8 ms·

Noam Chomsky and the Bicycle Theory

43 points by betolink 10y ago

ronnier 10y ago
>How do you account for your amazing stamina and energy level at age 87? >The bicycle theory. As long as you keep riding, you don’t fall.
- wolfram74 10y ago
  Talk about burying the headline.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gajomi 10y ago
>Chris Knight explores “the Chomsky problem” — the paradox of a thinker who belongs to the “professional and scientific elite” even as he espouses populist political ideas. Ok, this work is not the substance of the interview, but what is the paradox? Should I believe that it is strange that scientists studying fluid dynamics use conventional toilets and sinks outside of the lab?
- farright 10y ago
  The problem is Chomsky claims that the "professional and scientific elite" are compromised by their role in society, and end up taking up self-serving political views that seek to preserve this role. So the natural question is what make Chomsky different.
  - wamsachel 10y ago
    He's not different, and he openly acknowledges that a lot of his linguistic research was funded by the Pentagon. Edit: He also thought that his activism would get him fired, and so his wife started going back to school.
    - pravda 10y ago
      >Edit: He also thought that his activism would get him fired, and so his wife started going back to school. No, not get him fired. Get him imprisoned! His wife went back to school so she would be able to support the family, if he ended up in stir.
  - ianai 10y ago
    I always find this criticism silly. It's a form of normalization. "Elites must have elitist opinions or they and their opinions are not elite." No, there's usually more than one way to arrive at the same position. Not all paths will be equally complicated or well founded.
- mc32 10y ago
  I think one of the preeminent examples was his initial and sustained support for Pol Pot [ignoring evidence of wrongdoing [1]] while there existed much evidence for not supporting them [the KR] because it clashed with his sympathies for the Communist movement in SEAsia at the time. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chomsky_and_Herman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...
  - becs 10y ago
    He never supported Pol Pot. I do not understand why everybody keeps saying that and keeps relying solely on those who have no evidence to support that position. Let's go the source: I have the book Manufacturing Consent in front of me. I have used it on a few occasions for two research projects and am pretty familiar with its contents. I have emailed him directly regarding this book, too. So, with the book in front of me, I will quote the one statement that has everybody's dicks hard for hating Chomsky: "The victims of Pol Pot, a Communist leader, were worthy, although after he was ousted by the Vietnamese in 1978, Cambodians ceased to be worthy, as U.S. policy shifted toward support of Pol Pot in exile. The East Timorese remained unworthy in the 1990's, as the table suggests." So, without reading the book, you would think he's talking about worthy and unworthy the way that we normally mean it. However, he munificently describes the difference: "Our prediction is that the victims of enemy states will be found 'worthy' and will be subject to more intense and indignant coverage that those victimized by the United States or its clients, who are implicitly 'unworthy'." But, it's a lot easier for all of you with single digit IQ's to look up secondary-source material like Wikipedia which is essentially a mashup of opinions and has never been considered a reliable academic medium. No book or publication can ever be sourced by Wikipedia yet you all do this all day long. Manufacturing Consent is not an easy read, but if you would actually read the entire thing you would understand that he never even closely supported Pol Pot.
  - abalone 10y ago
    This is a total mischaracterization and unsupported by the citation. Chomsky and Herman examined mass media coverage of U.S. enemies vs friends, finding that similar atrocities by enemies would be trumpeted and exaggerated beyond their already atrocious reality (e.g. Cambodia), while those by friends would be ignored or downplayed (e.g. East Timor). To call this "support" or "sympathy" for enemies is a commissar mentality.
farright 10y ago
Chomsky has interesting ideas whether you fully agree or not. On language, human language has intricate rules that we can't fully explain in terms of the underlying neurobiology. But Chomsky's assertion that this implies some sort of underlying mechanism in the brain strikes me as excessively reductionist. Maybe neural networks are inherently capable of learning arbitrary rules, and the kinds of rules that comprise natural languages are constrained not by the brain, but by something else, e.g. maybe only some kinds of grammatical rules are stable over time as languages are subject to random drift. On politics, Chomsky gives a very thorough critique of US foreign policy, but it is excessively materialist, i.e. it assumes the main driving force in politics is money and power, not ideology. Often this seems far fetched, e.g. US politicians are clearly very eager to please the Jewish lobby (e.g. AIPAC) but according to Chomsky it's the Jewish lobby that has been co-opted by the US in order to use Israel as a tool for US foreign policy. And yet in all the private discussions of all US presidents, all we hear is them being pushed to the right by the Jewish lobby. We never hear them saying "the Middle East is too stable, Jews and Arabs are starting to form solidarity and oppose US imperialism. Quick, pressure Israel to take a harder line".
