Chomsky was doing so many podcasts up to the moment he disappeared from the radar presumably due to medical issues. I've seen him going for 2 hours with some nobody with 5K followers, being asked juvenile and stupid questions and answering with the patient of a Saint. He looked quite diminished physically, elderly and frail but mentally he's always sharp and his recall and memory is scary.
I feel that in his later years he made a conscious effort to talk to young people and made them aware of the history and depth of the problems the world is facing, and he used very modern avenues to do so, like podcast interviews. I will always have the highest degree of respect for this man and an admiration for his integrity, sensitivity and scholarship.
I’ve spent so much time watching this kind of content (plus the older lectures that are available) over almost a year of chores, lunches, and walks that it’s honestly bordering on parasocial. I of course don’t regret a minute; if you check these recent videos out it’s clear that he reiterates the same points over and over, but it never quite gets tiresome. Rather it gives the impression of someone who has truly glimpsed the structure of the universe, and thus is consistently going back to those same principles.
Of course, I would recommend choosing “one half of his brain” (his terms) and not mixing the politics interviews with the cognitive science / philosophy ones lol. I haven’t looked for many linguistics talks of his from recent years, but I had the impression he was working on seriously technical stuff there right up until he couldn’t, too.
I don’t know how I hope to sleep after this comment… I guess I’ll do him the honor of trying to rationalize my emotional/ethical interests, and care less about the passing of a world-renowned twice-(happily-)married scholar than the passing of children from war and famine.
I hope he believes in us to finish his life’s work, answering the most fundamental question: “What kind of creatures are we?” He was never able to see his theories in the recent LLM breakthroughs, but we’re in the early stages of the Chomskian era of AI, philosophy, and human endeavors writ large, I think… the ChatGPT outage from earlier this year couldn’t have supported him any better without having said “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” outright!
If you go to youtube and look for chomsky interview or chomsky podcast and find the recent ones (the ones where he looks terrible!). There are hundreds I think. Some examples I had in my recent watch history
I love Noam Chomsky so much. To me he is epitome of what a rational caring intellectual should be. Number one, he strives for the truth and while can have intellectual blind spots, isn't afraid of calling them out.
We had him has a guest speaker for an internal presentation at Google and of course we had some hyper-rational libertarian eastern block swe kid who was going to take him down and Noam was super respectful, spared with the kid for awhile and then changed the subject slightly while destroying the libertarian kid's entire argument.
I don't. There are some things out there that are up for debate. But not Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Chomsky, for some weird reason, chose to take Russia's side.
Edit: To be sure, I wish him full recovery and many more happy years.
> Chomsky, for some weird reason, chose to take Russia's side.
This is a mischaracterization. He explained Russia's stated motivation for invading Ukraine, that it felt threatened by NATO's continual eastward encroachment and breaking of promises not to do so. That's different than endorsing the invasion, which he did not.
> Chomsky, for some weird reason, chose to take Russia's side.
Chomsky's foreign policy views can somewhat accurately be reduced to "everything is either American imperialism or reactions against it," to a degree that he ignores the imperialist tendencies (and other unpleasantries) of countries that aren't the US because they're against the US. For example, his denial of the Cambodian genocide essentially boiled down to "well, the US doesn't like the Khmer Rouge, so therefore everybody criticizing the Khmer Rouge was overselling the criticism, how was anyone at the time to know what they were doing?"
Rather he chose to understand the point of view from their side. It is extremely difficult to do so and only a few public facing individuals is able to do ( Jeffrey Sachs etc. )
It is probably needless to say, but you do not have to agree with someone on everything, especially to admire someone's knowledge or contributions in specific fields.
Chomsky regularly and rigorously defends genocidal regimes. Look up "Cambodian genocide denial" on wikipedia and you'll find an entire section devoted to Chomsky. This isn't anything new, and I'm surprised how much sympathetic support he's getting in this thread.
> But not Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Chomsky, for some weird reason, chose to take Russia's side.
Taking sides is a sign of emotional, not intellectual approach. And Russia/Ukraine conflict is way far from good fighting evil simplified construct.
I don't like leftists in general and Chomsky in particlar, but I give him huge respect for intellectual and independent position, which will cause him losing appreciation from people like you.
