Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life

aaronsw.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 183 posts

Re: Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life

#61

Post by jules »

gadders wrote: post #9
francesca wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Ironic that Chomsky still teaches at MIT

Not sure about his linguistics, but his politics is adolescent.

Norvig (Director of Research at Google, and author of the most popular AI book [1]) has written a criticism of Chomsky's linguistics in relation to AI: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

tl;dr: Norvig argues that language is best modeled statistically, Chomsky's model is deterministic. He also disagrees about what makes good science (usefulness for engineering is a valid criterium & gathering facts over developing theories).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mode...

Re: Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life

#62

Post by jonknee »

chernevik wrote: post #59

"Reading the book, I felt as if my mind was rocked by explosions." If you've only had this experience from _one_ book, you aren't reading enough. "Questions that had puzzled me for years suddenly began making sense in this new world." If, on reading a book, you don't know of at least one other set of alternative answers, you aren't reading enough. No doubt Chomsky is a powerful and persuasive writer. But there are ma…

> If you've only had this experience from _one_ book, you aren't reading enough.

He was 17 years old when he read the book.

Re: Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life

#63

Post by roguecoder »

xk_id wrote: post #10
merinid wrote: post #2

The extent to which Chomsky has remained relevant in both political and scientific arenas never ceases to amaze me.

Uh, didn't he criticise scientific epistemologies in relation to so-called scientism? I read briefly about some of his remarks on the matter, and he just seemed like most of his fellow sociologists: ignorant of the relevance of science to sanity, probably caused by not having been trained in physico-mathematical rigour.

He made a distinction between describing something well enough to correctly predict its behavior and understanding the common mechanisms leading to those behaviors. He then critiqued science for focusing exclusively on correct predictions, without also searching for insight into the underlying order.

The problem with science focused exclusively on correct predictions is that it encodes implicit assumptions, and if the surrounding conditions change the previous evidence is no longer valid. It also has a tendency to lead people to think they are observing some final and universal Truth, when really they are just observing a system that is in a relatively stable equilibrium.

Re: Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life

#64

Post by jonknee »

jacquesm wrote: post #29
Alex3917 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any updated source for the statistics he gives in the first couple chapters? They are about 30 years out of date now, so the book is much less useful from that perspective. The Wikipedia page on media consolidation isn't very detailed, nor do I know of any updates sources for the military/pentagon propaganda budget.

I really hate google on some days. More days as of late. Anyway, if you google "the herman chomsky propaganda model twenty years on" and then click the pdf link you may find what you want. I can't post the link here because google is so paranoid about being crawled that they obfuscate links to the point where you can't get easily get a link to a pdf without going through the search manually.

It's not a fear of being crawled, it's link tracking. It has been discussed a bunch of times (how they show the link in the status bar but then the internal link is what shows up in the clip board).

The easiest way around this is to just click the link and copy it from your browser.

http://www.fifth-estate-online.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011...

Re: Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life

#65

Post by BCM43 »

cynicalkane wrote: post #58
fghh45sdfhr3 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His presumption here is that if the United States changes its behavior, that terrorist attacks will then cease. Islamic terrorists, in fact, want a pan-world government under Talibanesque repressive sharia law, a vision that mandates the overthrow of all free nations beginning with ours. First, It is not the US's fault it got attacked, Gandhi changed British foreign policy with peaceful protests. The terrorists chose…

It's telling that you are supporting a person who thinks governments routinely lie, then you auto-assume that anything Bin Laden says is a representative of the entire motivating ideology of all terrorism. The spirit of modern political analysis is to judge organizations as they do, not as they say through a mouthpiece. Terrorists don't get a free pass on this. The activity of Al-Qaeda and similar organizations in pl…

Indeed. Keep in mind that for months Bin Laden denied even having anything to do with it.

Re: Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life

#66

Post by merinid »

Bud wrote: post #18
merinid wrote: post #2

The extent to which Chomsky has remained relevant in both political and scientific arenas never ceases to amaze me.

That's probably because you don't really know who Chomsky is or what the breadth of his work has been. Even if you choose to discard all his work in politics, he's a towering figure in linguistics. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky

I meant this in a positive way, ie, that the breadth is so enormous and he is so prolific that I am constantly impressed.

Re: Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life

#67

Post by merinid »

francesca wrote: post #7
merinid wrote: post #2

The extent to which Chomsky has remained relevant in both political and scientific arenas never ceases to amaze me.

Agreed. Ironic that Chomsky still teaches at MIT

He likes to be at the nerve of it all. It's an honest place for him to be and work, and in all fairness, they have really supported his enterprise there.

Re: Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life

#68

Post by jacquesm »

jonknee wrote: post #64
jacquesm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate google on some days. More days as of late. Anyway, if you google "the herman chomsky propaganda model twenty years on" and then click the pdf link you may find what you want. I can't post the link here because google is so paranoid about being crawled that they obfuscate links to the point where you can't get easily get a link to a pdf without going through the search manually.

It's not a fear of being crawled, it's link tracking. It has been discussed a bunch of times (how they show the link in the status bar but then the internal link is what shows up in the clip board). The easiest way around this is to just click the link and copy it from your browser. http://www.fifth-estate-online.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011...

That works with any link type except for pdfs which start 'okular' on my machine, and then I don't have access to the link.

Re: Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life

#69

Post by pravda »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #47

Interesting thing about Noam Chomsky: he goes face to face with the US government on a lot of issues and is smart enough to not have ever got in serious trouble over it.

During the 1960s he faced prison due to his opposition to the Vietnam war.

I don't know the specifics, but I recall in one interview about his personal life he mentioned that his wife finished her degree so that she would be able to support their family while he was in prison.

Re: Aaron Swartz: The Book That Changed My Life

#70

Post by jacquesm »

jackpirate wrote: post #33
iandanforth wrote: post #31

I can also recommend Power and Struggle (Politics of Nonviolent Action, Part 1). It is an absurdly trenchant look at how power is derived from and maintained in a society. Gene Sharp is unparalleled in his research into effecting change through non-violent action and should be required reading for activists of all kinds.

I used to be a nuclear submarine officer, but left the US Navy as a complete pacifist and conscientious objector. What the pacifist movement needs is books willing to engage nonviolent strategy in the same way that military tacticians do it. That's what Gene Sharp's books claim to be, but IMHO they fail. They paint nonviolence in a little bit too good of a light, without fully acknowledging its limitations.

From one conscientious objector to another (ages ago), thank you.
Post reply on HN