- jessaustin 10y ago
  That's a great example for ideology > material interest, but in both the Middle East and the world as a whole it's an exception to the general rule. It's amusing that Chomsky resorts to epicycles rather than simply making an exception...
- throawaybay 10y ago
  It's all about oil, land and water. Ideology is about your country being the best. Everything else is irrelevant.
  - berntb 10y ago
    That seems naive in an anti-naive way? :-) When I look at the foreign policy of my country (Sweden), it seems a large part of it is decided as part of internal political posturing. Tail wagging the dog, etc. I'm not as knowledgeable about the US politics, but it seems to not be as bad -- but still a large influence.
HiroshiSan 10y ago
Is there any way to read the article without logging in?
- paloaltokid 10y ago
  For NYT, just open the article in an incognito tab. They're nice about it. I ended up subscribing because I read so many of their articles and I like their coverage.
analog31 10y ago
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” ― Albert Einstein http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/28/bicycle/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/28/bicycle/
mmel 10y ago
I find linguistics one of those topics that I have questions about but don't know enough to use the correct terms to find an answer. - Is there an objective metric for 'efficiency of communication of an idea'? If so, what is it? - Are some languages more efficient at communicating ideas than others? - What is the most efficient language? - Are there any attempts to create a new language using all the best features of historical languages? like how programming languages take the good features from one another?
- noobiemcfoob 10y ago
  As far as efficiency in communication, there is a metric, though I can't recall the name. There's a general idea that less information dense languages lead the speakers to talk faster (e.g. Spanish vs. English) implying that humans have a type of ideal information density regardless of how that information is packaged. /Not a linguist. Took a class once...
  - newjersey 10y ago
    Apparently, they're is a time article about it http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,0... They talk about information density: With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together to arrive at two critical values for each language: the average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information-dense) given an arbitrary value of 1. For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and thus the slower the speech. English, with a high information density of .91, was spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, ripped along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edged past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information. Further googling got me this PDF http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegrino_to%2520appear_language.pdf http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegri...
icpmacdo 10y ago
I have listened to hundreds of hours of Noam Chomsky lectures and talks on Youtube. Even if you don't agree with his politics seeing what his perspective is on issues is always interesting. Its funny to see this as Noam often remarks that there is an active ban on him being mentioned in the New York Times newspaper.
- berntb 10y ago
  NY Times didn't really go much into the political stuff, which they really don't write about. Do you have any recommendations after those hundreds of hours of Chomsky? I have problems reading/listening. To me, Chomsky's politics seems to not be written as an honest academic -- but just to change people's opinion. For instance, there are gigantic double standards in how different sides are evaluated by Chomsky. In an interview I found (no link saved, sorry) Chomsky was asked about criticizing Israel thousands of times more than the hateful antisemitic groups around Israel, which routinely use civilians for targets (while Israel follows the laws of war, more or less). Chomsky answered. The reason (at least then) was that Israel ignored an Egyptian peace initiative in the early 70s, so they deserved what they got... Uh... WTF?! Neither I nor Chomsky have a clue if that was a real initiative or just a trap ("give us X and we will sign a peace paper and follow it.") Even assuming the initiative was real and that it was realized on the Israeli side, but the Israeli politicians at the time were militaristic expansionists (maybe as bad as their neighbours) -- it is just not serious to hence you judge the future governments for decades because of that! After seeing that, I stopped reading/listening to Chomsky again. Edit: Two minus votes in 5 minutes for asking about references and explaining why Chomsky's political writing seemed weird? :-)
  - abalone 10y ago
    There are multiple reasons why your comment would be downvoted, chiefly that it is off topic and fails to cite a source. Citing a source for your claims would better allow the reader to evaluate whether you are accurately characterizing your subject. Being somewhat familiar with Chomsky's extensive body of work I know of exactly zero cases of him claiming that Israel "deserved" civilian casualties, while Israel's frequent violation of the "laws of war", e.g. use of white phosphorous and extensive targeting of civilian areas, is a frequent topic. This is before we even address your rather disturbing implication about what it means to be an "honest academic".
quantumfoam 10y ago
Time for another Noam Chomsky AMA?

