What does Veeky Forums think of Noam Chomsky?

>A Plato allusion will make me look smart

There's nothing honest with the way Harris debates. He asserts that there is a distinction between the subconscious decisions making and the conscious recognition of that decision, and that distinction implies that there is no free will. This strongly reminiscent of Cartesian dualism, a concept that has been ridiculed for years, and was finally put to bed in the 40's with Ryle's "Ghost in the machine".

Who and what are you defending your assertion from, and why? You've gone off-topic, completely unprompted, by forcing a discussion about "free will" and what you think Sam Harris has to say about that. That has nothing to do with the Chomsky affair.

>free will blah blah blah
Who cares. The argument between Chomsky and Harris had nothing to do with that.

I'm using it as an example of Harris's rank intellectual dishonesty, and using that as an example of why someone wouldn't want to engage him in a debate. Sorry if that was too abstract for you.

Isn't his stuff in linguistics starting to get disproved?

>"look mama I can link caves to Plato"
>"Sorry if that was too abstract for you."
This is the shit I was talking about when I mentioned unwillingness to have honest discussions. You're all airs.

Harris makes many good points and is open to being proven wrong with good arguments (and has been, even self-admittedly).

>Help me I'm being persecuted

It's you that couldn't follow a simple argument.

Nope. People like to say that kind of stuff though. It's kind of like when you hear people saying that Einstein's theories are getting disproved.

I know of him through linguistics. He's the most important and influential linguist of the 20th century, if not of all time.

>Isn't his stuff in linguistics starting to get disproved?
>Nope

Here's an essay full of Chomsky's mistakes: norvig.com/chomsky.html

I like Chomsky anyway. He's usually right.

>norvig.com/chomsky.html
Is a bunch of wordsalad nonsense.

In example:
>Science is a combination of gathering facts and making theories; neither can progress on its own.
And
>is wrong to push the needle so far towards theory over facts; in the history of science, the laborious accumulation of facts is the dominant mode, not a novelty.
The idiot is using "theory" in the lamen sense, not the scientific sense.

The site also attempts to re-invent propositional calculus, without sticking to any rules, and makes random claims as absolutes
>In example the section titled: How successful are statistical language models?

Anyway...

Chomsky is like any researcher:
Never completely right about everything and all things.
That should be obvious.
The real question is:
Is he sticking to the scientific method?
General no, but he does use analytical deduction (logic; which is rhetorical) to reach *rational* conclusions that are consistent with data.

The idiot that made that site is obviously a college drop out, or an educated idiot that doesn't understand how consistency and coherency work.
There is clearly a bias where the rules change when he looks at someone else's view, and when he looks at his own view.
It's pretty clear that the rules change.

>He's usually right.
>Believes in free will

>norvig.com
He's the director of research at google.
Explains a lot really.
None of my Google products work correctly.
Android's resource management is completely nonsensical.
Google Keep crashes.
Gmail lags when logging in.
Glass was a failure.
Chrome OS is a joke.
Youtube is still shit.
The only thing they're riding on?
Adverts (google search) and Pokemon go.
That and all the idiots that keep buying android.
Their lead researches doesn't know what "scientific theory" means.
I expect as much from company that took a day off for their staff to giggle at Ryan Reynolds.
Good bye Google.
You're gone within 15 years, guaranteed.

>philosophy/humanities

I think you meant to post this in Veeky Forums. Polite sage.

Proved to be a dishonest cuck during that email exchange with Sam Harris.

>chomsky
>god-tier linguist
'no'

>Cuck

Opinion discarded.

I think his theory of language is an emergent property of a more fundamental aspect of the way our minds work.

In his younger years he was legitimately genius tier, but now he's just an old fart who is used to being right all the time.

>debates

Debates are an entertainment medium you retard. Their goal isn't to provide anyone with a better or more complete understanding of a topic. Their goal is to entertain an audience while two people adamantly disagree with each other.

What happened in that Harris-Chomsky correspondence:
>Harris needs more entertainment content for his blog so he asks Chomsky to debate him.
>Chomsky ignores his dumb requests.
>Harris decides to write a meandering essay stating that he adamantly disagrees with Chomsky on something and sends it to Chomsky.
>Chomsky doesn't approach it as a debate and instead approaches it as a conversation.
>The rest of the correspondence proceeds with Chomsky telling Harris that Harris doesn't understand both what he's talking about and Chomsky's position while offering explanations all while Harris adamantly refuses to engage in discussion and instead keeps backing down and trying to re-frame the argument.
>At the end of it Chomsky has decided that there is no value in attempting to have a conversation with someone who not only adamantly refuses to put any effort in understanding the topics at hand but also ultimately doesn't have any new insight or knowledge to offer to Chomsky. Harris on the other hand is satisfied that this content can still be used on his entertainment blog as long as he frames it correctly.

Chomsky should have just called him a retard and told him to fuck off as soon as it was obvious that the guy didn't know shit.

>Harris: lol ur argument is wrong because you don't consider thing X in your book.
>Chomsky: Actually, thing X is the fundamental topic in that book and I talk about it at length.
>Harris: Oh, well I didn't actually read your book so maybe lets not talk about it and suppose ur still wrong for not considering X.

Atheists are so fucking dumb

smartest and most relevant individual in the field of pseudoscience.

Mathematicians respect him and use his ideas.

Sorry I was fucking your girlfriend. What were you saying ?

yes

>Here's an essay full of Chomsky's mistakes: norvig.com/chomsky.html
>mistakes

Chomsky is a structuralist who believes that the correct approach to studying languages is by figuring out fundamental properties in the structure of the grammar and semantics and using them to make inferences about the language. Norvig is a post-structuralist who believes that the correct approach is to only look at statistical models of the language (completely ignoring grammar or semantics) in order to make inferences about the language (i.e. give the most probable translation).

The two approaches are simply in disagreement there is no strong argument for why one approach is correct while the other is wrong. The claim that both sides agree on is that structuralist approaches are a lot more difficult than post-structuralist approaches.

To really hammer down this point, suppose someone gave you an algebraic structure (say a specific ring or a field like the rational numbers) and asked you to perform arithmetic on it. You could achieve this in at least two different ways.
One way is the way that we typically do so in mathematics, we deduce a set of rules that govern "the structure" of the thing we want to study and then use those rules to draw inferences about how to perform arithmetic (eg. "multiplication is commutative so we can rewrite our expression like so").
Another way you could approach this problem is to collect a large amount of sample data that contains correct arithmetic computations. Then you could take this data and construct a statistical model that takes an expression as input and produces the most probable arithmetic evaluation of that expression as output.

The first method will be perfect in how and why it works but depending how complicated your structure is it may require a lot of really clever work. The second method may work "good enough" for some applications but it will require less thought to perform and it may not justify how or why it works.