I feel that in his later years he made a conscious effort to talk to young people and made them aware of the history and depth of the problems the world is facing, and he used very modern avenues to do so, like podcast interviews. I will always have the highest degree of respect for this man and an admiration for his integrity, sensitivity and scholarship.
Of course, I would recommend choosing “one half of his brain” (his terms) and not mixing the politics interviews with the cognitive science / philosophy ones lol. I haven’t looked for many linguistics talks of his from recent years, but I had the impression he was working on seriously technical stuff there right up until he couldn’t, too.
I don’t know how I hope to sleep after this comment… I guess I’ll do him the honor of trying to rationalize my emotional/ethical interests, and care less about the passing of a world-renowned twice-(happily-)married scholar than the passing of children from war and famine.
I hope he believes in us to finish his life’s work, answering the most fundamental question: “What kind of creatures are we?” He was never able to see his theories in the recent LLM breakthroughs, but we’re in the early stages of the Chomskian era of AI, philosophy, and human endeavors writ large, I think… the ChatGPT outage from earlier this year couldn’t have supported him any better without having said “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” outright!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQOrAyXM5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i44WfeAzhg&t=366s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAnG0gnp1sA&t=3046s
We had him has a guest speaker for an internal presentation at Google and of course we had some hyper-rational libertarian eastern block swe kid who was going to take him down and Noam was super respectful, spared with the kid for awhile and then changed the subject slightly while destroying the libertarian kid's entire argument.
You don't just debate Noam Chomsky.
https://nerocam.com/DrFun/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200304/df20030409.jp...
Noam Chomsky vs. Michel Foucault - Dictatorship of the Proletariat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpoLLAJ1t74
I don't. There are some things out there that are up for debate. But not Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Chomsky, for some weird reason, chose to take Russia's side.
Edit: To be sure, I wish him full recovery and many more happy years.
https://www.e-flux.com/notes/470005/open-letter-to-noam-chom...
This is a mischaracterization. He explained Russia's stated motivation for invading Ukraine, that it felt threatened by NATO's continual eastward encroachment and breaking of promises not to do so. That's different than endorsing the invasion, which he did not.
Chomsky's foreign policy views can somewhat accurately be reduced to "everything is either American imperialism or reactions against it," to a degree that he ignores the imperialist tendencies (and other unpleasantries) of countries that aren't the US because they're against the US. For example, his denial of the Cambodian genocide essentially boiled down to "well, the US doesn't like the Khmer Rouge, so therefore everybody criticizing the Khmer Rouge was overselling the criticism, how was anyone at the time to know what they were doing?"
Taking sides is a sign of emotional, not intellectual approach. And Russia/Ukraine conflict is way far from good fighting evil simplified construct.
I don't like leftists in general and Chomsky in particlar, but I give him huge respect for intellectual and independent position, which will cause him losing appreciation from people like you.
Noam Chomsky had some financial money transfers and a series of meetings arranged by Jeffrey Epstein. At least one meeting with Ehud Barak (former PM of Israel). And he refused to explain himself.
This got quickly swept under the rug. But it's there even on mainstream media if you bother to search for it.
The guy has a different opinion.
It's going to happen a lot so maybe better to get used to it?
Would have loved to be a fly on the wall had he been able to do a guest spot at Google recently.
I'm willing to bet he would've gone off-script and given Google hell for their engagements with Israel and treatment of their own employees who protested.
>America bad, everything bad = America
What a frighteningly distorted view of "rational" and "intellectual".
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial#Revisi...
The whole thing is more semantical argument than ideological.
Chomsky is not 100% right on everything and his world views are more black and white than the world they describe.
But he is an excellent linchpin to validate your own views against.
People who hate him always attack him based on few things from the past, while following/praising people who are spineless.
+1
±1
When I was young I emailed him with a question something like "I am too young to have witnessed the events of the Vietnam War, can you please recommend me some reading material or push me in the right direction?"
