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Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

independent.co.uk

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Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#61

Post by teruakohatu »

gizmo686 wrote: post #49
SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #46

Speaking of non-political side of him: was not he wrong about "innate grammar" necessary to understand langage? LLM do not have such circuitry, yet they somehow work well...

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.

Trying to put his in an uncontroversial way: the human brain (or a brain plus paper and a pencil) can be turning complete/equivalent. Therefor a human sitting down with a pen and pencil could, in a painstakingly long time, compute the backwards and forward passes of a transformer network.

Therefor a human with no understanding of grammar/language, and using no innate biological circuits, could process grammar and respond with language.

The flaw in this argument would be how to teach a human to do this without grammar ...

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#62

Post by hi-v-rocknroll »

ein0p wrote: post #39
feedforward wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US began arming the "Khmer Rouge" (whatever that means) in 1979 as well as protecting them in the UN, so the equivalence seems pretty valid to me. Not to mention the US 1970 invasion of Cambodia and concurrent CIA-backed overthrow of the Cambodian government, which including shooting dead US students who protested against it at Kent State and Jackson State, or the US carpet bombing of Cambodia during and after Op…

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.

I was more-or-less a free-market, atheist libertarian until about age 16 because I didn't know any better and it seemed so righteous and freedom flag-waving. Then, I learned a few things decades since then (but kept the atheism), especially about the dark origins of libertarianism. The truth is that America is a neocolonial power that flirts authoritarianism where one can live an easy life if they're moderately rich, but on the backs of a massive, struggling underclass that has it much worse than most countries in Europe. "Socialism" is a taboo word in America that it needs much more of, but the problem is that most people have too much faith in strongmen, corruption of campaign financing, and giving corporations more money, more power, and favorable regulations including regulatory capture.

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#63

Post by sitkack »

SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #60
yareal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are an approximation of all the human media they consume. An LLM cannot exist with out human circuitry. It's at best an ersatz language user.

Unrelated to what I said, with all due respect.

It isn't tho, if you look at the bulk of tokens needed to train gen1 over LLMs and what is possible with better data and smaller models.

The fact that LLMs trained on dumptrucks full of data cannot achieve what a middle schooler begrudgingly achieves using existence and snide remarks.

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#64

Post by nsingh2 »

SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #58
gizmo686 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 are universal approximators and can pick up patterns in sequences that are very different from Human languages. Sure, they don't have many inductive biases and can understand language, but as a consequence require a tremendous amount of data to work. Humans don't, which implies a certain bias towards Human language built into our heads. A bias is also implied by the similarities across Human languages, though what structure(s) in the brain are responsible is not exactly clear.

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#65

Post by YZF »

yareal wrote: post #54
nailer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I checked sources, turns out literally tens of millions of people vocally and loudly disagree with you. I think it's not helpful to anyone to come in here and be so resolute and so black and white. Especially in the face of an event that has drawn the eye of the international community as a potential genocide. I'm not telling you what to believe, just that like, posting like you did is not engaging in any meaningful…

[EDIT: ok, I'm gonna remove my appeal/preaching]

I think the parent is referring to the situation before Oct 7th and likely going back to Israel's withdrawal in 2005. The detail I think he's trying to put forward is that before Israel's withdrawal the settlers in Gaza operated a flower export business of about that economic magnitude and that the greenhouses and infrastructure that was used for that business was left after Israel withdrew. There is some discussion of this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gush_Katif#Economy

[snippety snip]

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#66

Post by ein0p »

caycep wrote: post #52
ein0p wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reputation of historians according to Zinn: not all that great either. Read him as a counterpoint, and food for critical thought, not as the sole source of truth. He doesn’t hide that he has an agenda.

I did actually see him talk at a rally in Boston Common, around '04 or so. While his written stuff may well be better, what struck me was the gist was basically self promotion about how he know "secret" things from "secret" sources, but never really bothered to elaborate, only that the "US Govt is lying to you". Well yes but...I would say if one had such information, it is not well served by presenting oneself as a c…

Yes, US Govt is routinely lying to you. That is not controversial at all at this point. Read the book. It’s a difficult read though. Might ruffle some patriotic feathers.

Think of how difficult it is today to get even remotely truthful news. And then think about how this horseshit will be written up by government funded historians once all the political scores are settled and winners are determined

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#67

Post by lamontcg »

turndown wrote: post #40
feedforward wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US began arming the "Khmer Rouge" (whatever that means) in 1979 as well as protecting them in the UN, so the equivalence seems pretty valid to me. Not to mention the US 1970 invasion of Cambodia and concurrent CIA-backed overthrow of the Cambodian government, which including shooting dead US students who protested against it at Kent State and Jackson State, or the US carpet bombing of Cambodia during and after Op…

I worded that part poorly, and did not bring up what really bothers me about it, that he tried to deny that there was a genocide in Cambodia. I agree with what you said. The idea that the US is innocent in Cambodia or really anything going on in that part of the world at that time is beyond false.

His point was always that the most inflated estimates of deaths in Cambodia were uncritically accepted by Western media and widely broadcast, while atrocities committed by friendly nations always leaned towards the very low estimates and the stories were buried.

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#68

Post by tptacek »

ein0p wrote: post #43
tptacek wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zinn's reputation among historians: not all that great.

Reputation of historians according to Zinn: not all that great either. Read him as a counterpoint, and food for critical thought, not as the sole source of truth. He doesn’t hide that he has an agenda.

OK, but to be clear: his reputation among leftist historians, of which there are many: not all that great!

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#69

Post by SomeoneFromCA »

nsingh2 wrote: post #64
SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 are universal approximators and can pick up patterns in sequences that are very different from Human languages. Sure, they don't have many inductive biases and can understand language, but as a consequence require a tremendous amount of data to work. Humans don't, which implies a certain bias towards Human language built into our heads. A bias is also implied by the similarities across Human languages, though wh…

It still does not proof anything, as claiming that "there is certain bias for Human Language built into our heads" is quite different thing that saying there is some universal grammar in the brain structures, as much we do not have innate abilities to comprehend calculus or play chess, yet we still able to learn it, with a lot less training information than LLMs. In fact 2 books will suffice for the both.

Re: Noam Chomsky 'no longer able to talk' after 'medical event'

#70

Post by materielle »

SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #46

Speaking of non-political side of him: was not he wrong about "innate grammar" necessary to understand langage? LLM do not have such circuitry, yet they somehow work well...

I don't think LLMs have all that much to do with "innate grammar".

"Innate grammar" are essentially the meta-rules that govern why the rules are what they are. For instance, an English phrase can be recognized as valid or invalid by other native speakers according to the rules of the language. But why are the rules what they are?

This is especially puzzling due to the dazzling variety of human languages. And the fact that, after a period of immersion, humans seem to have the natural capacity to learn all of them.

How do LLMs fit into this? Well, I think it would be interesting if we left a group of LLM to talk to each other for 1000 years. Then see if 1) they developed a new language branch 2) that could be relearned by humans through immersion alone.

It's true that LLMs have learned (have they? I suppose that's a loaded word) human languages like English. But it's unclear if they are governed by the same meta-rules that both constrains and drives the evolution of humanities thousands of distinct languages.

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