Noam Chomsky, 95, ‘no longer able to talk’ as intellectual’s ‘health deteriorates’
Noam Chomsky, 95, ‘no longer able to talk’ as intellectual’s ‘health deteriorates’
Former assistant confirmed academic was no longer ‘ambulatory’
Will be forever beholden to his work on language and grammar. Made it bearable to sit through a pointless CompSci class.
Such a towering figure in the field of linguistics, politics and philosophy of psychology. Especially his linguistics work was something I found personally extremely engaging as a student. Reading his review of B.F. Skinner's book was a highlight of my philosophy of psychology class.
I know he has been active since the turn of the century but his influence was definitely more of a 20th century phenomenon. Not many academics reach the level of popular awareness that he did.
For you yongsters out there, Chomsky vs Skinner was the original Kendrick Lamar vs Drake.
Very sad to see our mortality as we watch Chomsky slip away. Let's celebrate his life and his accomplishments - our eventual deterioration and demise is all a part of our grand story of life. He's done amazing things with his time here and we'd all be lucky to have 95 great years like that.
Let's celebrate his life and his accomplishments
I'm a big fan of his work in the field of genocide denial and atrocity apologetics, truly inspirational.
It doesn’t sound like there’s necessarily been any recent change in his condition—their ultimate source is a month-old Reddit post from his former assistant, who was relaying information she’d heard from his family a month prior to that.
Edit: This AP story has more info: he hasn’t been able to speak since a stroke last year, but he was able to travel to Brazil with his wife via hospital jet and is still following the news from Gaza.
A few months is still recent for people not following his health closely.
True, but even the info from the family member was just confirming that his condition hadn’t improved since the “medical event” he suffered a full year ago.
I am a professional academic linguist, and make no mistake, whether you are a Chomskyan or a Functionalist, Papa Noam (as we used to call him in grad school) is one of the most important figures in the field for the last 100 years. Perhaps the most important. I wish him well and will be sad when he eventually passes.
That's to say nothing of his political endeavors.
If I may ask, what do you do as a professional academic linguist? Sounds like a interesting and niche field.
The more common definition of "linguist" is effectively "translator", i.e. someone who is a native speaker of language X but can also speak language Y. That's also the military definition.
In terms of the study of linguistics, in academia you can have a great many "linguists" who are not translators but are versed in the science of linguistics and can e.g. do grammatical analysis. It's an entirely different skillset from "translator", and in fact, one doesn't need to speak language Y to do it.
So, mostly I'm differentiating myself from the translator-type linguist and saying I'm the linguistics-type linguist. And because I also do that for a living, I added professional.
You changed my life Mister Chomsky. Thank you
We're all lucky he said as much as he did while he could speak.
Oh hey, I saw something by accident that I can contribute here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWKQIqzotLQ
It's a video response from Chomsky's current collaborators telling off these journalists for announcing a private health matter to the public & making it harder for Chomsky & his family & emphasising that even now into his 90s he is doing cutting-edge much-discussed intellectual work and that is the real news.
so who do we email now?
Nonononono
Aww man poor guy. I will never forget when he showed up on the Ali G show lol
Saw his Manufacturing Consent documentary and it is pretty good
Is he an idol for young people, but then later in life not any more? Politically?
Such an interesting and weird life to have lived. Academically, he lived to see almost his entire body of work thoroughly disrupted by LLMs, specifically the concept of an universal grammar/ and the idea of an 'innate language acquisition device'. I was in a live stream with him about 2 months or so after the first beta models from open AI had started to poke their way into the main-stream. It felt kind of sad, because its like, he was obviously very long in the tooth even then, but when your entire academic career is based on like "one thing", as so many scientists and philosophers careers are, when that 'one thing' ends up being demonstrably false, it seems kind of.. soul crushing? I saw it once before when the revised genomic classification of plants was being released and one of my professors (who i think was like, 1-2 years out from retirement), watched his life time body of work of taxonomic classification get "yeah nah dawged" by the revised genomic taxonomy. I'll say he was not the most engaged instructor and actually insisted on teaching us wrong, which was super aggravating.