That question turned into 5 or 6 (long) emails back and fourth that i'll always cherish that delved into his unique perspective on what the war was like as a protestor from the West, which papers got released that actually had some truth in them, among a lot of other valuable insights into the time period I had no access to myself.
At the end of our conversation he advocated finding a group that needs volunteers and effort. He didn't care what group that might be, he only cared that individual political concern of individuals be empowered by the necessary groups and collective effort.
I think that kind unequivocal support of 'being political' is something that is truly special.
I hope the best for him -- I view him as one of the only 'truly accessible' academics in this world; just as happy to slowly and carefully explain his thoughts to 'the rabble' as he would be while explaining the same thoughts to high academia and the press.
A great man.
"Afraid I never met any of those you mention, though I’ve followed their work for many years.
I’ve never been close to intellectual elite circles, including people I very much admire."
The time stamp for my email was Tuesday, Nov 26, 2019 at 2:19 PM. It was answered by chomsky@mit.edu at Tuesday, Nov 26, 2019 at 9:29 PM. Pretty remarkable.
For anyone curious, here is Chomsky in 1976 discussing the relevance of automation and anarcho syndicalism to modern productive economies: https://youtu.be/h_x0Y3FqkEI
I truly believe we can build a world where everyone benefits from automation, getting the freedom and time to do what we will that every person deserves. The reason I develop open source farming robots is to explore concepts of community ownership of the means of production and community oriented engineering. Noam Chomsky’s work heavily inspired the thinking that got me where I am today.
How about the environmental costs of all that automation?
Is there a realistic path for getting to what you propose from where we are now?
[Edit: realistic in the sense that e.g. the Alcubierre drive is possible but requires exotic matter, therefore "not realistic").
But, look here. He's 95 years old and just had a stroke. He's not going to get well soon, or at all.
* Today is in more-or-less the same predicament as 40 years ago
Ralph Nader is also still out there at 90 producing content regularly.
Disagree with him or not about US foreign policy, the man was a genius.
But oh wait you're probably just a propaganda bot yourself.
Humans can also lose parts of their language processing capabilities, without losing others (start at e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_disorder), which is highly suggestive of modular language development. The only question on which there isn't much consensus concerns the origin of that modularity. And humans can lose knowledge while still being able to speak and understand, or lose language while retaining knowledge.
LLMs don't have that at all: they predict the next token.
"Innate grammar" are essentially the meta-rules that govern why the rules are what they are. For instance, an English phrase can be recognized as valid or invalid by other native speakers according to the rules of the language. But why are the rules what they are?
This is especially puzzling due to the dazzling variety of human languages. And the fact that, after a period of immersion, humans seem to have the natural capacity to learn all of them.
How do LLMs fit into this? Well, I think it would be interesting if we left a group of LLM to talk to each other for 1000 years. Then see if 1) they developed a new language branch 2) that could be relearned by humans through immersion alone.
It's true that LLMs have learned (have they? I suppose that's a loaded word) human languages like English. But it's unclear if they are governed by the same meta-rules that both constrains and drives the evolution of humanities thousands of distinct languages.
Therefor a human with no understanding of grammar/language, and using no innate biological circuits, could process grammar and respond with language.
The flaw in this argument would be how to teach a human to do this without grammar ...
The approach is relatively straightforward. The team began by using a computer program to recreate the network that mushroom bodies rely on — a number of projection neurons feeding data to about 2,000 Kenyon cells. The team then trained the network to recognize the correlations between words in the text.
The task is based on the idea that a word can be characterized by it its context, or the other words that usually appear near it. The idea is to start with a corpus of text and then, for each word, to analyze those words that appear before and after it.
That an LLM does well at grammar doesn't prove or disprove this possibility. A more poignant criticism of "innate grammar" would be that it's not a hypothesis that can be disproven, and as such not really a scientific statement.
Will miss his interviews on various forums often posted on YT and appearances on Democracy Now.
Classic: Yanis Varoufakis with Professor Noam Chomsky at NYPL, April 16, 2016 | DiEM25
But with time, I also realized he is a linguist, not an historian or political scientist.
