Noam Chomsky Joins Faculty at University of Arizona • Hacker News Board

Re: Noam Chomsky Joins Faculty at University of Arizona

#131

Post by foldr » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 6:11 PM UTC

indubitably wrote: post #122

foldr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linguistic theory has not "moved on" to HPSG. HPSG originated in the early 90s and remains a minority pursuit. The term "statistical approaches" could mean almost anything. There have always been people who are more interested in building, say, practical machine translation systems than in figuring out how kids acquire grammatical knowledge. But again, the field has not "moved on". There are just different groups of…

Could mean almost anything but what generativist linguistics (or whatever the latest label for the Chomskyan school) does, which continues to promote the notion that language is essentially algebraic, that "grammaticality" is binary, and so forth. It's simply not the case that Chomsky is "okay" with approaches to the study of language which are not in accord wiht his own. He repeatedly dismisses whole subdisciplines…

>promote the notion [...] that "grammaticality" is binary

I don't know a single generative linguist who is committed to the claim that grammaticality is binary. And there is lots of published work in generative linguistics that explicitly does not assume this. Where are you getting this idea from, exactly?

>language is essentially algebraic,

Not sure what this means. If it just means that sentences have structure, then yes, generative linguistics is committed to this obviously true claim.

>He repeatedly dismisses whole subdisciplines as "uninteresting," but in context those complaints don't mean "uninteresting to me," they mean "worthless."

He's entitled to his opinion, no? It's not as if no-one ever criticizes his work.

Re: Noam Chomsky Joins Faculty at University of Arizona

#132

Post by y0ssar1an » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 6:13 PM UTC

balance_factor wrote: post #101

y0ssar1an wrote: post #86

Chomsky's politics can be summarized as: interpret everything the US does in the harshest possible light while torturing the data to make Hugo Chavez sound like a good leader.

Six years ago Chomsky wrote an open letter that said actions Hugo Chavez were taking were an "assault on democracy". How exactly is that "torturing the data to make Hugo Chavez sound like a good leader"? When Chavez was elected and freed the oil money of Venezuela from the hands of a small, corrupt, European-descendant aristocracy, being shared with poor and working class Venezuelans of all races, Chomsky was enthusi…

That's a fair point, but this more recent interview from 2013 shows Chomsky's real opinion of Chavez. He's defensive about the human rights abuses, and his overall tone is one of praise for the "liberator" of Latin America.

https://youtu.be/M6BiNppcnaI

Re: Noam Chomsky Joins Faculty at University of Arizona

#133

Post by sctb » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 6:14 PM UTC

shkibb wrote: post #44

Does anybody else find these sorts of discussions to be just fundamentally cringey as hell? On both sides. Stuff like "We agree mainstream black culture is terrible." Like I don't think either would have the guts to say that in front of a black person.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15052145 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Noam Chomsky Joins Faculty at University of Arizona

#134

Post by hindsightbias » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 6:16 PM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #19

BuckRogers wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why whenever I speak to someone and they have a strong opinion I like to ask them how many books they've read on that subject. It's almost always zero. You can pretty much instantly discard anyone like that as it's a decent baseline litmus test. If you really cared about something, you would read at least one if not multiple books on the subject. Anything less is just laziness and someone who wants to get an e…

I've made my mind about Nazism, because it strikes me as an abominable philosophy. I haven't read any books about it though. Would you dismiss anything I said about it until I read Mein Kampf? Most people have only read a handful of books. If they were limited to expressing their views on those topics, there wouldn't be very much said about anything in society. I'm not sure society would benefit from that.

Well, Godwin is Godwin.

I think a better example would be Marx's Das Kapital. I probably wouldn't waste any time talking to someone about 20th century political & economic history/theory who dismisses it out of hand.

And I can tell you the vast majority of Americans will dismiss it. The standard response to "I've read it" is: "What, you're a commie?"

Re: Noam Chomsky Joins Faculty at University of Arizona

#135

Post by galacticpony2 » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 6:17 PM UTC

RobertoG wrote: post #104

galacticpony2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems to me that you define socialism as whatever it fails and capitalism as whatever it works. No socialist state that called itself a socialist state has been a success. None. Zero. There are democratic countries that may at some point have "social democrats" or even "socialists" in power. These countries may have passed some laws that are "socialist" in spirit, but virtually all of those countries employ a ca…

So, if they are successful and call themselves communist they are not really communist. There are not private banks in China, for just pointing a random fact. I'm not defending the Chinese model, but the diminishing of poor people in the world that you pointed before is mostly due to China. >>"Like which? I'm not going to call any form of redistribution "socialism", like some people like to do." I suppose you agree t…

> So, if they are successful and call themselves communist they are not really communist.

