I find it interesting that the article makes no mention of his linguistic work. The Chomsky Hierarchy has had a massive impact on the world of software development, for example. If you’ve ever written a regular expression, you’ve used his work.
I find it very interesting that he didn’t start out in political science, but had a background in cognitive and mathematical realms where you can either be right or wrong based on how well your theory matches the reality, and if you’re wrong you have to fix your theory and try again. And then also that when he started analyzing political topics, he showed an uncommon-for-the-field ability to analyze statements and theories to see if they were true (which made him some kind of wild and radical outlier compared to how more or less every single other professional at the time liked to look at the world).
Wasn’t one of his first works showing how American media coverage, especially the New York Times, make key changes in articles about Israel? He found internationally distributed articles and showed that US media always changed articles about Israel to paint them in a better light. It was really great work.
Haven’t most of Chomsky’s linguistic theories been discredited at this point? Nothing against the man, science moves on, that’s just how it works. It certainly says nothing about his political activism.
Chomsky’s work undeniably transformed (cognitive) linguistics, but a large portion of Chomskyan linguistics is heavily debated/controversial.
His universal grammar, although debated, at least contributed a lot to Sapir-Whorf linguistics generally being recognized as wrong, which is nice.
His theories aren’t discredited. Many people have misconstrued them however. I wrote about this in a reply to someone else.
There’s a summary here. I know nothing about the field, and I know his theories were controversial, but just glancing over them right now quickly, they look pretty sensible to me. Also, even if they weren’t totally right from a modern perspective and needed some refinement, it looks like what they replaced at the time was pure nonsense (e.g. Skinner’s total batshit early-days-of-psychology theories about how language worked).
I suspect that a certain amount of criticism of his linguistic theories is from people who had sour grapes about his political theories. It’s hard to remember today how unanimous was the rabid disagreement with Chomsky’s political views all the way up until the rise of the internet made “the US isn’t always the good guys” an acceptable view outside of the fringes. Up until the mid-90s, the motherfucker was more or less Judas Iscariot.
I honestly don’t know. I do know that people regularly reference the Chomsky Hierarchy (or works based off of it) when writing FSAs or parsers, since the class of grammar dictates what you can use. A FSA can’t be used to completely parse a context-free grammar (or anything above it). The thing about parsing HTML with regex is an example of that, and is what first keyed me in to the different types of grammars.
I don’t know much about it, but it could be that his theories have good applications in computer science even if they don’t with human language. Science is also like that.
Holy shit, I wasn’t expecting to find out like this
He’s not actually dead.
Never forget that when Noam got scared, he greenlighted fascist tactics. Mandating an experimental medical procedure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMzPPa-M0JA
You are delusional if you’re saying that vaccines are a “medical procedure” and that requiring vaccines to enter certain public institutions are “fascist tactics” 🤡
I agree with him. You have to take measures to protect the populace, like with traffic laws. If people can’t abide by those rules and the science is sound (which it is in this case and in the case of traffic laws), then measures have to be taken to protect the community from those that refuse to abide by the verifiably safer option without due cause.
What those measures are can be deliberated amongst the community. Could be fines, could be jail time. I don’t know what would compel someone to get a vaccine, but that could be determined over time.
Moral Giant
Well, until you ask for his opinions on Cambodia or Ukraine…
his problem seems to be that he’s all in against US foreign policy, which leads to apologising for other countries shit policies because their actions are technically against US interest
Yeah and to be fair to him it’s a common one but still leads to logical inconsistency
It’s genuinely horrifying how otherwise morally and politically astute intellectuals will just come out and defend certain atrocities.
Or China. He was morally selective and emblematic of how conservativism infiltrates and undermines left-wing efforts. Committed more to a prescriptive ideology than real world results.
People don’t want to admit it because there’s a cult of personality around him, but he let the left down.
What the FUCK
I expected you to be making this up but you are not.
According to the consensus, Russia is now revising its abandoned plans and concentrating on a major assault in the Donbass region, where some 15,000 people are reported to have been killed since the Maidan uprising in 2014. By whom? It should not be hard to determine with many Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) observers on the ground.
Imma stop you right there my guy…
With a headline like that, I thought he died…
They changed the headline to “Let’s Celebrate Noam Chomsky”. The New Statesman article also was pulled.
The only recent information I can find is he was recovering from a bad stroke last year, and his wife moved him to Brazil.
See the talk page on his Wikipedia article—they’re currently comparing sources (including the New Statesman article you linked to), but don’t yet consider it conclusive.
Aritcle was pulled, nothing else points to him being dead.
Okay thanks, I hope he’s doing okay, I’ll update my comments
It even says obituary in the URL. I think they might have jumped the gun a little.
He’s my hero! I hope he’s still getting something out of life as he’s in Brazil with his wife. A true heartache knowing that his time here is coming to an end, because for as long as he could, he was still commenting on international affairs. A warrior for the truth, and I’m going to miss his commentary.
It’s not true, he’s still with us
