Noam Chomsky

[Benjamin Frank]

The 'question' speaks for itself, I think.

[the artist formerly known as catmusic]

FF beyond almost any other FF. Such a good dude, breaks my heart to see how old he's getting.

[John Dule]

The proto-Greenwald. A genocide denier and an apologist for one of the most bloodthirsty maniacs the European continent has seen since 1945. His "anti-imperialist" views gave him extreme tunnel vision in international affairs, to the point that he thinks America can do nothing right. I get that egghead academics are of the opinion that he's made valuable intellectual contributions to other fields, but none are significant enough to save him from being an abhorrent and undeniable HP.

[HisGrace]

Genocide denial puts you into the HP category by default, does it not? Glad to see how decisive the result is so far.

Became so knee jerk anti US that it led to him defending regimes that were just as bad or worse (like the Khmer Rouge) just because they were hostile to US interests. The usual contrarian tankie BS.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I've heard his linguistics work is genuinely remarkable, and as someone with a passing interest in the topic I'd be curious to check it out.

As far as his politics go, though, he's utterly vile and honestly has always been.

[Vosem]

I've heard his linguistics work is genuinely remarkable, and as someone with a passing interest in the topic I'd be curious to check it out.

His linguistics work is an awful scam which set the field back decades. Advances in the study of poorly-recorded indigenous languages (particularly those in South America) and psychology have both shown his understanding of universal grammar to be horrifically wrong. By contrast, the work others were doing in linguistics at the same time -- particularly Joseph Greenberg's use of mass comparison -- has been hugely vindicated by modern archaeogenetics; more attention given to them would've given us a better understanding of prehistory at an earlier date.

Also, genocide apologist and anti-capitalist. HP.

[Vice President Christian Man]

On the whole he’s a FP but some of his foreign policy takes especially regarding him downplaying the Khumer Rouge is wrong.

[Tartarus Sauce]

HP, encompasses the moral bankruptcy of the "anti-American imperialism" leftist archetype. Genocide denial is inexcusable.

[Dr. MB]

Lib

[DaleCooper]

The proto-Greenwald. A genocide denier and an apologist for one of the most bloodthirsty maniacs the European continent has seen since 1945. His "anti-imperialist" views gave him extreme tunnel vision in international affairs, to the point that he thinks America can do nothing right. I get that egghead academics are of the opinion that he's made valuable intellectual contributions to other fields, but none are significant enough to save him from being an abhorrent and undeniable HP.

This is the main reason why the far left is having so many problems all over the west. Most of them hate America and love (or at least defend) the biggest sh-tholes on the planet. Why would anyone support a political movement that has nothing good to say about the best countries on earth and nothing but apologia for all the world's disgusting dictatorships?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I've heard his linguistics work is genuinely remarkable, and as someone with a passing interest in the topic I'd be curious to check it out.

His linguistics work is an awful scam which set the field back decades. Advances in the study of poorly-recorded indigenous languages (particularly those in South America) and psychology have both shown his understanding of universal grammar to be horrifically wrong. By contrast, the work others were doing in linguistics at the same time -- particularly Joseph Greenberg's use of mass comparison -- has been hugely vindicated by modern archaeogenetics; more attention given to them would've given us a better understanding of prehistory at an earlier date.

Also, genocide apologist and anti-capitalist. HP.

Daniel Everett himself acknowledges that UG was a good guess for the time that Chomsky initially proposed it and (in the article that you link!) muses on reducing it into general cognition rather than dispensing with it entirely, so I think "scam" is awfully harsh even though Chomsky has definitely boxed himself into a position of crankishly defending ridiculous hypertrophies of his original theories in his old age. (Also we desperately need to get some people in fields other than linguistics studying the Piraha; Everett went full Cristovao Ferreira because of what any competent sociologist of religion would recognize within minutes as a ridiculous and self-contradictory misunderstanding of their attitude towards the supernatural.) Also, I've read Verbal Behavior and it's so onanistic and so divorced from the way people actually communicate that Chomsky tearing it apart would have been a valuable contribution to linguistics even if UG really had been an intentional deception from the beginning.

None of this really matters, though, because Chomsky is an HP for other reasons anyway.

