The breadth and depth of Noam Chomsky’s wrongness must be marvelled at. Within and without his professed area of expertise he is so skilled a sponsor of untruth that, in some future world, whole virtual shelves will be devoted to studies of how it happened that so many of his peers were willing to stir clouds of his intellectual poison into so many streams of scholarship.
Today I was reading Computing Reviews in the Campus library and came upon a short piece about a new book from MIT Press containing academic reflections on the Turing Test (TT). Turing had a great mind and used it to assist one of the most noble struggles in history: the fight against Nazism. His eponymous test is (apart from anything else) a piercing thought experiment, so it is unsurprising that in The Turing Test: verbal behaviour as a hallmark of intelligence, the philosopher and fan of thought experiments Daniel Dennett defends the TT against contemporary critics. He argues in his contribution to the book that it “would be hard to find a better intelligence test than the TT”.
That’s true, but that doesn’t mean the test is a good one. I have always had reservations about the TT as a measure of the ability of an artificial being truly to think, but cannot deny its power as a measure of our ability to think about the nature of intelligence. Reading on further, I felt certain that I would have to discard my reservations, however. In the same volume “Chomsky states that passing the TT is irrelevant for the problem of thinking”. Chomsky is as sure a touchstone of opinion for me as the Daily Mail. Perhaps Turing was perfectly correct all along.
I’m not particularly surprised by your hostility to Chomsky, but here is a link to what he says about the Turing Test:
http://www.southendpress.org/books/p&pex.shtml
If you felt like perusing his thought on the matter, you might generate something more interesting than the banal thoughts you have recorded here.
Thank you. I’ve followed your link and perused Chomsky’s thought on the matter. It’s banal.
Hi PG,
Good to see you back in the saddle again.
Regards,
James
Why does this post make me think of this?
All hail the return of The Geek!! Knew you couldn’t keep away.
Myself tends to drift into typical liberal thought-experience, (not an experiment, much-more a pattern of habitual handwringing brought on by years of indoctrination) over whether poor little Gnome Chomsky as a child was teased so horribly into becoming the poisonous troll that he grew up to be… And then I realize assigning blame on his poor behavior doesn’t matter or address the incubator in which he still thrives. Welcome back.
I’m not sure whether this means I am fortunate or simply philistine but I don’t think I’ve ever heard or read the thoughts of Chomsky on anything at all. (Well, except in Oliver Kamm posts and I try manfully to keep my exposure to them to a minimum).
Yep, there isn’t a layer of the abyss deep enough for the tatters of Chomsky’s soul. Just thinking about him I reflexively start singing Sympathy for the Devil.
Chomsky and Herman attempted to cast doubt on the reports of the brutal, forced evacuation of Pnomh Penh by the Khmer Rouge. The reports, written by Sidney Schanberg of The New York Times and Jon Swain of The Times (London), were based solely on personal observation from their refuge in the French embassy. Schanberg and Swain observed numerous bizarre details, including the crippled and severely wounded being forced to crawl or being wheeled in their hospital beds by their relatives out into the countryside. But Chomsky and Herman are not convinced. They have managed to come across an important, hitherto undiscovered document which casts the whole issue in a new light. It is nothing less than News From Kampuchea, a broadsheet published by Khmer Rouge sympathizers living in Australia. In this important publication Chomsky and Herman have found a very different account of the evacuation. It is by the noted authority Shane Tarr and his wife Chou Meng, New Zealand residents whose principal claim to fame is the pro-Pol Pot newsletter they co-edit. The Tarrs also claim to have participated in the long march out of Phnom Penh into the countryside, but after three days returned (or were returned) to the French Embassy to await their deportation from the country. The Tarrs claimed that the march was not forced, that everyone was willing to go, and that there was no suffering or executions as the insidious Western press reported. They were happy to have been able to participate in the “wonderful” revolution. And Chomsky and Herman found them to be more credible and reliable than the journalists who observed the Khmer Rouge atrocities.
The fact that you would reassess your own views on a topic simply because someone you dislike happens to agree with you is a little worrying.
I would have thought reassessing your views based on the facts and analysis would be a much more worthy approach.
Essentially you’re exactly the same as all the enthusiastic left wingers who adopt Chomsky’s ideas simply because they’re exactly that…’Chomsky’s’ ideas.
This post begins by pointing out that Chomsky has been seriously (and demonstrably) wrong about a great many things, including important questions in his own area of academic research. If one of your classmates is consistently bad at calculus and you find that you have come to the same answer as him for a particular question in an assignment then—as you’d rightly argue—it doesn’t necessarily mean that your answer is wrong, but you’d be foolish not to go back and check your working.
“it doesn’t necessarily mean that your answer is wrong, but you’d be foolish not to go back and check your working.”
