Noam Chomsky and the Bicycle Theory

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/education/edlife/on-being-noam-chomsky.html

by betolink • 10 years ago

43 48 10 years ago

ronnier• 10 years ago

How do you account for your amazing stamina and energy level at age 87?
The bicycle theory. As long as you keep riding, you don’t fall.

wolfram74• 10 years ago

Talk about burying the headline.

gajomi• 10 years ago

Chris Knight explores “the Chomsky problem” — the paradox of a thinker who belongs to the “professional and scientific elite” even as he espouses populist political ideas.

Ok, this work is not the substance of the interview, but what is the paradox? Should I believe that it is strange that scientists studying fluid dynamics use conventional toilets and sinks outside of the lab?

farright2• 10 years ago

The problem is Chomsky claims that the "professional and scientific elite" are compromised by their role in society, and end up taking up self-serving political views that seek to preserve this role. So the natural question is what make Chomsky different.

wamsachel• 10 years ago

He's not different, and he openly acknowledges that a lot of his linguistic research was funded by the Pentagon.

Edit: He also thought that his activism would get him fired, and so his wife started going back to school.

ianai• 10 years ago

I always find this criticism silly. It's a form of normalization. "Elites must have elitist opinions or they and their opinions are not elite." No, there's usually more than one way to arrive at the same position. Not all paths will be equally complicated or well founded.

mc32• 10 years ago

I think one of the preeminent examples was his initial and sustained support for Pol Pot [ignoring evidence of wrongdoing [1]] while there existed much evidence for not supporting them [the KR] because it clashed with his sympathies for the Communist movement in SEAsia at the time.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide_denial#Chom...

abalone3• 10 years ago

This is a total mischaracterization and unsupported by the citation. Chomsky and Herman examined mass media coverage of U.S. enemies vs friends, finding that similar atrocities by enemies would be trumpeted and exaggerated beyond their already atrocious reality (e.g. Cambodia), while those by friends would be ignored or downplayed (e.g. East Timor). To call this "support" or "sympathy" for enemies is a commissar mentality.

becs• 10 years ago

He never supported Pol Pot. I do not understand why everybody keeps saying that and keeps relying solely on those who have no evidence to support that position. Let's go the source: I have the book Manufacturing Consent in front of me. I have used it on a few occasions for two research projects and am pretty familiar with its contents. I have emailed him directly regarding this book, too.

So, with the book in front of me, I will quote the one statement that has everybody's dicks hard for hating Chomsky: "The victims of Pol Pot, a Communist leader, were worthy, although after he was ousted by the Vietnamese in 1978, Cambodians ceased to be worthy, as U.S. policy shifted toward support of Pol Pot in exile. The East Timorese remained unworthy in the 1990's, as the table suggests." So, without reading the book, you would think he's talking about worthy and unworthy the way that we normally mean it. However, he munificently describes the difference: "Our prediction is that the victims of enemy states will be found 'worthy' and will be subject to more intense and indignant coverage that those victimized by the United States or its clients, who are implicitly 'unworthy'."

But, it's a lot easier for all of you with single digit IQ's to look up secondary-source material like Wikipedia which is essentially a mashup of opinions and has never been considered a reliable academic medium. No book or publication can ever be sourced by Wikipedia yet you all do this all day long.

Manufacturing Consent is not an easy read, but if you would actually read the entire thing you would understand that he never even closely supported Pol Pot.

farright2• 10 years ago

Chomsky has interesting ideas whether you fully agree or not.

On language, human language has intricate rules that we can't fully explain in terms of the underlying neurobiology. But Chomsky's assertion that this implies some sort of underlying mechanism in the brain strikes me as excessively reductionist. Maybe neural networks are inherently capable of learning arbitrary rules, and the kinds of rules that comprise natural languages are constrained not by the brain, but by something else, e.g. maybe only some kinds of grammatical rules are stable over time as languages are subject to random drift.

