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Yeah, and the brain is nothing more than a bunch of atoms. Nobody is aware that you can make every single thing sound unimpressive by brutally reducing it to it

Yeah, and the brain is nothing more than a bunch of atoms. Nobody is aware that you can make every single thing sound unimpressive by brutally reducing it to its components, and nobody has used that trick before! Way to go, Chomsky. Insightful as a twelve year old.

psykotic 16y ago
> Way to go, Chomsky. Insightful as a twelve year old. What an immature response. You're the one acting like a twelve year-old here. Unless you've read a good portion of his writings on language and cognition published through the last half century, you might not want to dismiss his life's work based on an off-the-cuff response to a random email prodding him for sound bites. There are solid reasons to believe that purely empiricist approaches to learning have fundamental limitations that seem incompatible with what we know about human cognition. Those reasons (e.g. the poverty of the stimulus argument) may be less convincing now than they were in the 60s but they are still not easily dismissable. Keep in mind that Chomsky's goal is not to build useful software but to uncover the roots and mechanisms of human language and cognition.
- icandoitbetter 16y ago
  Sorry, I'm not going respect silly one-line remark because he's a celebrity in the field. This is exactly what he seems to be counting on, his 'authority': he can say whatever stubbornly contrarian thing he wants and be considered seriously because he's so established. If he didn't have time for an actual response, he should have not responded in the first place. He did, and he will be criticized for it.
  - psykotic 16y ago
    Just before you replied I added an extra paragraph with some background that explains where he's coming from. If the standard critique of empiricism I mention there is not familiar to you, you might want to study more before passing judgement.

psykotic 16y ago

> Way to go, Chomsky. Insightful as a twelve year old. What an immature response. You're the one acting like a twelve year-old here. Unless you've read a good portion of his writings on language and cognition published through the last half century, you might not want to dismiss his life's work based on an off-the-cuff response to a random email prodding him for sound bites. There are solid reasons to believe that purely empiricist approaches to learning have fundamental limitations that seem incompatible with what we know about human cognition. Those reasons (e.g. the poverty of the stimulus argument) may be less convincing now than they were in the 60s but they are still not easily dismissable. Keep in mind that Chomsky's goal is not to build useful software but to uncover the roots and mechanisms of human language and cognition.

icandoitbetter 16y ago
Sorry, I'm not going respect silly one-line remark because he's a celebrity in the field. This is exactly what he seems to be counting on, his 'authority': he can say whatever stubbornly contrarian thing he wants and be considered seriously because he's so established. If he didn't have time for an actual response, he should have not responded in the first place. He did, and he will be criticized for it.
- psykotic 16y ago
  Just before you replied I added an extra paragraph with some background that explains where he's coming from. If the standard critique of empiricism I mention there is not familiar to you, you might want to study more before passing judgement.