He is controversial.
I think Manufacturing Consent should go down as one of the most important books ever written in our culture. He was right about much, but wrong about much also.
His beliefs on Cambodia strain credulity and I still have trouble separating that Chomsky, so bent on drawing an equivalence(however valid) between American actions and the Khmer Rouge that he missed the point entirely, and Chomsky the visionary philosopher who I admire deeply.
Chomsky was illuminating in my personal character development. I grew up in a pretty conservative area, and his name carried a lot of hate like Hillary/Clinton did, but i didn't know why. Later, I saw some of his writings on American interventionism, and I found myself nodding my head in agreement over the mistakes my country/we have made. Later yet, I'm in college going for the math+cs degrees and his stuff on formal languages was probably the peak of my admiration for him... but with the admiration comes research, and perhaps the most important thing chomsky illustrated to me was that you can be a genius, but that doesn't mean you can't be blind, myopic, wrong, an asshole, or ... non-credible.
I don't know why chomsky's beliefs and supported causes are so inconsistent with the morals he pushes, but it's been an exemplar for me regardless -- good and bad, functional and broken.
The obvious resolution to that paradox is either you don't understand Chomsky's morals or have mistaken what his beliefs are.
Judging by some random interview from 2022 [0] it looks like he has a position on Russia/Ukraine that is easy to defend. He describes it as a "principled, internationalist, anti-imperialist left response" and that seems like a fair assessment from what I'm reading. Looks like pretty standard fare for anyone who doesn't like war and propaganda.
Not to mention the US 1970 invasion of Cambodia and concurrent CIA-backed overthrow of the Cambodian government, which including shooting dead US students who protested against it at Kent State and Jackson State, or the US carpet bombing of Cambodia during and after Operation Freedom Deal.
Now the US did support some incompetent and corrupt militia in Cambodia to oppose the Khmer rouges, and those did their fair share of misdeeds, to the frustration of local US officers. But given the crimes the khmer rouges ended up committing, it is hard to argue that not opposing them was the morally superior position, even with hindsight.
What I don’t understand is this: the news agencies don’t report to the government. Then why would they work together with the government to mislead the people? Does anyone know?
Noam is so amazingly smart, he is probably one a billion. Sometimes I am not sure he is right but can’t really formulate why or what is it that I don’t agree.
A friend of mine has a low-power FM radio station, that I wrote the software for, that endlessly downloads and replays Noam Chomsky's podcasts.
I disagree with about everything this guy wrote politically. I totally disagree with this guys perspective, it drives me up a wall frankly. But I have always have had incredible respect and think he played an important role in the dialogue. I read everything he wrote, and generally enjoy his writing. The very definition of the constant loyal opposition. Always getting people to think about things differently and with incredible moral courage. I wrote and argued with him and he always responded. We are all better off because of Chomsky.
If you skip to the very last question at 26:50, it is a little bit poignant, considering this news.
My personal opinion is that he 1) hates the US 2) hates eastern Europe because it defeated socialism.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but I do not think I will be.
He doesn't hate the US. He hates that the US has been captured by warmongering elites and hates its poor. And he'd probably school you on the USSR's state authoritarian capitalism not being a good example of socialism.
The funniest part is that everyone has a different reason to think that.
EDIT: and, of course, he had an accurate view of the world geopolitically, media manipulation, etc.
I was amazed when he replied to my email, asking a polical history question, with a thoughtful and personal reply.
The only other person I could think of even being close to his stature is Howard Zinn.
It may be a long shot, but I'm still hoping for his recovery.
This man has done more for humanity than a billion billionaire-bills could ever aquire...
His anti US imperialism views blind him.
> February 4, 2022
https://chomsky.info/20220204/
Questions of human conflict are incredibly complex, but occasionally life gives you a freebie. Occasionally, things actually are black and white, there are good guys and bad guys and you should not support the bad guys. If you had trouble getting this one absolutely dead simple case right, maybe you should not bother having an opinion on these matters at all.
..must have a hell of a lot of downvotes.