Which I assume you’ve done? And what was your conclusion?
Or was this post just an excuse for an unsubstantiated attack on Chomsky? Because I saw nothing of real value in it at all.
I have to agree with the first reply. Your post was banal. You provided nothing interesting or substantial. Seems to me it was just another commonplace hollow attack on a popular and controversial academic, which in my mind puts you on an even par with the commonplace hollow supporters who mindlessly quote Chomsky as the answer to all questions.
But then I tend to judge ideas on their merit, not their source.
No. As with most things here, it was an excuse for a joke.
Fine. Go elsewhere. Plenty of other people see some value in PooterGeek and come back every day because of it.
Interestingly, unlike your previous comment, there is nothing but unsubstantiated opinion in this one.
No, you don’t. None of us does. In certain cases we evaluate conclusions from first principles (an unchecked proof from a student); in others we take certain intermediate steps as read (a proof in a peer-reviewed mathematical journal). We simply don’t have enough time in our short lives to judge every idea on its merits.
In this case, the difficult question of a suitable test for intelligence, you can’t just “go back and check your working” because reaching a conclusion about it is not a mechanical process. You compare different arguments and reflect on them. This takes time. I, like everyone else not directly involved in the study of AI, can only take a sampling of the relevant literature and evaluate the various claims made in it.
One sensible way of saving time is to avoid the output of cranks; one way to reach more robust conclusions is to be suspicious of work published, as you would put it, on the basis of its source rather than its merit. I believe that Chomsky is an unreliable source, but a famous one. This post is not an attempt to persuade anyone else of that belief; it’s an ironic reflection on how that belief affected my thought processes one day.
If you want a detailed critique of Chomsky’s ideas then read an academic publication. If you want to read something serious by me then google my academic publications. If you want to sneer unproductively then go somewhere else.
One substantial thing that is worth pointing out is that, just as there was never any physiological or physical correlate for the élan vital of the vitalists, there is not to my knowledge solid evidence of any neurophysiological or physical correlate of the supposedly innate mechanisms underlying Chomsky’s grammar(s). If you really want to be scientific, rather than just pose in annoying way, then the simple fact is it’s still Chomsky and his followers who (literally) have to do the substantiating, not me.
“Interestingly, unlike your previous comment, there is nothing but unsubstantiated opinion in this one.”
And stated thusly. Unlike your original comment.
“One sensible way of saving time is to avoid the output of cranks; one way to reach more robust conclusions is to be suspicious of work published, as you would put it, on the basis of its source rather than its merit.”
One way of closing your mind to the possibility that you could be wrong is to ignore or avoid views that oppose your own. It’s easy to dismiss people as cranks when they hold views that clash with yours and its easy to dismiss their views once you’ve dismissed them as a crank. For every academic who thinks Chomsky is a fool, there are those who believe the opposite, including within his chosen field. In this case, I hardly think ‘crank’ is a fair assessment.
I’m just worried that your ‘thought process’ is so easily swayed by the person rather than the idea.
It seems to me that this kind of personal ‘point scoring’ that is so readily apparent in academic culture is at the least, counterproductive, and at the most a pathetic display of humankind’s obsession with social status.
“If you want to sneer unproductively then go somewhere else.”
Ironic, in that this is exactly what your original post was doing, and exactly what I was pointing out. Essentially, whether or not my suggestion is productive is completely in your hands.
I’m still waiting for you to show me where I claimed otherwise.
That might have been a clever thing for you to say if the whole point of the original post hadn’t been that Chomsky’s view was the same as mine.
I don’t think Chomsky is a crank and I didn’t say he was. I called him an “unreliable source”.
One running theme here is my contempt for social status, especially within science. That’s one of the great strengths of the discipline. Despite Chomsky’s high “social status” within certain branches of academia, most experimental scientists have no interest in him at all. Until you can measure some aspect of it, and everyone else can measure it too, an idea is more like theology than science. Given the lack of hard evidence for any of his claims, Chomsky is lucky I bother to skim the abstracts of his papers.
I think producing laughs is a measurable output. And, unlike the sort of person who begins sentences with the word “essentially” in effort to sound weighty, people usually laugh at me because I want them too.
Take it from a failed scientist: big words and a lofty tone don’t make you a great thinker. In science your theories are tested by the greatest crusher of egos there is: nature. You can’t score points against the real world. If Chomksy had been an experimentalist then he might be a little more humble in general and you might have a case for my reading him.
The only person who has submitted any relevant scientific content to this debate is me. Who’s the point-scorer?
“Despite Chomsky’s high “social status” within certain branches of academia, most experimental scientists have no interest in him at all.”
While I have no desire to draw this out into a discussion that could go on forever, what the hell are you talking about?
