
Noam Chomsky and the Bicycle Theory - betolink
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/education/edlife/on-being-noam-chomsky.html
======
farright
Chomsky has interesting ideas whether you fully agree or not.

On language, human language has intricate rules that we can't fully explain in
terms of the underlying neurobiology. But Chomsky's assertion that this
implies some sort of underlying mechanism in the brain strikes me as
excessively reductionist. Maybe neural networks are inherently capable of
learning arbitrary rules, and the kinds of rules that comprise natural
languages are constrained not by the brain, but by something else, e.g. maybe
only some kinds of grammatical rules are stable over time as languages are
subject to random drift.

On politics, Chomsky gives a very thorough critique of US foreign policy, but
it is excessively materialist, i.e. it assumes the main driving force in
politics is money and power, not ideology. Often this seems far fetched, e.g.
US politicians are clearly very eager to please the Jewish lobby (e.g. AIPAC)
but according to Chomsky it's the Jewish lobby that has been co-opted by the
US in order to use Israel as a tool for US foreign policy. And yet in all the
private discussions of all US presidents, all we hear is them being pushed to
the right by the Jewish lobby. We never hear them saying "the Middle East is
too stable, Jews and Arabs are starting to form solidarity and oppose US
imperialism. Quick, pressure Israel to take a harder line".

~~~
mikevm
How "powerful" would the Jewish lobby be if support for Israel among Americans
was not at 62%[1]?

[1] [http://www.gallup.com/poll/189626/americans-views-toward-
isr...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/189626/americans-views-toward-israel-
remain-firmly-positive.aspx)

~~~
gotofritz
It's kind of chicken and egg though, isn't it?

------
ronnier
>How do you account for your amazing stamina and energy level at age 87?

>The bicycle theory. As long as you keep riding, you don’t fall.

~~~
wolfram74
Talk about burying the headline.

------
analog31
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

― Albert Einstein

[http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/28/bicycle/](http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/28/bicycle/)

------
icpmacdo
I have listened to hundreds of hours of Noam Chomsky lectures and talks on
Youtube. Even if you don't agree with his politics seeing what his perspective
is on issues is always interesting.

Its funny to see this as Noam often remarks that there is an active ban on him
being mentioned in the New York Times newspaper.

~~~
gotofritz
I agree, but it's also very depressing. He lays bare all the ugliness in our
current system, but suggests no solution. Which is ok, it's good to separate
the two things, or perhaps there simply isn't a solution. But still, I always
need to cheer myself up after listening to him.

~~~
glennsl
He does suggest a solution, it's just not an easy one. But it is simple:
Organize and get shit done. He often uses the womens liberation movement,
civil rights movement and anti-vietnam-war movement as historical examples.
There's still work to be done, and it takes a lot of effort and a long time to
get anywhere, but we continue to progress towards the better.

------
gajomi
>Chris Knight explores “the Chomsky problem” — the paradox of a thinker who
belongs to the “professional and scientific elite” even as he espouses
populist political ideas.

Ok, this work is not the substance of the interview, but what is the paradox?
Should I believe that it is strange that scientists studying fluid dynamics
use conventional toilets and sinks outside of the lab?

~~~
mc32
I think one of the preeminent examples was his initial and sustained support
for Pol Pot [ignoring evidence of wrongdoing [1]] while there existed much
evidence for not supporting them [the KR] because it clashed with his
sympathies for the Communist movement in SEAsia at the time.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chomsky_and_Herman)

~~~
abalone
This is a total mischaracterization and unsupported by the citation. Chomsky
and Herman examined mass media coverage of U.S. enemies vs friends, finding
that similar atrocities by enemies would be trumpeted and exaggerated beyond
their already atrocious reality (e.g. Cambodia), while those by friends would
be ignored or downplayed (e.g. East Timor). To call this "support" or
"sympathy" for enemies is a commissar mentality.

~~~
berntb
>> Chomsky and Herman examined mass media coverage of U.S. enemies vs friends

That is not exactly how Wikipedia discuss the Pol Pot and Chomsky subject?

(Also, a later quote by Chomsky, at the end of that discussion of him, notes
that Pol Pot's atrocities were "I think it would be hard to find any example
of a comparable outrage and outpouring of fury." which directly contradicts
comparing with East Timor. But sure, during the Cold War lots of dictators
that was needed got off easy for human rights violations.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chomsky_and_Herman)

~~~
abalone
You misunderstand. That directly _supports_ the comparison with East Timor.
When enemies commit atrocities there is outrage and fury in the mass media,
and when friends commit similar atrocities there is silence and downplaying.
Also, the Wikipedia article does not support the claim that Chomsky offered
"support for Pol Pot".

~~~
berntb
What?!

