4 ms·

"Not really, only the basis of the entire business."

jules 9y ago
It's a good contribution but don't exaggerate it. Just because you defined something doesn't mean it's impressive. Peano rigorously defined natural numbers but Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem is a tad more impressive. The parsing contribution of figures like Knuth is orders of magnitude more impressive. I see that above you state "Noam is on the short list of the most intellectually impactful human beings of the period since Descartes". This is just not the case. The religion built around Chomsky is a bit crazy. Chomsky contributed to linguistics and it was an interesting theory but it turned out he was mostly wrong, but fortunately his work is applicable to parsing computer languages. That's it. He certainly doesn't belong on a list that Einstein "maybe" belongs to.
- jeffmcmahan 8y ago
  "Chomsky contributed to linguistics and it was an interesting theory but it turned out he was mostly wrong..." You've made a very strong claim about linguistic theory while knowing very little about it. The vast majority of those working on phonology do so within the mold set by Chomsky & Morris Halle in 1970, and there are roughly zero syntacticians doing serious work on natural language syntax outside the Chomskyan tradition (whether in GB or Minimalism). "The religion built around Chomsky is a bit crazy." You're hardly in a position to judge, with no more than a passing acquaintance with psych 101 summaries of his work. "Just because you defined something doesn't mean it's impressive." The Chomsky hierarchy was not "defined" in the deflationary sense that you're pushing. Chomsky discovered that generative mechanisms partake of a special set of related properties relating the range of their output to specific constraints on the formalisms that can exactly describe their grammars. It so happens that this discovery made possible much that happened in CS during the 60s and into the 70s. I'll leave aside your bizarre comments as to the unimpressiveness of Peano arithmetic.

It's a good contribution but don't exaggerate it. Just because you defined something doesn't mean it's impressive. Peano rigorously defined natural numbers but Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem is a tad more impressive. The parsing contribution of figures like Knuth is orders of magnitude more impressive. I see that above you state "Noam is on the short list of the most intellectually impactful human beings of the period since Descartes". This is just not the case. The religion built around Chomsky is a bit crazy. Chomsky contributed to linguistics and it was an interesting theory but it turned out he was mostly wrong, but fortunately his work is applicable to parsing computer languages. That's it. He certainly doesn't belong on a list that Einstein "maybe" belongs to.

jeffmcmahan 8y ago
"Chomsky contributed to linguistics and it was an interesting theory but it turned out he was mostly wrong..." You've made a very strong claim about linguistic theory while knowing very little about it. The vast majority of those working on phonology do so within the mold set by Chomsky & Morris Halle in 1970, and there are roughly zero syntacticians doing serious work on natural language syntax outside the Chomskyan tradition (whether in GB or Minimalism). "The religion built around Chomsky is a bit crazy." You're hardly in a position to judge, with no more than a passing acquaintance with psych 101 summaries of his work. "Just because you defined something doesn't mean it's impressive." The Chomsky hierarchy was not "defined" in the deflationary sense that you're pushing. Chomsky discovered that generative mechanisms partake of a special set of related properties relating the range of their output to specific constraints on the formalisms that can exactly describe their grammars. It so happens that this discovery made possible much that happened in CS during the 60s and into the 70s. I'll leave aside your bizarre comments as to the unimpressiveness of Peano arithmetic.