Noam Chomsky had some financial money transfers and a series of meetings arranged by Jeffrey Epstein. At least one meeting with Ehud Barak (former PM of Israel). And he refused to explain himself.
This got quickly swept under the rug. But it's there even on mainstream media if you bother to search for it.
> We had him has a guest speaker for an internal presentation at Google
Would have loved to be a fly on the wall had he been able to do a guest spot at Google recently.
I'm willing to bet he would've gone off-script and given Google hell for their engagements with Israel and treatment of their own employees who protested.
He is such a terrible person he has his own section on the Wikipedia page for "Cambodian Genocide Denial"[1] and is heavily featured in the page for "Bosnian Genocide Denial"[2]. Chomsky is a disgusting hack who runs cover for any genocidal freak that pays lip service to the hammer and sickle.
He is a genocide supporting cancer. The only thing that he cares is to be against US, so he supports Serbia and Putin. He has no problem to lie and deceive.
I actually emailed Noam Chomsky asking questions about Manufacturing Consent and actually got a reply. I always thought he was really cool for being so accessible to those who just had honest questions. I really hope he gets well soon.
When I was young I emailed him with a question something like "I am too young to have witnessed the events of the Vietnam War, can you please recommend me some reading material or push me in the right direction?"
That question turned into 5 or 6 (long) emails back and fourth that i'll always cherish that delved into his unique perspective on what the war was like as a protestor from the West, which papers got released that actually had some truth in them, among a lot of other valuable insights into the time period I had no access to myself.
At the end of our conversation he advocated finding a group that needs volunteers and effort. He didn't care what group that might be, he only cared that individual political concern of individuals be empowered by the necessary groups and collective effort.
I think that kind unequivocal support of 'being political' is something that is truly special.
I hope the best for him -- I view him as one of the only 'truly accessible' academics in this world; just as happy to slowly and carefully explain his thoughts to 'the rabble' as he would be while explaining the same thoughts to high academia and the press.
Same. I emailed him about whether he'd ever met Margaret Mead, John C. Lilly, or Gregory Bateson in the 1960s while researching my book. I got this reply within hours:
"Afraid I never met any of those you mention, though I’ve followed their work for many years.
I’ve never been close to intellectual elite circles, including people I very much admire."
The time stamp for my email was Tuesday, Nov 26, 2019 at 2:19 PM. It was answered by chomsky@mit.edu at Tuesday, Nov 26, 2019 at 9:29 PM. Pretty remarkable.
I emailed him in ~2012 and got a response as well. Keep in mind, I was not a student at his university and I emailed him out of the blue. Incredible guy!
Same! I emailed him asking for his thoughts on robotics and anarcho-communism and he replied pretty promptly. He said it was an important subject and that he was moving offices (this was his move to Arizona), but I could ask again another time. I never quite had the time to prepare for what I would have asked for, some kind of discussion I could record, which he was doing a lot at the time, but I was very happy just to have gotten a supportive reply the first time.
For anyone curious, here is Chomsky in 1976 discussing the relevance of automation and anarcho syndicalism to modern productive economies:
https://youtu.be/h_x0Y3FqkEI
I truly believe we can build a world where everyone benefits from automation, getting the freedom and time to do what we will that every person deserves. The reason I develop open source farming robots is to explore concepts of community ownership of the means of production and community oriented engineering. Noam Chomsky’s work heavily inspired the thinking that got me where I am today.
That's definitely a big question. I asked a pretty open ended question about how he thinks the internet (and filter bubbles in specific) might have changed some of his thoughts in manufacturing consent as the main media went from TV / newspapers (broadcast) to internet (personalized). He said that basically the big companies own it all anyway.
What makes you believe this would work? Specifically any form of anarchism? Have you seen groups of people operate for large periods of time successfully like this? Anything I've looked into shows me human nature would make any anarcho-anything system fail due to infighting.
That sounds great but how do you deal with the fact that robots require mass-produced electronics and the infrastructure for those is currently in the hands of, well, let's say not anarcho-communists?
How about the environmental costs of all that automation?
