
On Language and Humanity: In Conversation with Noam Chomsky - anarbadalov
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/noam-chomsky-interview/
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lordleft
It's weird to think that Noam Chomsky, who is so well known for his politics,
and is reasonably well known for his contributions to linguistics, is also a
significant contributor to automata theory & programming language design,
despite having a very minimal direct involvement in CS. Imagine strongly
influencing an entire field and not really working in that field. What an
intellectual giant.

~~~
spamizbad
He's probably spent the least amount of time dealing with politics but it's
what grabs him the most attention. This also causes lots of people to dislike
him for no good reason; there was a VC on twitter recently who basically said
his work on linguistics and politics have been debunked and then proceeded
block a few engineers who (rightly) pointed out his considerable contributions
to PLT.

~~~
yesenadam
>He's probably spent the least amount of time dealing with politics

I'm not sure about that--he's written a lot of political books about
particular countries/wars, each of them lengthy and painstakingly researched
and footnoted--they alone would have been an ample life's work for most
people. (I mean the earlier books, not the recent ones mostly based on
interviews/conversations.) Then there's all the speeches, conversations,
interviews etc on political topics.

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joe_the_user
It's fascinating that to get attention and acceptance for his theories,
Chomsky had found modern linguistics in the concrete sense of creating
departments, training students and so-forth.

Over the last few years, I've become more aware how dependent ideas are on
fitting into institutional frameworks - some are outside such frameworks but
without people to systematically develop them, such ideas tend to be
ephemeral.

~~~
contingencies
Will a better-connected, more searchable record of academic output allow
talented thinkers to sidestep this historic need for academic track hoop-
jumping and obtain reasonable assurance of future recognition for independent
work?

~~~
vkou
No, because search isn't the problem, curation and education is. Search by
itself is a waste of time, if you don't know what you don't know, and don't
know what to look for.

Institutional frameworks solve those problems.

~~~
joe_the_user
Indeed, telling a person the those thing "they don't know they don't know",
telling people the key question people are trying to answer in the field,
provide structure and guidance while a person spends time attempting to
address a given question, etc, etc, etc.

All these things are powerful and shape most modern intellectual endeavors.
And by that token, someone who apply discipline and rigor in approaching
questions outside an institution can have an incredible effect - back to
Chomsky essentially creating the field that he's dominated (theoretical
linguistics, one thing I didn't know 'till this article).

~~~
vkou
The key question that people are trying to answer in the field of fluid
dynamics is how to find the solution to the Navier-Stokes set of equations.

There you go. You have the question. You have a search engine. Go solve it.
Oh... Hmm.

'Knowing which question to solve' only helps for easy problems. A search
engine can help you solve easy problems. It won't do a damn thing for hard
problems. You need someone to curate what is known in the field, point you in
the right direction, steer you away from dead ends, help you break the problem
down into bits that you might make headway in.

Academic institutions do just that. They don't always do it optimally, they
can get stuck in local maximums, they are occasionally blind-sided by some
genius that attacked the problem from an unorthodox angle.

But they do a hell of a lot more then a search engine ever would.

~~~
contingencies
The whole notion that there is a field and it has a key question and there's a
goal to solve it is already a triple set of local maximums.

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lacker
To me, the most important work in linguistics in my lifetime has been the
modern ability of computers to convert spoken language to written language and
thus use it to control software, which I use daily in things like Alexa and
CarPlay driving directions. What I’m not sure about is, has the Chomskyan
style of analyzing language been useful for that at all?

Basically, a lot of pre-1980 theories of mind seemed promising at the time
because they had some explanatory power and made sense. But more recently,
machine learning techniques of treating the mind more like a large-dimensional
statistical object rather than something with complex internal structure seem
to be proving more effective. I wonder whether in time the Chomskyan style of
linguistics will prove to be a dead end.

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AkshatM
I just have to say that, assuming this was a spoken interview, Chomsky can
_talk_. I can scarcely comprehend using the same number of choice phrases
Chomsky employs in a sentence if I had a paragraph - and I certainly wouldn't
be able to do it at the speed of speech.

I've heard of people disgruntled by his economics and political activism
denigrating him as "not particularly smart". This article is proof to the
contrary, politics notwithstanding.

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artur_makly
he keeps blowing me away. even at 90. seriously...who can come remotely close
to his breadth, dept, and consiousness?

~~~
devoply
i am sad to see him go sooner or later, and also sad that the left has no
replacement for him.

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peter303
Interesting how he bashes ML translation as having little scientific interest

~~~
knolax
Anybody who speaks more than one language knows to not trust translations(even
those made by humans), especially if they're made by some black box
algorithms. It's one of those tasks where quality is almost (objectively)
immeasurable and perfection is impossible.

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samkough
Is it just me, or whenever I try to read what Noam Chomsky says or listen to
him I have to constantly read over it to understand it?

~~~
tunesmith
I don't know if it's true for Chomsky, but I have noticed that a lot of
academic sentences use a lot of inner clauses. I think it's a bad habit. When
reading those sentences as a programmer, I wish for a lot of parentheses so I
can determine order of operations. Without them we're left to infer that
order, which is extra work when we're also just trying to figure out what the
sentence itself is about.

Here's an example from T.M. Scanlon's "What We Owe to Each Other", a
philosophical book on morality I was reading yesterday:

"When I ask myself what reason the fact that an action would be wrong provides
me with not to do it, my answer is that such an action would be one that I
could not justify to others on grounds I could expect them to accept."

This sentence is actually key to what the entire book is about, but.... "what
reason the fact that an action"? I mean even as programmers we are taught to
break apart long boolean expressions.

It's kind of like garden path sentences but a more general syntactic ambiguity
that smart people are more guilty of due to their need to explain complex
subjects. Hard for a writer to recognize, because _they_ know what they mean.

~~~
ahartmetz
I would go further and say that many academics hide their banal or confused
ideas behind overcomplex language. They learn to write that way by reading all
those awfully written texts and imitating them. But Chomsky is not like that -
he usually has something insightful to say expresses it plainly.

~~~
ahartmetz
... AND expresses it plainly. Oops.