43 points by betolink 10y ago

>How do you account for your amazing stamina and energy level at age 87? >The bicycle theory. As long as you keep riding, you don’t fall.

wolfram74 10y ago
Talk about burying the headline.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

gajomi 10y ago

>Chris Knight explores “the Chomsky problem” — the paradox of a thinker who belongs to the “professional and scientific elite” even as he espouses populist political ideas. Ok, this work is not the substance of the interview, but what is the paradox? Should I believe that it is strange that scientists studying fluid dynamics use conventional toilets and sinks outside of the lab?

farright 10y ago
The problem is Chomsky claims that the "professional and scientific elite" are compromised by their role in society, and end up taking up self-serving political views that seek to preserve this role. So the natural question is what make Chomsky different.
- wamsachel 10y ago
  He's not different, and he openly acknowledges that a lot of his linguistic research was funded by the Pentagon. Edit: He also thought that his activism would get him fired, and so his wife started going back to school.
  - pravda 10y ago
    >Edit: He also thought that his activism would get him fired, and so his wife started going back to school. No, not get him fired. Get him imprisoned! His wife went back to school so she would be able to support the family, if he ended up in stir.
- ianai 10y ago
  I always find this criticism silly. It's a form of normalization. "Elites must have elitist opinions or they and their opinions are not elite." No, there's usually more than one way to arrive at the same position. Not all paths will be equally complicated or well founded.
mc32 10y ago
I think one of the preeminent examples was his initial and sustained support for Pol Pot [ignoring evidence of wrongdoing [1]] while there existed much evidence for not supporting them [the KR] because it clashed with his sympathies for the Communist movement in SEAsia at the time. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chomsky_and_Herman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...
- becs 10y ago
  He never supported Pol Pot. I do not understand why everybody keeps saying that and keeps relying solely on those who have no evidence to support that position. Let's go the source: I have the book Manufacturing Consent in front of me. I have used it on a few occasions for two research projects and am pretty familiar with its contents. I have emailed him directly regarding this book, too. So, with the book in front of me, I will quote the one statement that has everybody's dicks hard for hating Chomsky: "The victims of Pol Pot, a Communist leader, were worthy, although after he was ousted by the Vietnamese in 1978, Cambodians ceased to be worthy, as U.S. policy shifted toward support of Pol Pot in exile. The East Timorese remained unworthy in the 1990's, as the table suggests." So, without reading the book, you would think he's talking about worthy and unworthy the way that we normally mean it. However, he munificently describes the difference: "Our prediction is that the victims of enemy states will be found 'worthy' and will be subject to more intense and indignant coverage that those victimized by the United States or its clients, who are implicitly 'unworthy'." But, it's a lot easier for all of you with single digit IQ's to look up secondary-source material like Wikipedia which is essentially a mashup of opinions and has never been considered a reliable academic medium. No book or publication can ever be sourced by Wikipedia yet you all do this all day long. Manufacturing Consent is not an easy read, but if you would actually read the entire thing you would understand that he never even closely supported Pol Pot.
- abalone 10y ago
  This is a total mischaracterization and unsupported by the citation. Chomsky and Herman examined mass media coverage of U.S. enemies vs friends, finding that similar atrocities by enemies would be trumpeted and exaggerated beyond their already atrocious reality (e.g. Cambodia), while those by friends would be ignored or downplayed (e.g. East Timor). To call this "support" or "sympathy" for enemies is a commissar mentality.

farright 10y ago

Chomsky has interesting ideas whether you fully agree or not. On language, human language has intricate rules that we can't fully explain in terms of the underlying neurobiology. But Chomsky's assertion that this implies some sort of underlying mechanism in the brain strikes me as excessively reductionist. Maybe neural networks are inherently capable of learning arbitrary rules, and the kinds of rules that comprise natural languages are constrained not by the brain, but by something else, e.g. maybe only some kinds of grammatical rules are stable over time as languages are subject to random drift. On politics, Chomsky gives a very thorough critique of US foreign policy, but it is excessively materialist, i.e. it assumes the main driving force in politics is money and power, not ideology. Often this seems far fetched, e.g. US politicians are clearly very eager to please the Jewish lobby (e.g. AIPAC) but according to Chomsky it's the Jewish lobby that has been co-opted by the US in order to use Israel as a tool for US foreign policy. And yet in all the private discussions of all US presidents, all we hear is them being pushed to the right by the Jewish lobby. We never hear them saying "the Middle East is too stable, Jews and Arabs are starting to form solidarity and oppose US imperialism. Quick, pressure Israel to take a harder line".

