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I don't like Chomsky in his main area of expertise of Linguistics. My post-grad work was in NLP, embedded within a linguistics department, and requiring a heavy

I don't like Chomsky in his main area of expertise of Linguistics. My post-grad work was in NLP, embedded within a linguistics department, and requiring a heavy background in formal linguistics. A fair number of faculty, while appreciative of his contributions to the field, held him in low regard because he & some of his main "acolytes" systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own. Meaning more than a generation or more of advancement has stagnated in the US. Advancement in syntactic theory (his main contribution to linguistics) has tended to come from outside the US. It's possible this has changed somewhat since my formal education, but it was the status quo for quite some time.

Iv 6y ago
"Science progresses one funeral at a time" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
john4532452 6y ago
I find it very hard to believe. Could you please provide any citations.
benjaminjosephw 6y ago
Isn't this more or less how a paradigm shift would look from the perspective of someone who sticks to the old paradigm?
blonde_ocean 6y ago
Hey, can I connect with you 1-1 to discuss your post-grad work? I’ve been playing around with the idea of getting a graduate degree in linguistics, but with a CS-focus. Would love to hear from someone who’s been through it.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
>> A fair number of faculty, while appreciative of his contributions to the field, held him in low regard because he & some of his main "acolytes" systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own. Meaning more than a generation or more of advancement has stagnated in the US. I've heard this about Chomsky before and I don't get it. It sounds like he's criticised for doing what any researcher would do- defend his work and criticise competing approaches. I know that's what I do and what everybody else I know does (and has done to me too). Of course any researcher worth her salt will defend her work and of course they will criticise competing approaches. Robustly so. That is how research works and that is how researchers work. He "systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own"? Yes, that's precisely what you do when you think the other approach is rubbish, you fight to put it out like a fire that threatens to burn down your beloved field. You only ever stop criticising others' work and promoting your own ideas when you are 100% convinced -no doubts at all- that it's your work that's flawed. Otherwise, how does science advance? Nobody has the absolute truth in any scientific question. Our best chance to know the truth is to try to formulate an answer and then have everybody's answers duke it out, like pit fighters in Conan the Barbarian. The alternative is to let your ideas go without putting up a fight - but then you run the risk of letting ideas that are worse than yours prevail. And I'm probably getting all this from Schopenhauer on the art of dialectic, which I read a while ago, but this is how debates go. And science is a debate. And if you're having a debate, it means there is disagreement- that's the point of having a debate; and the point of having research: that we can't agree about what the truth is in the first place. Otherwise, we wouldn't need research. So I think that those complaints are best explained as sour grapes by those who failed to convince of the merit of their ideas, and blame Chomsky for doing his job as a scientist better than them. Of course you're starting at a disadvantage if you're going up against an established authority in your field, no less one of the size of Chomsky, but that's exactly what everyone else spends all their time trying to become, an established authority in their field. And they want that so that they can defend their own ideas more easily. So that, too, is not such a great piece of criticism.
- wrnr 6y ago
  Thanks it is good to know there are still those who think there is a truth to be settled by politicking like real gentleman. Still I love how his favourite question of universal grammar was utterly sidelined when it was shown that problems of parser ambiguity also show up in the vision system, a much older neural structure.
  - foldr 6y ago
    Parser ambiguities have never really been a major focus of Chomsky’s research. He’s certainly never argued for the existence of UG on the basis of parser ambiguities.
- mistermann 6y ago
  What if some of the ideas that Chomsky "put out like a fire" were actually correct, and would have been discovered to be so if more time and (collaborative) effort had gone into them?
  - DSingularity 6y ago
    Are you accusing his sincerity? The correctness of the ideas which failed to gain traction is irrelevant. The burden is on the authors of those works to explain and decent the merit of their ideas. If they failed to convince their peer reviewers then that is on them. Unless you are accusing the peer-reviewers of acting in bad-faith.
    - mistermann 6y ago
      > Are you accusing his sincerity? No, I am pointing out the shortcomings in this statement: >> He "systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own"? > Yes, that's precisely what you do when you think the other approach is rubbish, you fight to put it out like a fire that threatens to burn down your beloved field. You only ever stop criticising others' work and promoting your own ideas when you are 100% convinced -no doubts at all- that it's your work that's flawed. - > The correctness of the ideas which failed to gain traction is irrelevant. Do you perceive yourself to have knowledge of what difference an alternative outcome would have made in the world? > The burden is on the authors of those works to explain and decent the merit of their ideas. If they failed to convince their peer reviewers then that is on them. It is also "on" anyone else who would have been affected by good ideas not being "put out like a fire". Things that do not happen are not stored in your mind, therefore it is quite natural for them to not exert much influence on your thinking. > Unless you are accusing the peer-reviewers of acting in bad-faith. I have no knowledge of their actions and therefore no opinion, I am simply pointing out shortcomings in thinking.
ribit 6y ago