[Upper Canada Tory]

I don't think too much of him. He is a typical overly academized socialist intellectual whose worldview is entirely based on theories and not the practical realities of the real world. I'm not really a fan of his works in linguistics either. Is too anti-Western to the point that he denies atrocities committed by the West's geopolitical adversaries, but I won't get into that too much as others already have discussed this extensively.

[James Monroe]

One of the finest American intellectuals of the 20th/21th century. Challenging the American status quo in a era where it was common for people to stand silent on American atrocities deserves props. The world needs more men such as Chomsky and his late colleague Howard Zinn, who also help change the way we rewrite about history.

[Mr. Smith]

Mixed.

There hasn't been anyone after him that really carries that same intellectual weight, probably because he's the last gen not raised by TV and definitely closer to reality on fp than almost everyone else here...but he does fall into the common "weighing in on things you don't know" trap that a lot of intellectuals make.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

I've heard his linguistics work is genuinely remarkable, and as someone with a passing interest in the topic I'd be curious to check it out.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-chomsky-s-theory-of-language-learning/

The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions. The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique human ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky’s theory for guidance.

[Lexii, harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy]

I've heard his linguistics work is genuinely remarkable, and as someone with a passing interest in the topic I'd be curious to check it out.

His linguistics work is an awful scam which set the field back decades. Advances in the study of poorly-recorded indigenous languages (particularly those in South America) and psychology have both shown his understanding of universal grammar to be horrifically wrong. By contrast, the work others were doing in linguistics at the same time -- particularly Joseph Greenberg's use of mass comparison -- has been hugely vindicated by modern archaeogenetics; more attention given to them would've given us a better understanding of prehistory at an earlier date.

Also, genocide apologist and anti-capitalist. HP.

Daniel Everett himself acknowledges that UG was a good guess for the time that Chomsky initially proposed it and (in the article that you link!) muses on reducing it into general cognition rather than dispensing with it entirely, so I think "scam" is awfully harsh even though Chomsky has definitely boxed himself into a position of crankishly defending ridiculous hypertrophies of his original theories in his old age. (Also we desperately need to get some people in fields other than linguistics studying the Piraha; Everett went full Cristovao Ferreira because of what any competent sociologist of religion would recognize within minutes as a ridiculous and self-contradictory misunderstanding of their attitude towards the supernatural.) Also, I've read Verbal Behavior and it's so onanistic and so divorced from the way people actually communicate that Chomsky tearing it apart would have been a valuable contribution to linguistics even if UG really had been an intentional deception from the beginning.

None of this really matters, though, because Chomsky is an HP for other reasons anyway.

And it's not as if Everett himself is a particularly transparent guy either

Being one of the very few people who speaks Pirahã outside of the tribe themselves has allowed him to make a lot of extremely dubious and radical claims often without much evidence behind them

[Red Velvet]

One of the very few Americans - if not mayyybe the only one - whom I admire 100%, regarding political stances. Revealing how the greatest intellectuals are always hated throughout history for not automatically aligning with propaganda. There’s nothing that is more of a threat than critical thinking.

[Crumpets]

One of the very few Americans - if not mayyybe the only one - whom I admire 100%, regarding political stances. Revealing how the greatest intellectuals are always hated throughout history for not automatically aligning with propaganda. There’s nothing that is more of a threat than critical thinking.

Chomsky is himself a propagandist and aligns himself with fellow propagandists regularly. It's just that most of them aren't from his home country. He rarely travels outside of the western world, gets almost all of his information from highly-filtered second-hand sources, sometimes decades-old ones at that, and then says his claims based on these sources are "obviously true," something which not even the most learned, experienced subject matter expert would try to claim about any sort of philosophical or sociological argument. This is not critical thinking. It's being a mouthpiece.

If you're interested in critically engaging Chomsky's work, I would highly recommend checking out some of the responses by Vlad Vexler (a Russian political philosopher living in the UK) to Chomsky's recent statements on Ukraine and the 2020 election. Unlike a lot of "normie lib" western retorts, he does a very good job at countering Chomsky on his own terms and is generally much more deferential to Chomsky than I know I could ever be, so hopefully it gives you another lens through which to view his work.