Is there a realistic path for getting to what you propose from where we are now?
[Edit: realistic in the sense that e.g. the Alcubierre drive is possible but requires exotic matter, therefore "not realistic").
The full obituaries and reflections will come later, but the volume alone of papers, essays, books, articles, and interviews he's generated over his 95 year life is staggering.
The man writes faster than I can realistically read, but I still have a full shelf that I have dipped into over the last 32 years. Linguistics to Gaza, one of my proudest moments was once having some wingnut include me on a public list of enemies alongside Chomsky.
Sad news. I do not agree with him on everything, but I found his work and arguments he made a good counterbalance to those who are followers of Edward Bernays and his "The Engineering of Consent".
Speaking of non-political side of him: was not he wrong about "innate grammar" necessary to understand langage? LLM do not have such circuitry, yet they somehow work well...
There have been many attempts to model and emulate human syntactic acquisition and processing, but the general consensus is that it cannot be done without presupposing some mechanism that enables hierarchical structure. The number of tokens a child needs to learn syntax is the tiniest fraction of the amount of tokens an LLM is trained on.
Humans can also lose parts of their language processing capabilities, without losing others (start at e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_disorder), which is highly suggestive of modular language development. The only question on which there isn't much consensus concerns the origin of that modularity. And humans can lose knowledge while still being able to speak and understand, or lose language while retaining knowledge.
LLMs don't have that at all: they predict the next token.
LLMs does have that, or at least it’s very likely that we will eventually be able to manipulate LLMs in a modular way (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40429540). One point remains: humans learn language with much fewer tokens than LLMs need, which suggests presence of a priori knowledge about the world. The LLM metaphor is finetuning, so babies are born with a base model and then finetuned with environment data, but it’s still within LLM scope.
I don't think LLMs have all that much to do with "innate grammar".
"Innate grammar" are essentially the meta-rules that govern why the rules are what they are. For instance, an English phrase can be recognized as valid or invalid by other native speakers according to the rules of the language. But why are the rules what they are?
This is especially puzzling due to the dazzling variety of human languages. And the fact that, after a period of immersion, humans seem to have the natural capacity to learn all of them.
How do LLMs fit into this? Well, I think it would be interesting if we left a group of LLM to talk to each other for 1000 years. Then see if 1) they developed a new language branch 2) that could be relearned by humans through immersion alone.
It's true that LLMs have learned (have they? I suppose that's a loaded word) human languages like English. But it's unclear if they are governed by the same meta-rules that both constrains and drives the evolution of humanities thousands of distinct languages.
No. Innate grammar has always been about how humans aquire language, not how any possible system which understands human language must posses that innate grammar.
Trying to put his in an uncontroversial way: the human brain (or a brain plus paper and a pencil) can be turning complete/equivalent. Therefor a human sitting down with a pen and pencil could, in a painstakingly long time, compute the backwards and forward passes of a transformer network.
Therefor a human with no understanding of grammar/language, and using no innate biological circuits, could process grammar and respond with language.
The flaw in this argument would be how to teach a human to do this without grammar ...
But that has never been proven that this is how indeed human acquire language; it is essentially a hypothesis. We may as well do it the way LLMs do - some undifferentiated networks acquires the grammar by unknown means.
Compared to an LLM, how many hundreds of gigabytes of text do humans need to acquire a language? And isn’t that disparity already proof that some sort of innate structure must be going on?
Or that llm learning algos should be further improved, which will happen at some point. I remember Kasparov's tirades to the tune of I have an eternal soul therefore computers can never beat me in chess.
The approach is relatively straightforward. The team began by using a computer program to recreate the network that mushroom bodies rely on — a number of projection neurons feeding data to about 2,000 Kenyon cells. The team then trained the network to recognize the correlations between words in the text.
The task is based on the idea that a word can be characterized by it its context, or the other words that usually appear near it. The idea is to start with a corpus of text and then, for each word, to analyze those words that appear before and after it.
Somehow the transformer architecture does pretty well at this task, and other architectures do not. You could say a transformer has "innate grammar", while other architectures do not.
That an LLM does well at grammar doesn't prove or disprove this possibility. A more poignant criticism of "innate grammar" would be that it's not a hypothesis that can be disproven, and as such not really a scientific statement.
