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Chomsky's personality reminds me Dijkstra - so full of themselves that they don't entertain anyone challenging their ideas. Take a look at how Chomsky writes e

by k2xl 10y ago

Chomsky's personality reminds me Dijkstra - so full of themselves that they don't entertain anyone challenging their ideas. Take a look at how Chomsky writes emails, see his correspondance with Sam Harris https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse - the arrogance in his reply to a genuine offer of conversation is staggering.

ep103 10y ago
I think that is extremely unfair. When I was in my early twenties, and trying to make a difference via NGOs and the like, one of the things that was always taken as a truism, was if you ever had a question, you could email Noam, and he'd get back to you. The man is famed for responding to almost everyone who writes to him, which considering his fame, is quite substantial, and for working tirelessly. As such, I think we could be forgiving for writing terse email responses, particularly to those who he believes misrepresent his views
- k2xl 10y ago
  Just because he responds doesn't justify how he responds. There is a way to respond in ways that engage and there are ways to respond in ways that are dismissive.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    In their exchange, Sam Harris is tendentious and offensively impolite, and seems to lack basic reading comprehension skill. Chomsky shows him far more patience and courtesy than he deserves.
coliveira 10y ago
Sam Harris is one of a few atheist activists who started to use denounces against religion in general as a tool against other racial groups, just in line with American foreign policy. From what I see Bill Maher is following on the same steps. It seems clear to me that Chomsky doesn't want to have anything to do with that.
- k2xl 10y ago
  How has he denounced religion as a tool against other racial groups?
  - dang 10y ago
    This is off-topic and bound to lead to a flamewar. Please stop taking the thread that way.
    - kmonsen 10y ago
      This is fair, but should it not be addressed at the parent instead?
      - dang 10y ago
        I replied to the user who introduced the flamewar topic (at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12367869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12367869), but meant the point to apply to the entire subthread.
  - Synaesthesia 10y ago
    He has said that a nuclear strike on an Islamic country aught to be seriously considered.
    - nikcheerla 10y ago
      Source (with context)?
      - Synaesthesia 10y ago
        >What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_End_of_Faith https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_End_of_Faith https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7T7barZEeU&app=desktop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7T7barZEeU&app=desktop
99123120931 10y ago
Chomsky's style is quite normal and refreshing. The Internet faux-polite censorship has eradicated that style mostly, so public conversation has largely become unproductive and boring.
thieving_magpie 10y ago
Do you think it's fair to use this one interaction with someone he finds personally annoying to wholly declare that he can't "entertain anyone challenging his ideas"? I don't and I'm a little tired of seeing this argument trotted out anytime Chomsky is mentioned. It's one email chain, not 60 years of activism and linguistics.
throwaway729 10y ago
I don't really understand at all what that email exchange is supposed to indicate. Chomsky starts the entire chain and every subsequent email with some equivalent of "we don't have enough common ground on these subjects to have a reasonable conversation, so let's not have a stupid back-and-forth in which we do nothing but loudly contradict each other's basically axiomatic interpretations". And then there's a lot of back-and-forth that's frustrating to everyone involved (and particularly to the third party reading the exchange). It's frustrating because Sam and Noam are talking past one another, and clearly don't have enough common understanding to take part in a productive discourse, and one party is trying the entire time to just get out of the damned stupid back-and-forth of nothing but mutual contradiction. To me this reads like a very common occurrence at parties I attended in college: two people who disagree, with one person trying to avoid a public argument that's bound to be fruitless and irritating to all involved, and the other one insisting on having the argument anyways. I never had much sympathy for the Sam character when the Noam character finally snapped and told them to change the topic or fuck off. > so full of themselves that they don't entertain anyone challenging their ideas. There's a HUGE difference between realizing a particular conversation is pointless and refusing to have any conversations with dissenters. The latter is arrogance, but the former is an important social skill. > to a genuine offer of conversation... 1. Noam's primary complaint is that he doesn't believe this is a genuine offer of conversation, and that even if it were, he doesn't think the conversation would be remotely productive. 2. Noam has far more patience in this thread than I or most people would've displayed. I probably wouldn't have replied beyond the second email with anything other than "We obviously disagree on some pretty basic facts. Any further conversation on this matter would therefore be fruitless to both of us. Have a great day!"
- k2xl 10y ago
  Realizing a particular conversation as pointless is dismissive if you aren't open to attempting to understand other perspectives. A religious person telling a scientist that a debate about religion with him would be "pointless" is indeed dismissive. It may end up being pointless to the people making the arguments but not necessarily for the listeners.
  - 10y ago
munificent 10y ago
There's something magical about that correspondence in that it seems to be a Rorschach test for the reader's own perspective. Everyone I've seen talk about it comes away feeling one of the participants was obviously totally wrong and awful. It's just that readers tend to not agree on whether it was Chomsky or Harris who is the bad guy.
andrewingram 10y ago
When I read this conversation a couple of months ago, I found it frustrating. I'd recently endured the 3.5 hour trainwreck of a conversation Sam attempted to have Omar Aziz. Concluded that nobody could reasonably take Omar's side in it, and was sadly not surprised to see the crowds of people on Twitter concluding that Omar had "won" the conversation. I sought out the Chomsky conversation because I even though i'd heard it was disappointed from Sam's perspective, I was expecting it to be more nuanced. Neither came off particularly well, but I was especially frustrated by Chomsky. The source of my frustration was that I was constantly felt he would have been able to make a point that would give Sam pause for thought, to take the conversation down an interested road. But he wasn't willing to even briefly humour Sam's need to explore contrived thought experiments. If they'd just been able to get that out of the way, they could have gotten somewhere. I actually like Sam's thought experiments because they're a device to establish a dispassionate common ground on which to build the more nuanced (and challenging) conversations, but they seem to fall flat with the people who I'm most interested in him going head-to-head with.
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  The thought experiments were pretty unnecessary and illogical - their premise was flawed, namely that US intentions are noble, something Chomsky has spent a lifetime refuting.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    I see that as Harris trying to get Chomsky to acknowledge that intentions can matter in moral judgment, using an extreme hypothetical example to force his hand. Of course, this is unnecessary because it's arguing against a straw-man of Chomsky's position.
- bkjabsd 10y ago
  Sam started off (even before the email exchange - and during it) misrepresenting Chomsky's ideas, even stating blunt untruths about Chomsky's words from a book he admitted to not even reading. How can anyone take such a slanderous clown seriously after that? If he wanted to have a serious discussion with a person he falsely slandered, he should have started with a sincere apology and then a very careful exposition of his worthless thought experiments and their purpose.
RodericDay 10y ago
Chomsky had a very famous debate with Foucault where they discussed "Human Nature". It is quite enjoyable to watch. The problem isn't with Chomsky, it's with Sam Harris.
steauengeglase 10y ago
I put Chomsky on the same shelf that I put Richard Stallman on. They've both spent years building huge and sometimes impenetrable rhetorical castles. Yet there is a cost of staking out all of your moral high ground and putting out impaling spikes of a specially compiled lexicography of precise, barbed, and hand crafted definitions. Eventually you are left alone in that high castle and abandoned by future generations. Sadly for Stallman it happened mostly in his own life and Chomsky will have at least a good decade after he passes.
- the_af 10y ago
  That's pretty dismissive of both men. Neither of them have been "left alone in their high castles". Both have a large following, are well respected (and controversial), and people have built upon their philosophies or used them to better understand the world.
  - steauengeglase 10y ago
    People have built upon, but (at least in Stallman's case) also built around. You can go back as far as the late 2000's and the GPL still had a huge following. With the mobile boom F/OSS was still embraced, but the GPL has steadily fallen to the wayside. You can only be so uncompromising when people need a means to eat. Now we have an entire generation of CS grads who'll use MIT as their de facto license.