I fully agree with you. I started studying linguistics since I come from a math background and Chomskian promise of mathematical linguistics was something I found very enticing. I quickly became disillusioned. Most of the Chomsky-inspired research boils down to fitting carefully selected data into an artificial formal machine and manipulating the said machine into accepting more and more data, until the machinery ends up being turing complete therefore rendering any result trivial. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of very smart people working in that particular field and they have produced some very interesting results and observations, but IMO the real academic value of these models if very limited. It's all about solving intellectual puzzles in a theoretical void. But does it advance our understanding of human brain, learnability or language change? After being a linguist for over 15 years, I'd say "not really". And yes, as you say, Chomsian followers are a highly guarded, closed camp. There is a strong tradition of giving maximal support to acolyte who wants to work in this area while casting out the "heretics".
- foldr 6y ago
  As another (ex but not disillusioned) linguist, can I ask what’s the alternative? Say I’m puzzled by the acquisition of Antecedent Contained Deletion structures. I know how to tell a broadly Chomskian story about it. What other options are on the table? I hear lots of broad brush criticism of generative linguistics, but in almost all cases it turns out that the proposed alternative approaches are just working on different problems, and aren’t really alternatives at all.
  - ribit 6y ago
    I don't think that you will find my answer satisfactory, but does there have to be an alternative? I think that many syntactic mysteries are mysterious only because syntacticians assume that they work in particular ways. Once you start looking at these problems from the perspective of pragmatics, competing interpretations and conventionalisation, many of these mysteries disappear. The point to make is that interpretation makes use of multiple sources of information, of which syntax is just one. You don't need an elegant, tight fitting, constrained syntactic structure to use language. Which incidentally is why we can understand things even they are not grammatical. I firmly believe that the issue of "grammaticality" simply boils down to convention. Not to mention that many constructed examples used to motivate formal grammar research (be it syntax or semantics) are borderline acceptable themselves to many native speakers.
aborsy 6y ago
Chomsky has more citations to his peer-reviewed work, than your whole former department or maybe university. I don’t agree with him on numerous topics, but that doesn’t mean that I have a credible critic of his work.
- justicezyx 6y ago
  This is not a critic. This is a complaint that that dominance sucked up a lot of mental freedom and dareness to break out established regime. That's not even complaint to most people who are doing professional research, i.e., modern professional research is just like any other industrialized profession, it requires profit. Of course, with that comes conscious or unconscious desire to follow the lead. That inevitably manifests into low esteem to some prominent figure, but when you look closely, that low esteem is nothing but a sentiment towards the lack of resources; you almost never see any well regarded openly criticize people without different views, because intellectual ideas being different is just the inherent situation of any academic research, everyone knows that, otherwise one would not actually want to be in that profession in the first place.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
loceng 6y ago
Eric Weinstein (The Portal podcast on Youtube) has run into a similar problem with physics. He's a mathematician by trade and over the last 37 years has developed a new theory of everything he calls Geometric Unity. He wasn't able to make any headway into the physics community for a long time - and so now instead he's educating people about what he calls DISC and GIN - about the problems with these systems, and building his own audience of people while waiting for peers to get interested in learning/understanding his theory. It's happened in health too, arguably it has in all subjects, whether due to regulatory capture of government policy and/or academic capture influencing what research gets done via funding - the system is broken, well - it works for industrial complexes who generally have ulterior motive than wanting the very best for society. Edit to add: why the hell would anyone downvote this comment?
- typon 6y ago
  Can't speak for everyone else, but I personally think you are misrepresented the Eric Weinstein story. From all that I have read about him, it seems like the academic peer review system did it's job: kept a charlatan with half baked ideas out of reputable journals. Sometimes when no one takes you seriously it doesn't necessarily mean there is a conspiracy against you.
  - loceng 6y ago
    "kept a charlatan with half baked ideas out of reputable journals." LOL. Citations needed. Please point to the peer reviewed criticism that disproved his math. You've clearly never watched him speak to people about mathematics - there hasn't been a person he hasn't been able to dance with when discussing mathematics/physics principles.
    - andrekandre 6y ago
      criticism that disproved his math has weinstein made any testable predictions with his theory/math?
      - 6y ago
cptaj 6y ago
I hold him in low regard because he defended Chavez for years while his dictatorship destroyed my country.
- toiletfuneral 6y ago
  Hang in there buddy, I’m sure the US & oil industry is still working super hard to get a Pinochet in there ASAP
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  Disclaimers: It’s inevitable that his political activism will be a topic here, and I’m sensitive to the harm Chavez did, and I may very well be out of the loop. That said I’m not aware of Chomsky defending Chavez, though I’m certainly aware of him challenging US intervention. And his general stance of non-intervention is often interpreted as support for the would-be intervened regime. Is there a more clear position of support/defense on record? I know that I’ve been disappointed by some of his later in life positions dismissing Palestinian efforts, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s regressed on other topics, I’m just not familiar in this case. And asking sincerely.