Firstly that comment has absolutely no grounding in fact whatsoever, and I challenge you to prove it. Like you say “Until you can measure some aspect of it, and everyone else can measure it too, an idea is more like theology than science.” Which would make your comment, what? Theology?
Please.
I understand the difference between theoretical and experimental science. I also understand the importance of both. The tone of your comment implies that somehow the opinions of ‘experimental’ scientists are weightier and more credible than those of a more theoretical nature, which is absolute crap. It’s also yet another example of an obsession with social status inherent in academia.
“You can’t score points against the real world.”
And you propose to know what the real world is, yes? What arrogance. If we can’t measure it, it mustn’t exist and it isn’t worth thinking about yeah? Shall we go back throughout humankind’s history and look at the way theoretical science and philosophy have driven some of the most important discoveries of our very brief existence? Because we CAN measure that!
“The only person who has submitted any relevant scientific content to this debate is me. Who’s the point-scorer?”
I’m not debating Chomsky’s work here. Either were you in your original comment, and that’s part of the problem. It was a cheap shot, and it was devoid of any substance whatsoever. Some people may find that amusing. I don’t. But I agree…it certainly is a joke.
Check out his Wikipedia entry. It seems pretty comprehensive to me and, as I said at the very beginning, Chomsky’s had his finger in a lot of pies, but the only quasi-scientific fields it mentions his influence on are linguistics, computer science, and psychology. There’s absolutely no mention of neuroscience (though I’ve got to concede there is a mention of his inspiring some of Jerne’s ideas in immunology).
You’d expect, given the current power of brain imaging techniques, the huge interest of these experimentalists you’ve hallucinated, and the nature of Chomsky’s theories, someone might have identified the loci of these “innate”, “modular”, and of course “universal” brain activities by now. It’d have been front page news in Nature, dontcha think?
Now, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find me an experimental result from the hard sciences that confirms one of Chomsky’s substantial theories of linguistics over his critics’.
The “opinions” of experimental scientists are more likely to have been tested so (in general) they are weightier and more credible. It’s the exact opposite of “an obsession with social status”; it’s an obsession with evidence. In science, the grandest theoretician can be brought down by data collected by the lowliest student—something a lot less likely to happen in, for example, historical research.
I could devise a theory of human language development tomorrow that posits the existence of tiny pixies in your brain. Until people can observe these pixies under a microscope it’s just a theory (and I would rightly be thought a crank).
I’m not dismissing theoretical scientists, but most, say, theoretical physicists who have been working as long as Chomsky would expect to have some hard experimental support for their ideas by now. The longer a theoretician goes without that support, the harder it is to take him seriously.
Er, no. But if it’s easier for you to argue with something I didn’t write then please, be my guest. Goodness knows you need all the help you can get.
I thought that’s what you wanted me to do. It’s funny how people come here from time to time huffily demanding that I get serious about something, then, when I do, they get upset at having to support their claims with evidence and having to build robust arguments.
It was indeed, as I have pointed out repeatedly, a cheap shot. But you’ve just spent a lot on trying to shoot it down and simply made yourself look a fool.
Don’t meddle in the affairs of clowns, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
“Now, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find me an experimental result from the hard sciences that confirms one of Chomsky’s substantial theories of linguistics over his critics’.”
No, if we’re running with your previous post here, my mission would be to find an experimentalist who has an ‘interest’ in him. At any rate, YOU made the claim. YOU prove it. Unless you can measure it adequately I’ll be forced to assume you’re a crank. Isn’t that how it works?
“It’s the exact opposite of “an obsession with social status”; it’s an obsession with evidence.”
“Until people can observe these pixies under a microscope it’s just a theory (and I would rightly be thought a crank).”
And if someone dismissed your pixie theory just because you said it, then I’d be having the same discussion with them. You can attempt to redefine the boundaries of the discussion all you like. I’ve made my point pretty clear. Your original post virtually implied that Chomsky was pretty much wrong on everything he’s ever said or done, and that because he held a certain view that paralleled your own then this was a good reason to reassess it. I think that’s a ridiculous mindset and it was an excuse for a cheap shot at him personally, not scientifically.
“Er, no. But if it’s easier for you to argue with something I didn’t write then please, be my guest.”
You’re basically saying if something can’t be measured then it’s not worth your time. I’m basically saying that not everything can be measured. Whether that’s a temporary truth or a universal one, well that’s another discussion. And a philosophical one at that.
Nevertheless it has little baring on my original reason for posting. The only reason I even moved slightly towards defending Chomsky’s credentials was to highlight the fact he wasn’t a ‘crank’. You implied that one of the ways you weed out useless information is by identifying its source as a crank or unreliable. I’ve made no claims relating to Chomsky’s work. As far as I can tell you’ve been the one making all the claims.