by k2xl 10y ago

ep103 10y ago

I think that is extremely unfair. When I was in my early twenties, and trying to make a difference via NGOs and the like, one of the things that was always taken as a truism, was if you ever had a question, you could email Noam, and he'd get back to you. The man is famed for responding to almost everyone who writes to him, which considering his fame, is quite substantial, and for working tirelessly. As such, I think we could be forgiving for writing terse email responses, particularly to those who he believes misrepresent his views

k2xl 10y ago
Just because he responds doesn't justify how he responds. There is a way to respond in ways that engage and there are ways to respond in ways that are dismissive.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jacobolus 10y ago
  In their exchange, Sam Harris is tendentious and offensively impolite, and seems to lack basic reading comprehension skill. Chomsky shows him far more patience and courtesy than he deserves.

coliveira 10y ago

Sam Harris is one of a few atheist activists who started to use denounces against religion in general as a tool against other racial groups, just in line with American foreign policy. From what I see Bill Maher is following on the same steps. It seems clear to me that Chomsky doesn't want to have anything to do with that.

k2xl 10y ago
How has he denounced religion as a tool against other racial groups?
- dang 10y ago
  This is off-topic and bound to lead to a flamewar. Please stop taking the thread that way.
  - kmonsen 10y ago
    This is fair, but should it not be addressed at the parent instead?
    - dang 10y ago
      I replied to the user who introduced the flamewar topic (at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12367869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12367869), but meant the point to apply to the entire subthread.
- Synaesthesia 10y ago
  He has said that a nuclear strike on an Islamic country aught to be seriously considered.
  - nikcheerla 10y ago
    Source (with context)?
    - Synaesthesia 10y ago
      >What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_End_of_Faith https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_End_of_Faith https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7T7barZEeU&app=desktop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7T7barZEeU&app=desktop

99123120931 10y ago

Chomsky's style is quite normal and refreshing. The Internet faux-polite censorship has eradicated that style mostly, so public conversation has largely become unproductive and boring.

thieving_magpie 10y ago

Do you think it's fair to use this one interaction with someone he finds personally annoying to wholly declare that he can't "entertain anyone challenging his ideas"? I don't and I'm a little tired of seeing this argument trotted out anytime Chomsky is mentioned. It's one email chain, not 60 years of activism and linguistics.