On politics, Chomsky gives a very thorough critique of US foreign policy, but it is excessively materialist, i.e. it assumes the main driving force in politics is money and power, not ideology. Often this seems far fetched, e.g. US politicians are clearly very eager to please the Jewish lobby (e.g. AIPAC) but according to Chomsky it's the Jewish lobby that has been co-opted by the US in order to use Israel as a tool for US foreign policy. And yet in all the private discussions of all US presidents, all we hear is them being pushed to the right by the Jewish lobby. We never hear them saying "the Middle East is too stable, Jews and Arabs are starting to form solidarity and oppose US imperialism. Quick, pressure Israel to take a harder line".

jessaustin• 10 years ago

That's a great example for ideology > material interest, but in both the Middle East and the world as a whole it's an exception to the general rule. It's amusing that Chomsky resorts to epicycles rather than simply making an exception...

throawaybay• 10 years ago

It's all about oil, land and water. Ideology is about your country being the best. Everything else is irrelevant.

berntb8• 10 years ago

That seems naive in an anti-naive way? :-)

When I look at the foreign policy of my country (Sweden), it seems a large part of it is decided as part of internal political posturing. Tail wagging the dog, etc.

I'm not as knowledgeable about the US politics, but it seems to not be as bad -- but still a large influence.

mikevm• 10 years ago

How "powerful" would the Jewish lobby be if support for Israel among Americans was not at 62%[1]?

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/189626/americans-views-toward-isr...

gotofritz2• 10 years ago

It's kind of chicken and egg though, isn't it?

Synaesthesia2• 10 years ago

There are instances where Chomsky does show that US policy often is ideologically motivated, for instance the Vietnam war which he notes, "could have ended in 1965" as the major aims had been achieved - the region had been inoculated as Indonesia had fallen and Vietnam was devastated.

HiroshiSan• 10 years ago

Is there any way to read the article without logging in?

paloaltokid• 10 years ago

For NYT, just open the article in an incognito tab. They're nice about it. I ended up subscribing because I read so many of their articles and I like their coverage.

analog31• 10 years ago

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

― Albert Einstein

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/28/bicycle/

mmel• 10 years ago

I find linguistics one of those topics that I have questions about but don't know enough to use the correct terms to find an answer. - Is there an objective metric for 'efficiency of communication of an idea'? If so, what is it? - Are some languages more efficient at communicating ideas than others? - What is the most efficient language? - Are there any attempts to create a new language using all the best features of historical languages? like how programming languages take the good features from one another?

noobiemcfoob• 10 years ago

As far as efficiency in communication, there is a metric, though I can't recall the name.

There's a general idea that less information dense languages lead the speakers to talk faster (e.g. Spanish vs. English) implying that humans have a type of ideal information density regardless of how that information is packaged.

/Not a linguist. Took a class once...

newjersey• 10 years ago

Apparently, they're is a time article about it

http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,0...

They talk about information density:

With this raw data in hand, the investigators crunched the numbers together to arrive at two critical values for each language: the average information density for each of its syllables and the average number of syllables spoken per second in ordinary speech. Vietnamese was used as a reference language for the other seven, with its syllables (which are considered by linguists to be very information-dense) given an arbitrary value of 1.

For all of the other languages, the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and thus the slower the speech. English, with a high information density of .91, was spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, ripped along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edged past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.

Further googling got me this PDF http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegri...

gizmo686• 10 years ago

That depends on what you mean by "efficiency". The most natural understanding of the question for me would be to look at the information density of spoken language with respect to time, as was done in [1].

The linked findings looked at 7 different languages and found that all of the studied languages had about the same rate.

However, the languages vary significantly in the density of information with respect to syllables, and the speed at which syllables are produced.

EDIT: chart on page 7 (544)

[1]https://muse.jhu.edu/article/449938/pdf

Osmium• 10 years ago

I find linguistics one of those topics that I have questions about but don't know enough to use the correct terms to find an answer.

I can't help answer your questions, unfortunately, but I agree completely that it's difficult for outsiders to even formulate the right questions.

I find linguistics to be fascinating, in that language really is foundational to what it means to be human, and yet it seems like we still only understand so little about it. And linguistics is such a huge and broad field that is so complex once you scratch the surface, I feel like outsiders (like myself) just have a very poor grasp about what it's about. And that's only compounded by the fact that we all, as 'expert users' of languages on a daily basis, feel like we have some intuition or knowledge into how it works that very often turns out to be completely incorrect when studied rigorously. So we're often not even aware of just how ignorant we are.

In many ways modern linguistics is such a young field too. I can only expect that we have exciting times ahead... I only wish it were taught more often in schools; I wish I'd studied it myself. As a sort of 'meta' subject, it seems like it'd be useful for young people to think more about what it means to communicate.

kylebgorman• 10 years ago

This is not a question that really would be of much interest to most working linguists, who aren't really willing to make value judgments about language any more than chemists are to talk about their favorite molecules.

