in the newspaper"

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tripletao 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree that his contributions to proto-computer-science were real and significant, though I think they're also overstated. Note the link to the Wikipedia page for BNF elsewhere in these comments. There's no evidence that Backus or Naur were aware of Chomsky's ideas vs. simply reinventing them, and Knuth argues that an ancient Indian Sanskrit grammarian deserves priority anyways.

I think Chomsky's political views were pretty terrible, especially before 1990. He spoke favorably of the Khmer Rouge. He dismissed "Murder of a Gentle Land", one of the first Western reports of their mass killing, as a "third rate propaganda tract". As the killing became impossible to completely deny, he downplayed its scale. Concern for human rights in distant lands tends to be a left-leaning concept in the West, but Chomsky's influence neutralized that here. This contributed significantly to the West's indifference, and the killing continued. (The Vietnamese communists ultimately stopped it.)

Anyone who thinks Chomsky had good political ideas should read the opinions of Westerners in Cambodia during that time. I'm not saying he didn't have other good ideas; but how many good ideas does it take to offset 1.5-2M deaths?

	▲	thomassmith65 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Judging by that comment, you probably know more about him than I do. I won't try to rebut it, but I enjoyed reading it.

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jeremyjh 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Just imagine if Nixon had been president in today's environment... the public would say "the tapes are a forgery!" or "why would I believe establishment shills like Woodward and Bernstein?" Too much skepticism is as bad as too little.

Today it would not matter in the least if the president were understood to have covered up a conspiracy to break into the DNC headquarters. Much worse things have been dismissed or excused. Most of his party would approve of it and the rest would support him anyway so as not to damage "their side".