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Agreed. Ironic that Chomsky still teaches at MIT
by francesca 14y ago
Agreed. Ironic that Chomsky still teaches at MIT
- gadders 14y agoNot sure about his linguistics, but his politics is adolescent.
- 46Bit 14y agoAdolescent in what way?
- jeremyswank 14y agoyou're going to have to take that argument a bit farther for it to be convincing.
- lukifer 14y agoAt worst, he is guilty of unrealistic idealism, in the same fashion as the original democratic philosophers. But his knowledge and understanding of real power (perception management) is more sophisticated than any adolescent, and for that matter, most adults.
- jacquesm 14y agoAre you suggesting that older people are not allowed to have ideals?
- Yaa101 14y agoNow explain to the world why you think that his politics is adolescent without the world thinking that you are behaving adolescent.
- jules 14y agoNorvig (Director of Research at Google, and author of the most popular AI book [1]) has written a criticism of Chomsky's linguistics in relation to AI: http://norvig.com/chomsky.html http://norvig.com/chomsky.html tl;dr: Norvig argues that language is best modeled statistically, Chomsky's model is deterministic. He also disagrees about what makes good science (usefulness for engineering is a valid criterium & gathering facts over developing theories). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Modern_Approach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mode...
- cdavid 14y agoThe scientific pedigree of Chomsky is beyond doubt. From a purely academic POV, with all respect due to Norvig, they are in a different league. (that does not mean that Norvig may be wrong and Chomsky right on that point you are quoting. It seems you're suggesting that Chomsky is not a great linguist because he disagress with Norvig - that would be a mistake).
- beagle3 14y agoNorvig has written criticism about specific ideas that Chomsky uttered in some convention (which are also reflected in some of his written works on natural languages and their computational models). But Chomsky's contribution to linguistics in general and computational linguistics in particular goes well beyond anything like that, e.g. [1]. I'm not sure, but I suspect that linguistics and computational linguistics where unrelated fields before Chomsky tied them together. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy
- jules 14y agoYou are minimizing the criticism, which isn't just about some utterance at a convention, it's about the core premise on which Chomsky's entire work rests, namely determinism. And more generally, that success of a model should be tested empirically rather than that it should "provide insight" in some abstract way. There is no doubt that Chomsky has done great work in the area of formal languages, it's just that the relationship with natural language is not as strong as initially hoped.
- flyinRyan 14y agoMy CSS must be broken. I would expect such a useless, non-content-contributing comment to be greyed out by now.
- merinid 14y agoHe likes to be at the nerve of it all. It's an honest place for him to be and work, and in all fairness, they have really supported his enterprise there.