Iv 6y ago

"Science progresses one funeral at a time" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

john4532452 6y ago

I find it very hard to believe. Could you please provide any citations.

benjaminjosephw 6y ago

Isn't this more or less how a paradigm shift would look from the perspective of someone who sticks to the old paradigm?

blonde_ocean 6y ago

Hey, can I connect with you 1-1 to discuss your post-grad work? I’ve been playing around with the idea of getting a graduate degree in linguistics, but with a CS-focus. Would love to hear from someone who’s been through it.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

>> A fair number of faculty, while appreciative of his contributions to the field, held him in low regard because he & some of his main "acolytes" systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own. Meaning more than a generation or more of advancement has stagnated in the US. I've heard this about Chomsky before and I don't get it. It sounds like he's criticised for doing what any researcher would do- defend his work and criticise competing approaches. I know that's what I do and what everybody else I know does (and has done to me too). Of course any researcher worth her salt will defend her work and of course they will criticise competing approaches. Robustly so. That is how research works and that is how researchers work. He "systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own"? Yes, that's precisely what you do when you think the other approach is rubbish, you fight to put it out like a fire that threatens to burn down your beloved field. You only ever stop criticising others' work and promoting your own ideas when you are 100% convinced -no doubts at all- that it's your work that's flawed. Otherwise, how does science advance? Nobody has the absolute truth in any scientific question. Our best chance to know the truth is to try to formulate an answer and then have everybody's answers duke it out, like pit fighters in Conan the Barbarian. The alternative is to let your ideas go without putting up a fight - but then you run the risk of letting ideas that are worse than yours prevail. And I'm probably getting all this from Schopenhauer on the art of dialectic, which I read a while ago, but this is how debates go. And science is a debate. And if you're having a debate, it means there is disagreement- that's the point of having a debate; and the point of having research: that we can't agree about what the truth is in the first place. Otherwise, we wouldn't need research. So I think that those complaints are best explained as sour grapes by those who failed to convince of the merit of their ideas, and blame Chomsky for doing his job as a scientist better than them. Of course you're starting at a disadvantage if you're going up against an established authority in your field, no less one of the size of Chomsky, but that's exactly what everyone else spends all their time trying to become, an established authority in their field. And they want that so that they can defend their own ideas more easily. So that, too, is not such a great piece of criticism.

wrnr 6y ago
Thanks it is good to know there are still those who think there is a truth to be settled by politicking like real gentleman. Still I love how his favourite question of universal grammar was utterly sidelined when it was shown that problems of parser ambiguity also show up in the vision system, a much older neural structure.
- foldr 6y ago
  Parser ambiguities have never really been a major focus of Chomsky’s research. He’s certainly never argued for the existence of UG on the basis of parser ambiguities.
mistermann 6y ago
What if some of the ideas that Chomsky "put out like a fire" were actually correct, and would have been discovered to be so if more time and (collaborative) effort had gone into them?
- DSingularity 6y ago
  Are you accusing his sincerity? The correctness of the ideas which failed to gain traction is irrelevant. The burden is on the authors of those works to explain and decent the merit of their ideas. If they failed to convince their peer reviewers then that is on them. Unless you are accusing the peer-reviewers of acting in bad-faith.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    > Are you accusing his sincerity? No, I am pointing out the shortcomings in this statement: >> He "systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own"? > Yes, that's precisely what you do when you think the other approach is rubbish, you fight to put it out like a fire that threatens to burn down your beloved field. You only ever stop criticising others' work and promoting your own ideas when you are 100% convinced -no doubts at all- that it's your work that's flawed. - > The correctness of the ideas which failed to gain traction is irrelevant. Do you perceive yourself to have knowledge of what difference an alternative outcome would have made in the world? > The burden is on the authors of those works to explain and decent the merit of their ideas. If they failed to convince their peer reviewers then that is on them. It is also "on" anyone else who would have been affected by good ideas not being "put out like a fire". Things that do not happen are not stored in your mind, therefore it is quite natural for them to not exert much influence on your thinking. > Unless you are accusing the peer-reviewers of acting in bad-faith. I have no knowledge of their actions and therefore no opinion, I am simply pointing out shortcomings in thinking.