throwaway729 10y ago

I don't really understand at all what that email exchange is supposed to indicate. Chomsky starts the entire chain and every subsequent email with some equivalent of "we don't have enough common ground on these subjects to have a reasonable conversation, so let's not have a stupid back-and-forth in which we do nothing but loudly contradict each other's basically axiomatic interpretations". And then there's a lot of back-and-forth that's frustrating to everyone involved (and particularly to the third party reading the exchange). It's frustrating because Sam and Noam are talking past one another, and clearly don't have enough common understanding to take part in a productive discourse, and one party is trying the entire time to just get out of the damned stupid back-and-forth of nothing but mutual contradiction. To me this reads like a very common occurrence at parties I attended in college: two people who disagree, with one person trying to avoid a public argument that's bound to be fruitless and irritating to all involved, and the other one insisting on having the argument anyways. I never had much sympathy for the Sam character when the Noam character finally snapped and told them to change the topic or fuck off. > so full of themselves that they don't entertain anyone challenging their ideas. There's a HUGE difference between realizing a particular conversation is pointless and refusing to have any conversations with dissenters. The latter is arrogance, but the former is an important social skill. > to a genuine offer of conversation... 1. Noam's primary complaint is that he doesn't believe this is a genuine offer of conversation, and that even if it were, he doesn't think the conversation would be remotely productive. 2. Noam has far more patience in this thread than I or most people would've displayed. I probably wouldn't have replied beyond the second email with anything other than "We obviously disagree on some pretty basic facts. Any further conversation on this matter would therefore be fruitless to both of us. Have a great day!"

k2xl 10y ago
Realizing a particular conversation as pointless is dismissive if you aren't open to attempting to understand other perspectives. A religious person telling a scientist that a debate about religion with him would be "pointless" is indeed dismissive. It may end up being pointless to the people making the arguments but not necessarily for the listeners.
- 10y ago

munificent 10y ago

There's something magical about that correspondence in that it seems to be a Rorschach test for the reader's own perspective. Everyone I've seen talk about it comes away feeling one of the participants was obviously totally wrong and awful. It's just that readers tend to not agree on whether it was Chomsky or Harris who is the bad guy.

andrewingram 10y ago

When I read this conversation a couple of months ago, I found it frustrating. I'd recently endured the 3.5 hour trainwreck of a conversation Sam attempted to have Omar Aziz. Concluded that nobody could reasonably take Omar's side in it, and was sadly not surprised to see the crowds of people on Twitter concluding that Omar had "won" the conversation. I sought out the Chomsky conversation because I even though i'd heard it was disappointed from Sam's perspective, I was expecting it to be more nuanced. Neither came off particularly well, but I was especially frustrated by Chomsky. The source of my frustration was that I was constantly felt he would have been able to make a point that would give Sam pause for thought, to take the conversation down an interested road. But he wasn't willing to even briefly humour Sam's need to explore contrived thought experiments. If they'd just been able to get that out of the way, they could have gotten somewhere. I actually like Sam's thought experiments because they're a device to establish a dispassionate common ground on which to build the more nuanced (and challenging) conversations, but they seem to fall flat with the people who I'm most interested in him going head-to-head with.

Synaesthesia 10y ago
The thought experiments were pretty unnecessary and illogical - their premise was flawed, namely that US intentions are noble, something Chomsky has spent a lifetime refuting.
- icebraining 10y ago
  I see that as Harris trying to get Chomsky to acknowledge that intentions can matter in moral judgment, using an extreme hypothetical example to force his hand. Of course, this is unnecessary because it's arguing against a straw-man of Chomsky's position.
bkjabsd 10y ago
Sam started off (even before the email exchange - and during it) misrepresenting Chomsky's ideas, even stating blunt untruths about Chomsky's words from a book he admitted to not even reading. How can anyone take such a slanderous clown seriously after that? If he wanted to have a serious discussion with a person he falsely slandered, he should have started with a sincere apology and then a very careful exposition of his worthless thought experiments and their purpose.

RodericDay 10y ago

Chomsky had a very famous debate with Foucault where they discussed "Human Nature". It is quite enjoyable to watch. The problem isn't with Chomsky, it's with Sam Harris.

steauengeglase 10y ago

I put Chomsky on the same shelf that I put Richard Stallman on. They've both spent years building huge and sometimes impenetrable rhetorical castles. Yet there is a cost of staking out all of your moral high ground and putting out impaling spikes of a specially compiled lexicography of precise, barbed, and hand crafted definitions. Eventually you are left alone in that high castle and abandoned by future generations. Sadly for Stallman it happened mostly in his own life and Chomsky will have at least a good decade after he passes.

the_af 10y ago
That's pretty dismissive of both men. Neither of them have been "left alone in their high castles". Both have a large following, are well respected (and controversial), and people have built upon their philosophies or used them to better understand the world.
- steauengeglase 10y ago
  People have built upon, but (at least in Stallman's case) also built around. You can go back as far as the late 2000's and the GPL still had a huge following. With the mobile boom F/OSS was still embraced, but the GPL has steadily fallen to the wayside. You can only be so uncompromising when people need a means to eat. Now we have an entire generation of CS grads who'll use MIT as their de facto license.