Chomsky has interesting ideas whether you fully agree or not.<p>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.<p>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".
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”<p>― Albert Einstein<p><a href="http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/28/bicycle/" rel="nofollow">http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/28/bicycle/</a>
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.<p>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.
>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.<p>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?
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?