I think the popular perception is that his theory is extremely important, as far as I know the academic consensus is that while hugely influential it is long obsolete.
Readit News
I feel that in his later years he made a conscious effort to talk to young people and made them aware of the history and depth of the problems the world is facing, and he used very modern avenues to do so, like podcast interviews. I will always have the highest degree of respect for this man and an admiration for his integrity, sensitivity and scholarship.
Of course, I would recommend choosing “one half of his brain” (his terms) and not mixing the politics interviews with the cognitive science / philosophy ones lol. I haven’t looked for many linguistics talks of his from recent years, but I had the impression he was working on seriously technical stuff there right up until he couldn’t, too.
I don’t know how I hope to sleep after this comment… I guess I’ll do him the honor of trying to rationalize my emotional/ethical interests, and care less about the passing of a world-renowned twice-(happily-)married scholar than the passing of children from war and famine.
I hope he believes in us to finish his life’s work, answering the most fundamental question: “What kind of creatures are we?” He was never able to see his theories in the recent LLM breakthroughs, but we’re in the early stages of the Chomskian era of AI, philosophy, and human endeavors writ large, I think… the ChatGPT outage from earlier this year couldn’t have supported him any better without having said “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” outright!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQOrAyXM5Uhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i44WfeAzhg&t=366shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAnG0gnp1sA&t=3046s
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We had him has a guest speaker for an internal presentation at Google and of course we had some hyper-rational libertarian eastern block swe kid who was going to take him down and Noam was super respectful, spared with the kid for awhile and then changed the subject slightly while destroying the libertarian kid's entire argument.
You don't just debate Noam Chomsky.
https://nerocam.com/DrFun/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200304/df20030409.jp...
Noam Chomsky vs. Michel Foucault - Dictatorship of the Proletariat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpoLLAJ1t74
I don't. There are some things out there that are up for debate. But not Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Chomsky, for some weird reason, chose to take Russia's side.
Edit: To be sure, I wish him full recovery and many more happy years.
https://www.e-flux.com/notes/470005/open-letter-to-noam-chom...
This is a mischaracterization. He explained Russia's stated motivation for invading Ukraine, that it felt threatened by NATO's continual eastward encroachment and breaking of promises not to do so. That's different than endorsing the invasion, which he did not.
Chomsky's foreign policy views can somewhat accurately be reduced to "everything is either American imperialism or reactions against it," to a degree that he ignores the imperialist tendencies (and other unpleasantries) of countries that aren't the US because they're against the US. For example, his denial of the Cambodian genocide essentially boiled down to "well, the US doesn't like the Khmer Rouge, so therefore everybody criticizing the Khmer Rouge was overselling the criticism, how was anyone at the time to know what they were doing?"
Taking sides is a sign of emotional, not intellectual approach. And Russia/Ukraine conflict is way far from good fighting evil simplified construct.
I don't like leftists in general and Chomsky in particlar, but I give him huge respect for intellectual and independent position, which will cause him losing appreciation from people like you.
Noam Chomsky had some financial money transfers and a series of meetings arranged by Jeffrey Epstein. At least one meeting with Ehud Barak (former PM of Israel). And he refused to explain himself.
This got quickly swept under the rug. But it's there even on mainstream media if you bother to search for it.
The guy has a different opinion.
It's going to happen a lot so maybe better to get used to it?
Would have loved to be a fly on the wall had he been able to do a guest spot at Google recently.
I'm willing to bet he would've gone off-script and given Google hell for their engagements with Israel and treatment of their own employees who protested.
>America bad, everything bad = America
What a frighteningly distorted view of "rational" and "intellectual".
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide_denial#Revisi...
The whole thing is more semantical argument than ideological.
Chomsky is not 100% right on everything and his world views are more black and white than the world they describe.
But he is an excellent linchpin to validate your own views against.
People who hate him always attack him based on few things from the past, while following/praising people who are spineless.
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When I was young I emailed him with a question something like "I am too young to have witnessed the events of the Vietnam War, can you please recommend me some reading material or push me in the right direction?"