This is the early international reaction of Pol Pot criticism:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide#Internation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide#International_reaction)

Chomsky, according to the w-pedia link I gave in the GP, criticize that and
call it probable anti communist propaganda. And then they write
supportive/neutrally of communist Pol Pot defenders.

~~~
bildung
Mind the context: The Vietnam invastion of the U.S. happend just then, with
massive atrocities committed by the U.S. (2 million civilians were killed in
North Vietnam alone, Agent Orange killed an _additional 400000_ after the war
ended). At that time, that was hardly mentionened in the press, or, if
mentioned, framed as a necessary price to pay to archieve freedom.

In 1969, Nixon also dropped over 100.000 tons of bombs over Laos and Cambodia
(Operations MENU and Freedom Deal), killing many thousands of civilians.

Even now, 40 years later, the English Wikipedia entry for the Vietnam War and
the casualities portrays a completely different image than e.g. the German
entry
([https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamkrieg#Tote_und_Verletzt...](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamkrieg#Tote_und_Verletzte)).
The english entry downplays the U.S. atrocities and e.g. doesn't mention the
Agent Orange aftermath. The majority of pictures in the U.S. entry show Viet
Cong victims, despite the fact that the U.S. killed way more civilians.

Of course Chomsky and Herman, being aware of that, were sceptical about the
Pol Pot press coverage in 1977. And, according to your link, they reverted
their scepticism when the facts became clearer, calling it the "great act of
genocide in the modern period".

~~~
notahacker
Context is very important in understanding commentary written in the 1970s. In
today's world, people on various parts of the political spectrum are writing
things about various Middle Eastern actors which they are sure to regret in
future. I have a certain degree of sympathy for someone like Hildebrand - the
coauthor of a book heavily dependent on Khmer Rouge sources which one of
Chomsky's more controversial articles on Cambodia praised - who subsequently
admitted that he'd been guilty of "intellectual arrogance" in being too quick
to assume based on his Vietnam experiences that popular media accounts were
fabrications and Southeast Asian leftist groups were relatively honest about
the situation. I have somewhat less for Chomsky, who switched from insisting
that Cambodian refugee reports were unreliable, casualties owed more to US
bombing than the Khmer Rouge and that nitpicking over mainstream estimates of
death tolls was entirely appropriate if they were out by a "factor of 1000" to
accusing the CIA of Cambodian genocide denial (by deliberately misrepresenting
a report which actually attributes 1.2-1.8m deaths to "the savagery of that
regime") almost as soon as Cambodia was successfully invaded by North Vietnam,
and who continues insist to his commentary in the 1970s was entirely balanced
and justifiable.

~~~
berntb
>> people on various parts of the political spectrum are writing things about
various Middle Eastern actors which they are sure to regret in future.

Interesting, what do you think will be heavily reevaluated? Frankly, I have no
clue. The whole place seem too complex to have a serious opinion.

Do you expect that ~ friends of different democratic groups will do genocides?
[Edit: It ought to be quite a time before a US president flirts with the
Brotherhood in Egypt again, right?]

Do you think the acceptance of extremists will be embarrassing? When the whole
"don't be a friend of a non believer" etc gets through to the left?

Or the opposite, that the Middle East will be less intolerant and easier to
live with and gets modernized?

------
mmel
I find linguistics one of those topics that I have questions about but don't
know enough to use the correct terms to find an answer. \- Is there an
objective metric for 'efficiency of communication of an idea'? If so, what is
it? \- Are some languages more efficient at communicating ideas than others?
\- What is the most efficient language? \- Are there any attempts to create a
new language using all the best features of historical languages? like how
programming languages take the good features from one another?

~~~
noobiemcfoob
As far as efficiency in communication, there is a metric, though I can't
recall the name.

There's a general idea that less information dense languages lead the speakers
to talk faster (e.g. Spanish vs. English) implying that humans have a type of
ideal information density regardless of how that information is packaged.

/Not a linguist. Took a class once...

~~~
newjersey
Apparently, they're is a time article about it

[http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,0...](http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html)

They talk about information density:

With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together to
arrive at two critical values for each language: the average information
density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken
per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language for
the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be
very information-dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.

For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-
dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken
per second — and thus the slower the speech. English, with a high information
density of .91, was spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second.
Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at
5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, ripped along at a
syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group,
however, was Japanese, which edged past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low
density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of
speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical
amounts of information.

Further googling got me this PDF [http://www.ddl.ish-
lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegri...](http://www.ddl.ish-
lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegrino_to%2520appear_language.pdf)

------
quantumfoam
Time for another Noam Chomsky AMA?

------
HiroshiSan
Is there any way to read the article without logging in?

~~~
paloaltokid
For NYT, just open the article in an incognito tab. They're nice about it. I
ended up subscribing because I read so many of their articles and I like their
coverage.