Constructed languages are also generally considered "mostly harmless" but not really an object of scientific inquiry.

If you're interested in languages, you may want what people who study languages for a living are interested in. Or you dive into conlanging...there's probably a subreddit for that.

yongjik• 10 years ago

Are there any attempts to create a new language using all the best features of historical languages? like how programming languages take the good features from one another?

Unlike programming languages, natural languages are really, really complicated. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, one of the most comprehensive treatise on the grammar of English (and probably one of the most comprehensive work on any human language), runs 1700+ pages, and that's considering mostly just syntax. Imagine: a native English speaker keeps most of the rules explained in this book in their head.

So, I believe any attempt to "create a new language using the best features" will either (1) fail, or (2) end up being accidentally successful, where the speakers of the new language will pile additional layers of complication by simply using the language in the same way we use any human language.

IANAL, so read it with a grain of salt.

snailletters• 10 years ago

I was introduced[1] to Lojban[2] by a friend through my shallow interest in programming. I don't know much about it, but maybe it comes close to providing an answer to your 'new language' question. Their website[3] provides links to learn about it's architecture.

1. https://youtu.be/QdlGxgKt7nc 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban 2. https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban

Edit: updated video link

icpmacdo• 10 years ago

I have listened to hundreds of hours of Noam Chomsky lectures and talks on Youtube. Even if you don't agree with his politics seeing what his perspective is on issues is always interesting.

Its funny to see this as Noam often remarks that there is an active ban on him being mentioned in the New York Times newspaper.

berntb8• 10 years ago

NY Times didn't really go much into the political stuff, which they really don't write about.

Do you have any recommendations after those hundreds of hours of Chomsky? I have problems reading/listening. To me, Chomsky's politics seems to not be written as an honest academic -- but just to change people's opinion.

For instance, there are gigantic double standards in how different sides are evaluated by Chomsky. In an interview I found (no link saved, sorry) Chomsky was asked about criticizing Israel thousands of times more than the hateful antisemitic groups around Israel, which routinely use civilians for targets (while Israel follows the laws of war, more or less).

Chomsky answered. The reason (at least then) was that Israel ignored an Egyptian peace initiative in the early 70s, so they deserved what they got... Uh... WTF?! Neither I nor Chomsky have a clue if that was a real initiative or just a trap ("give us X and we will sign a peace paper and follow it.") Even assuming the initiative was real and that it was realized on the Israeli side, but the Israeli politicians at the time were militaristic expansionists (maybe as bad as their neighbours) -- it is just not serious to hence you judge the future governments for decades because of that!

After seeing that, I stopped reading/listening to Chomsky again.

Edit: Two minus votes in 5 minutes for asking about references and explaining why Chomsky's political writing seemed weird? :-)

abalone3• 10 years ago

There are multiple reasons why your comment would be downvoted, chiefly that it is off topic and fails to cite a source.

Citing a source for your claims would better allow the reader to evaluate whether you are accurately characterizing your subject. Being somewhat familiar with Chomsky's extensive body of work I know of exactly zero cases of him claiming that Israel "deserved" civilian casualties, while Israel's frequent violation of the "laws of war", e.g. use of white phosphorous and extensive targeting of civilian areas, is a frequent topic.

This is before we even address your rather disturbing implication about what it means to be an "honest academic".

gotofritz2• 10 years ago

I agree, but it's also very depressing. He lays bare all the ugliness in our current system, but suggests no solution. Which is ok, it's good to separate the two things, or perhaps there simply isn't a solution. But still, I always need to cheer myself up after listening to him.

glennsl• 10 years ago

He does suggest a solution, it's just not an easy one. But it is simple: Organize and get shit done. He often uses the womens liberation movement, civil rights movement and anti-vietnam-war movement as historical examples. There's still work to be done, and it takes a lot of effort and a long time to get anywhere, but we continue to progress towards the better.

hrnnnnnn• 10 years ago

"I never looked around, never second-guessed

Then I read some howard zinn now I'm always depressed

And now I can't sleep from years of apathy

All because I read a little noam chomsky"

- NOFX, Franco Un-American

quantumfoam• 10 years ago

Time for another Noam Chomsky AMA?

Noam Chomsky and the Bicycle Theory

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