jessaustin 10y ago
That's a great example for ideology > material interest, but in both the Middle East and the world as a whole it's an exception to the general rule. It's amusing that Chomsky resorts to epicycles rather than simply making an exception...
throawaybay 10y ago
It's all about oil, land and water. Ideology is about your country being the best. Everything else is irrelevant.
- berntb 10y ago
  That seems naive in an anti-naive way? :-) When I look at the foreign policy of my country (Sweden), it seems a large part of it is decided as part of internal political posturing. Tail wagging the dog, etc. I'm not as knowledgeable about the US politics, but it seems to not be as bad -- but still a large influence.

HiroshiSan 10y ago

Is there any way to read the article without logging in?

paloaltokid 10y ago
For NYT, just open the article in an incognito tab. They're nice about it. I ended up subscribing because I read so many of their articles and I like their coverage.

analog31 10y ago

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” ― Albert Einstein http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/28/bicycle/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/28/bicycle/

mmel 10y ago

I find linguistics one of those topics that I have questions about but don't know enough to use the correct terms to find an answer. - Is there an objective metric for 'efficiency of communication of an idea'? If so, what is it? - Are some languages more efficient at communicating ideas than others? - What is the most efficient language? - Are there any attempts to create a new language using all the best features of historical languages? like how programming languages take the good features from one another?

noobiemcfoob 10y ago
As far as efficiency in communication, there is a metric, though I can't recall the name. There's a general idea that less information dense languages lead the speakers to talk faster (e.g. Spanish vs. English) implying that humans have a type of ideal information density regardless of how that information is packaged. /Not a linguist. Took a class once...
- newjersey 10y ago
  Apparently, they're is a time article about it http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,0... They talk about information density: With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together to arrive at two critical values for each language: the average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information-dense) given an arbitrary value of 1. For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and thus the slower the speech. English, with a high information density of .91, was spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, ripped along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edged past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information. Further googling got me this PDF http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegrino_to%2520appear_language.pdf http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegri...

icpmacdo 10y ago

I have listened to hundreds of hours of Noam Chomsky lectures and talks on Youtube. Even if you don't agree with his politics seeing what his perspective is on issues is always interesting. Its funny to see this as Noam often remarks that there is an active ban on him being mentioned in the New York Times newspaper.

berntb 10y ago
NY Times didn't really go much into the political stuff, which they really don't write about. Do you have any recommendations after those hundreds of hours of Chomsky? I have problems reading/listening. To me, Chomsky's politics seems to not be written as an honest academic -- but just to change people's opinion. For instance, there are gigantic double standards in how different sides are evaluated by Chomsky. In an interview I found (no link saved, sorry) Chomsky was asked about criticizing Israel thousands of times more than the hateful antisemitic groups around Israel, which routinely use civilians for targets (while Israel follows the laws of war, more or less). Chomsky answered. The reason (at least then) was that Israel ignored an Egyptian peace initiative in the early 70s, so they deserved what they got... Uh... WTF?! Neither I nor Chomsky have a clue if that was a real initiative or just a trap ("give us X and we will sign a peace paper and follow it.") Even assuming the initiative was real and that it was realized on the Israeli side, but the Israeli politicians at the time were militaristic expansionists (maybe as bad as their neighbours) -- it is just not serious to hence you judge the future governments for decades because of that! After seeing that, I stopped reading/listening to Chomsky again. Edit: Two minus votes in 5 minutes for asking about references and explaining why Chomsky's political writing seemed weird? :-)
- abalone 10y ago
  There are multiple reasons why your comment would be downvoted, chiefly that it is off topic and fails to cite a source. Citing a source for your claims would better allow the reader to evaluate whether you are accurately characterizing your subject. Being somewhat familiar with Chomsky's extensive body of work I know of exactly zero cases of him claiming that Israel "deserved" civilian casualties, while Israel's frequent violation of the "laws of war", e.g. use of white phosphorous and extensive targeting of civilian areas, is a frequent topic. This is before we even address your rather disturbing implication about what it means to be an "honest academic".

quantumfoam 10y ago

Time for another Noam Chomsky AMA?