171–180 of 500 posts
Sad news. He was remarkably sharp even in old age.
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You could probably make an argument that it wasn't justified in this case using information known at the time but you have to actually make that case, not resort to appeals to "freedom" or information we know now.
Chomsky was doing so many podcasts up to the moment he disappeared from the radar presumably due to medical issues. I've seen him going for 2 hours with some nobody with 5K followers, being asked juvenile and stupid questions and answering with the patient of a Saint. He looked quite diminished physically, elderly and frail but mentally he's always sharp and his recall and memory is scary. I feel that in his later ye…
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No. Innate grammar has always been about how humans aquire language, not how any possible system which understands human language must posses that innate grammar.
But that has never been proven that this is how indeed human acquire language; it is essentially a hypothesis. We may as well do it the way LLMs do - some undifferentiated networks acquires the grammar by unknown means.
LLMs on the other hand can easily learn these non-human grammatical structures which means that they are not the way humans do it.
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Here's your monthly reminder that despite the large place he occupies in the "sciency" cultural landscape, a lot of his work has been debunked and he has not gone back on his genocide-denying claims about Serbia. His anti US imperialism views blind him.
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I recall vehemently disagreeing with Chomsky on many things when I was much younger, but then I somehow stumbled upon Howard Zinn’s “People’s history of the United States” and realized the version of history I knew was basically concentrated propaganda I was brainwashed into believing. That opened the door to understanding Chomsky. “Manufacturing consent” explains our present state of affairs really well.
If you reread what you wrote carefully an amazing irony falls out. You might consider your consent has simply been manufactured in another direction. Lots of Chomsky acolytes never quite reach that epiphany. They simply follow in his footsteps of being oh so traumatized by the sudden realization that governments lie and propaganda is a thing that you could get them to opt in to an even deeper set of absurdities and h…
Chomsky was doing so many podcasts up to the moment he disappeared from the radar presumably due to medical issues. I've seen him going for 2 hours with some nobody with 5K followers, being asked juvenile and stupid questions and answering with the patient of a Saint. He looked quite diminished physically, elderly and frail but mentally he's always sharp and his recall and memory is scary. I feel that in his later ye…
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His view regarding the Bosnian genocide is really strange imo. I would correct you that the people perpetrating it weren't really communists, but serbian nationalists. However, his "USA bad" take is correct because it's true. Being anti-US, anti-NATO, anti-imperialism is the only moral view to have when you look at the history and current politics of the US.
And trade it for Russian imperialism? Chinese? As an Eastern European being pro-US and pro-NATO is the only moral view.
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I was thinking more about February 2022, where he tries to blame the Ukrainian invasion on nato expansion or something https://chomsky.info/20220204/ Oh also his georgian take https://chomsky.info/200809__2/
He was entirely right about that too. NATO is an aggressive alliance that has exclusively invaded three countries in the last 20 years, zero of whom were threat to it. The worst one was probably Libya, because NATO pretended to engage in a humanitarian mission to gain approval from the security council and then left the country utterly destroyed state afterwards. The country was shredded . It's a tool of western impe…