[John Dule]

One of the very few Americans - if not mayyybe the only one - whom I admire 100%, regarding political stances. Revealing how the greatest intellectuals are always hated throughout history for not automatically aligning with propaganda. There’s nothing that is more of a threat than critical thinking.

Fascist apologists getting along? Shocking!

[Sol]

I've heard his linguistics work is genuinely remarkable, and as someone with a passing interest in the topic I'd be curious to check it out.

His linguistics work is an awful scam which set the field back decades. Advances in the study of poorly-recorded indigenous languages (particularly those in South America) and psychology have both shown his understanding of universal grammar to be horrifically wrong. By contrast, the work others were doing in linguistics at the same time -- particularly Joseph Greenberg's use of mass comparison -- has been hugely vindicated by modern archaeogenetics; more attention given to them would've given us a better understanding of prehistory at an earlier date.

Also, genocide apologist and anti-capitalist. HP.

Bookmarking this for myself to come back to but this is not really very accurate.

[Sol]

I've heard his linguistics work is genuinely remarkable, and as someone with a passing interest in the topic I'd be curious to check it out.

His linguistics work is an awful scam which set the field back decades. Advances in the study of poorly-recorded indigenous languages (particularly those in South America) and psychology have both shown his understanding of universal grammar to be horrifically wrong. By contrast, the work others were doing in linguistics at the same time -- particularly Joseph Greenberg's use of mass comparison -- has been hugely vindicated by modern archaeogenetics; more attention given to them would've given us a better understanding of prehistory at an earlier date.

Also, genocide apologist and anti-capitalist. HP.

I'm not a syntactician ftr, and I'm not particularly invested in Universal Grammar, but the evidence on Pirahã is quite contested and depends a lot on how you interpret Everett's own documentation (and how reliable you think Everett's work is.) The arguments in favor of the presence of recursion in Pirahã don't seem crazy to me. I've also never really come across a good argument against the Poverty of the Stimulus argument, especially one that would work cross-culturally in contexts where children receive less linguistic stimulus.

On the other hand, Greenberg's work is really incredibly unscientific. It's not that his work is necessarily getting at the wrong things -- like you said, a lot of it corresponds to archaeology and genetics -- but fundamentally it just isn't rigorous. Mass comparison is really not reliable -- there's no way of getting around scientific comparative reconstruction. Part of it frankly, is an understandable but inaccurate desire to fill in blanks in the historical record, especially since comparative reconstruction gets significantly less accurate the further back you go (there's a reason why we don't have a good reconstruction of Proto-Afroasiatic, even though it's pretty uncontroversial).

This gets to be pretty problematic though, because there's a lot of Greenberg's classifications just don't meet the threshold for actual language families, ranging from "seems pretty likely (Na-Dene)" to "maybe but it's hard to say (Papuan)" to "false (like for Nilo-Saharan or Khoisan) to "laughably non-empirical (Indo-Pacific, Eurasiatic)." It's very tempting when suggestive linguistic similarities seem to match up with genetics and archaeology, but you can't just reject basic historical linguistics to read those similarities into the discipline.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

He's a bad man with rather unpleasant politics and has been for a very long time: we do not need to look for recent episodes for confirmation, it is sufficient to see what he has said about Cambodia and Bosnia. None of this has any bearing on his importance as an academic, which is clearly significant even if, like everyone outside his famously Byzantine field*, I can't safely comment on whether he was 'right' in his grand theory or not. Even if he were wrong about that, it would not decrease his importance (as that's not how scholarly life works), much as the those occasions on which he has made reasonable and accurate political statements do not excuse those on which he has exhibited grotesque and dangerous opinions.

_{*No offence intended to the always pretty large number of people on Atlas who are in it.}

[The Mikado]

Everyone else already said everything important else to say but what are all these people in their 90s doing still getting interviewed about this? I had a massive triple-take last year when I saw Jurgen Habermas (!!!) weigh in on Ukraine. Henry Kissinger is nearly 100. I don't recall any time in which so many nonagenarians were hot interviews.

[Blue3]

He seems great at first but then learned about all his inconsistency and flaws.

[MarkD]

I'll bet every time he walks into his favorite bar, all the people in the bar shout "Noam!" Other than that, I don't have anything to think about him.