China is still very much communist in every way but economically. I don't mind calling them communist, it's just that if we're talking about an economic system and I'm looking for success story of socialism, you can't bring up China. Ever since China abandoned planned economy and employed capitalism, its economy has grown by leaps and bounds.

> I suppose you agree that there are not pure capitalist states. What we see in the world is normally called "mixed economy".

Whatever you want to call it, does "more socialism" or "more capitalism" correlate strongly with wealth? What about individual freedom?

Re: Noam Chomsky Joins Faculty at University of Arizona

#136

Post by y0ssar1an » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 6:34 PM UTC

swiftting wrote: post #76

Congratulations to Noam Chomsky! I remember when he was giving a talk at Columbia university and the line for entry was literally around the block ! Great man.

He is not a great man. He is an intellectually dishonest enabler of repressive leftist governments. He was a well known supporter of Hugo Chavez - perhaps the only leader in the Americas dumber than Trump. I'm embarrassed at how many of my fellow techies have fallen under Chomsky's sway.

http://www.noticias24.com/actualidad/noticia/77779/hugo-chav...

Re: Noam Chomsky Joins Faculty at University of Arizona

#137

Post by BuckRogers » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 6:54 PM UTC

nindalf wrote: post #19

BuckRogers wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why whenever I speak to someone and they have a strong opinion I like to ask them how many books they've read on that subject. It's almost always zero. You can pretty much instantly discard anyone like that as it's a decent baseline litmus test. If you really cared about something, you would read at least one if not multiple books on the subject. Anything less is just laziness and someone who wants to get an e…

I've made my mind about Nazism, because it strikes me as an abominable philosophy. I haven't read any books about it though. Would you dismiss anything I said about it until I read Mein Kampf? Most people have only read a handful of books. If they were limited to expressing their views on those topics, there wouldn't be very much said about anything in society. I'm not sure society would benefit from that.

You have an opinion about Nazism. You certainly do know less than someone who has read Mein Kampf, so your opinion is to be discarded versus someone like Noam Chomsky's. Who probably has read Mein Kampf. As long as you accept that, and accept why some outsider would take Chomsky's take on Nazism over yours, then we're on the same page.

I do think society would benefit greatly if we cut out the masses who have strong opinions on subjects they haven't even bothered to read.

Your Nazism opinion for example, doesn't sound like it's based on much other than trendiness. If it were 1935 and you were in the environment where it were popular- someone like yourself would probably would be Sieg Heiling with your jackboots on, in all seriousness.

Re: Noam Chomsky Joins Faculty at University of Arizona

#138

Post by 1024core » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 6:58 PM UTC

reader5000 wrote: post #114

kenjackson wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty good argument to me. I defer to Wiles and other mathematicians on FLT. Full stop, that's sufficient to me.

The purpose of an argument is to show why something is true. Saying an 'expert' believes something is true does not show why it is true nor that it is true. Deferring to Wiles is just ceasing to argue.

I know I should be "deferring to Wiles" here too, since you are oblivious to what's being said in response. There are certain things that we take for granted: like gravity. Or a round Earth. If some flat-earther comes over and starts asking you to prove that the Earth is flat, or that gravity is not just little gremlins pulling on your jeans, then I think it's safe to "defer to an expert".

Re: Noam Chomsky Joins Faculty at University of Arizona

#139

Post by jnordwick » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 6:59 PM UTC

reader5000 wrote: post #97

kenjackson wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chomsky had stated earlier that there are experts to read who cover such things. The kid kept asking variations of the same question. If I were Chomsky I would have been done after a couple of responses.

"These 'experts' agree with me" is not an argument. Indeed, clearly Chomsky did not want to engage the argument so ceasing responding would have been logical.

Its called Appeal to Authority, and it is considered a logical fallacy - basically the opposite of Argument Ad Hominen.

Re: Noam Chomsky Joins Faculty at University of Arizona

#140

Post by Synaesthesia » Sat, Aug 19, 2017, 7:00 PM UTC

y0ssar1an wrote: post #132

balance_factor wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Six years ago Chomsky wrote an open letter that said actions Hugo Chavez were taking were an "assault on democracy". How exactly is that "torturing the data to make Hugo Chavez sound like a good leader"? When Chavez was elected and freed the oil money of Venezuela from the hands of a small, corrupt, European-descendant aristocracy, being shared with poor and working class Venezuelans of all races, Chomsky was enthusi…

That's a fair point, but this more recent interview from 2013 shows Chomsky's real opinion of Chavez. He's defensive about the human rights abuses, and his overall tone is one of praise for the "liberator" of Latin America. https://youtu.be/M6BiNppcnaI

Let’s look at the western response to the horrific genocide in Guatemala compared to the admittedly egregious abuses in Venezuela but which don’t evens approach those atrocities ...