• non_burglar@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    He had some interesting ideas about language development in the 70s which have mostly been debunked since (by people who actually knew what they were talking about).

    Noam Chomspky has always been a blowhard.

    • KyxFuddib@tarte.nuage-libre.fr
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      7 hours ago

      lol, that’s just fake. Go have a look at the Chomsky wikipedia article, he has proposed a revolutionary view on the linguistic science. His work is fundamental in the natural language processing science, except for LLM.

      beside that he is an anarchist with great takes on how mainstream media is manipulating opinion. A very interesting person.

      I was very sad to learn that he was friend with Epstein though…

      • non_burglar@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        lol, that’s just fake.

        Look, of you’re going to quote Wikipedia on Chomsky, at least do some of the required reading:

        • Chomsky publicly reviled Bolchevism, yet actively advocated for a “social revolution” using the exact same mechanisms. When questioned in a recorded interview on this point in 1974, he got up and left.
        • Speaking of old-world, anticapitalist “social renegade” behaviour, he famously endorsed Mao Tse Tung and Fidel Castro as aspirational figures. Many of the 60s left were led astray by these figures, but Chomsky was one of the stubborn few who refused to recant their support, even after it became apparent that both had been revealed to be as power-hungry as the establishments they claimed to fight.

        “When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung’s “relatively livable” and “just society,” Chomsky was probably unaware he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history.”

        Chomsky also continued to crow about the stellar merits of USSR agricultural output, and when presented with the discovery that they had forged the numbers in an effort to appear more productive, he did not change this support.

        Anecdotally, I studied linguistics in the late 90s and we were specifically prohibited from quoting Chomsky in my syntax, phonology, and semantics courses. That’s how much respect he commanded in the actual academic community. Thirty years ago.

        • frongt@lemmy.zip
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          6 hours ago

          *Chomsky. Chompsky in the gnome in HL2, who does not appear in the Epstein files, so I will not have you sully his good name.

    • AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      I studied linguistics in the 90s, and that was the general attitude about Chomsky then (specifically universal grammar and to some extent X-bar theory—his work on generative syntax and formal grammar from the 50s was still considered foundational).

      But I’ve lately discovered the research of the Minimalist program that he was working on for the last few decades, and that seems pretty solid and cutting-edge.