That question turned into 5 or 6 (long) emails back and fourth that i'll always cherish that delved into his unique perspective on what the war was like as a protestor from the West, which papers got released that actually had some truth in them, among a lot of other valuable insights into the time period I had no access to myself.
At the end of our conversation he advocated finding a group that needs volunteers and effort. He didn't care what group that might be, he only cared that individual political concern of individuals be empowered by the necessary groups and collective effort.
I think that kind unequivocal support of 'being political' is something that is truly special.
I hope the best for him -- I view him as one of the only 'truly accessible' academics in this world; just as happy to slowly and carefully explain his thoughts to 'the rabble' as he would be while explaining the same thoughts to high academia and the press.
A great man.
"Afraid I never met any of those you mention, though I’ve followed their work for many years.
I’ve never been close to intellectual elite circles, including people I very much admire."
The time stamp for my email was Tuesday, Nov 26, 2019 at 2:19 PM. It was answered by chomsky@mit.edu at Tuesday, Nov 26, 2019 at 9:29 PM. Pretty remarkable.
That is very humble
For anyone curious, here is Chomsky in 1976 discussing the relevance of automation and anarcho syndicalism to modern productive economies: https://youtu.be/h_x0Y3FqkEI
I truly believe we can build a world where everyone benefits from automation, getting the freedom and time to do what we will that every person deserves. The reason I develop open source farming robots is to explore concepts of community ownership of the means of production and community oriented engineering. Noam Chomsky’s work heavily inspired the thinking that got me where I am today.
How about the environmental costs of all that automation?
Is there a realistic path for getting to what you propose from where we are now?
[Edit: realistic in the sense that e.g. the Alcubierre drive is possible but requires exotic matter, therefore "not realistic").
But, look here. He's 95 years old and just had a stroke. He's not going to get well soon, or at all.
* Today is in more-or-less the same predicament as 40 years ago
Ralph Nader is also still out there at 90 producing content regularly.
https://www.youtube.com/@RalphNaderRadioHour
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Disagree with him or not about US foreign policy, the man was a genius.
But oh wait you're probably just a propaganda bot yourself.
Humans can also lose parts of their language processing capabilities, without losing others (start at e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_disorder), which is highly suggestive of modular language development. The only question on which there isn't much consensus concerns the origin of that modularity. And humans can lose knowledge while still being able to speak and understand, or lose language while retaining knowledge.
LLMs don't have that at all: they predict the next token.
"Innate grammar" are essentially the meta-rules that govern why the rules are what they are. For instance, an English phrase can be recognized as valid or invalid by other native speakers according to the rules of the language. But why are the rules what they are?
This is especially puzzling due to the dazzling variety of human languages. And the fact that, after a period of immersion, humans seem to have the natural capacity to learn all of them.
How do LLMs fit into this? Well, I think it would be interesting if we left a group of LLM to talk to each other for 1000 years. Then see if 1) they developed a new language branch 2) that could be relearned by humans through immersion alone.
It's true that LLMs have learned (have they? I suppose that's a loaded word) human languages like English. But it's unclear if they are governed by the same meta-rules that both constrains and drives the evolution of humanities thousands of distinct languages.
Therefor a human with no understanding of grammar/language, and using no innate biological circuits, could process grammar and respond with language.
The flaw in this argument would be how to teach a human to do this without grammar ...
The approach is relatively straightforward. The team began by using a computer program to recreate the network that mushroom bodies rely on — a number of projection neurons feeding data to about 2,000 Kenyon cells. The team then trained the network to recognize the correlations between words in the text.
The task is based on the idea that a word can be characterized by it its context, or the other words that usually appear near it. The idea is to start with a corpus of text and then, for each word, to analyze those words that appear before and after it.
That an LLM does well at grammar doesn't prove or disprove this possibility. A more poignant criticism of "innate grammar" would be that it's not a hypothesis that can be disproven, and as such not really a scientific statement.
Will miss his interviews on various forums often posted on YT and appearances on Democracy Now.
Classic: Yanis Varoufakis with Professor Noam Chomsky at NYPL, April 16, 2016 | DiEM25
https://youtu.be/szIGZVrSAyc