Then in other words I wish Chomsky's Op Ed to the public nipped off the low hanging fruit of unjustified, thoughtless nonsequiturs. There's value in that.
The number of people who understand Chomsky's argument is not very many in the world. I think the reason is because a computational background is necessary. To the extent that an Op Ed is a great opportunity to educate people, he could've had the article especially the first part written so that more regular people could find the argument accessible. And yes that means anticipating typical objections even if you or I mind find them superficial or wrong.
I don't think this is intended to convince the people who are already confidently making the incorrect arguments you cite. I think it's intended to reassure the less-terminally-online people who are hearing those arguments, from a perspective of some understanding and authority, that they're not true.
It did, but laymen will respond as laymen do, regardless. They already don't understand it, so they are just going to repeat their tautological end run... "well, whose to say we don't do the same thing... so therefor who is to say it is not doing the same thing as us?" When one of the first paragraphs is "Humans do not behave this way at all".
>The number of people who understand Chomsky's argument is not very many in the world.
I don't think the argument is inaccessible. Some people just don't want to hear things, that's not really unusual in today's intellectual economy.
The number of people who understand Chomsky's argument is not very many in the world. I think the reason is because a computational background is necessary. To the extent that an Op Ed is a great opportunity to educate people, he could've had the article especially the first part written so that more regular people could find the argument accessible. And yes that means anticipating typical objections even if you or I mind find them superficial or wrong.