ribit 6y ago

I fully agree with you. I started studying linguistics since I come from a math background and Chomskian promise of mathematical linguistics was something I found very enticing. I quickly became disillusioned. Most of the Chomsky-inspired research boils down to fitting carefully selected data into an artificial formal machine and manipulating the said machine into accepting more and more data, until the machinery ends up being turing complete therefore rendering any result trivial. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of very smart people working in that particular field and they have produced some very interesting results and observations, but IMO the real academic value of these models if very limited. It's all about solving intellectual puzzles in a theoretical void. But does it advance our understanding of human brain, learnability or language change? After being a linguist for over 15 years, I'd say "not really". And yes, as you say, Chomsian followers are a highly guarded, closed camp. There is a strong tradition of giving maximal support to acolyte who wants to work in this area while casting out the "heretics".

foldr 6y ago
As another (ex but not disillusioned) linguist, can I ask what’s the alternative? Say I’m puzzled by the acquisition of Antecedent Contained Deletion structures. I know how to tell a broadly Chomskian story about it. What other options are on the table? I hear lots of broad brush criticism of generative linguistics, but in almost all cases it turns out that the proposed alternative approaches are just working on different problems, and aren’t really alternatives at all.
- ribit 6y ago
  I don't think that you will find my answer satisfactory, but does there have to be an alternative? I think that many syntactic mysteries are mysterious only because syntacticians assume that they work in particular ways. Once you start looking at these problems from the perspective of pragmatics, competing interpretations and conventionalisation, many of these mysteries disappear. The point to make is that interpretation makes use of multiple sources of information, of which syntax is just one. You don't need an elegant, tight fitting, constrained syntactic structure to use language. Which incidentally is why we can understand things even they are not grammatical. I firmly believe that the issue of "grammaticality" simply boils down to convention. Not to mention that many constructed examples used to motivate formal grammar research (be it syntax or semantics) are borderline acceptable themselves to many native speakers.

aborsy 6y ago

Chomsky has more citations to his peer-reviewed work, than your whole former department or maybe university. I don’t agree with him on numerous topics, but that doesn’t mean that I have a credible critic of his work.

justicezyx 6y ago
This is not a critic. This is a complaint that that dominance sucked up a lot of mental freedom and dareness to break out established regime. That's not even complaint to most people who are doing professional research, i.e., modern professional research is just like any other industrialized profession, it requires profit. Of course, with that comes conscious or unconscious desire to follow the lead. That inevitably manifests into low esteem to some prominent figure, but when you look closely, that low esteem is nothing but a sentiment towards the lack of resources; you almost never see any well regarded openly criticize people without different views, because intellectual ideas being different is just the inherent situation of any academic research, everyone knows that, otherwise one would not actually want to be in that profession in the first place.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

loceng 6y ago

Eric Weinstein (The Portal podcast on Youtube) has run into a similar problem with physics. He's a mathematician by trade and over the last 37 years has developed a new theory of everything he calls Geometric Unity. He wasn't able to make any headway into the physics community for a long time - and so now instead he's educating people about what he calls DISC and GIN - about the problems with these systems, and building his own audience of people while waiting for peers to get interested in learning/understanding his theory. It's happened in health too, arguably it has in all subjects, whether due to regulatory capture of government policy and/or academic capture influencing what research gets done via funding - the system is broken, well - it works for industrial complexes who generally have ulterior motive than wanting the very best for society. Edit to add: why the hell would anyone downvote this comment?

typon 6y ago
Can't speak for everyone else, but I personally think you are misrepresented the Eric Weinstein story. From all that I have read about him, it seems like the academic peer review system did it's job: kept a charlatan with half baked ideas out of reputable journals. Sometimes when no one takes you seriously it doesn't necessarily mean there is a conspiracy against you.
- loceng 6y ago
  "kept a charlatan with half baked ideas out of reputable journals." LOL. Citations needed. Please point to the peer reviewed criticism that disproved his math. You've clearly never watched him speak to people about mathematics - there hasn't been a person he hasn't been able to dance with when discussing mathematics/physics principles.
  - andrekandre 6y ago
    criticism that disproved his math has weinstein made any testable predictions with his theory/math?
    - 6y ago

cptaj 6y ago

I hold him in low regard because he defended Chavez for years while his dictatorship destroyed my country.

toiletfuneral 6y ago
Hang in there buddy, I’m sure the US & oil industry is still working super hard to get a Pinochet in there ASAP
eyelidlessness 6y ago
Disclaimers: It’s inevitable that his political activism will be a topic here, and I’m sensitive to the harm Chavez did, and I may very well be out of the loop. That said I’m not aware of Chomsky defending Chavez, though I’m certainly aware of him challenging US intervention. And his general stance of non-intervention is often interpreted as support for the would-be intervened regime. Is there a more clear position of support/defense on record? I know that I’ve been disappointed by some of his later in life positions dismissing Palestinian efforts, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s regressed on other topics, I’m just not familiar in this case. And asking sincerely.