I still think Chomskys political work stands apart as a life well lived.
This comment is global-warming-denialism levels of stupid. I’m honestly shocked.
LLM’s have no such implications for the field of linguistics. They’re barely relevant at all.
Do I really need to point out that human beings do not learn language the way LLMs “learn” language? That human beings do not use language the way LLM’s use language? Or that human beings are not mathematical models. Not even approximately. I fucking hate this timeline.
Thank you for saying it. That really was a depressingly incurious comment.
Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull on the topic: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html
Suppose you are holding an apple in your hand. Now you let the apple go. You observe the result and say, “The apple falls.” That is a description. A prediction might have been the statement “The apple will fall if I open my hand.” Both are valuable, and both can be correct. But an explanation is something more: It includes not only descriptions and predictions but also counterfactual conjectures like “Any such object would fall,” plus the additional clause “because of the force of gravity” or “because of the curvature of space-time” or whatever. That is a causal explanation: “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking.
I'm not saying this from a defending LLMs point, I genuinely think they are a waste of so many things in this world and I can't wait for this hype cycle to be over.
However, there is a lot of research and backing behind statistical learning in language acquisition, this is specifically the research subject of my friends. It's a very big thing in intervention for delays in language.
It is opposed to Chomsky's innate language theory, which at this point I think almost any linguist or language/speech sciences researcher would tell you isn't a well accepted theory (at least as a holistic explanation, certainly it could still be true to an extent and a part of other systems).
tl;Dr LLMs are stupid, but it's not broadly true that the way they "learn language" is entirely different from how humans do. The real difference is that they fail to actually learn anything even when imitating humans.
This would be true if chomskys claim was that he was simply studying human language acquisition and that machines are different, but his claim was that machines can't learn human languages because they don't have some intuitive innate grammar.
Saying an llm hasn't learned language becomes harder and harder the more you talk to it and the more it starts walking like a duck and quacking like a duck. To make that claim you'll need some evidence to counter the demonstrable understanding the llm displays. Chomsky in his nytimes response just gives his own unprovable theories on innate grammar and some examples of questions llms "can't answer" but if you actually ask any modern llm they answer them fine.
You can define "learning" and "understanding" in a way that excludes llms but you'll end up relying upon unprovable abstract theories until you can come up with an example of a question/prompt that any human would answer correctly and llms won't to demonstrate that difference. I have yet to see any such examples. There's plenty of evidence of them hallucinating when they reach the edge of their understanding, but that is something humans do as well.
Chomsky is still a very important figure and his work on politics with manufacturing consent is just as relevant as when it was written over 20 years ago. His work on language though is on shaky grounds and llms have made it even shakier.
Universal grammar isn’t “almost his entire body of work”—for the last thirty years he’s been at the forefront of the Minimalist program which approaches syntax from a very different direction. (And for twenty years prior to that he was working on X-bar theory, which was also a departure from universal grammar.) He’d still be considered one of the leading linguists of the past century on the strength of his non-UG work alone.
And Chomsky’s criticism of LLMs as a model of the brain’s internal language process is absolutely valid: while LLMs can imitate human languages, they can just as readily imitate unnatural constructed languages humans would never organically create. So they’re (at best) post-hoc predictive models, not explanatory ones—like Ptolemy’s epicycles, which could accurately predict the motions of the known planets but couldn’t generally distinguish between physically possible orbits and ones that would violate Newtonian mechanics, and thus provided no real insight into the natural world.
I'd say his language theories had already been sufficiently challenged way before the advent of LLMs. But it's hard to deny that they helped to lay the groundwork for what we know about linguistics today, even if they weren't proven out in the end.
Two of my favorite Chomsky moments are his interview with Brian McGee and his debate with Foucault.
what an awful thing to write .
Tell us, what do you plan to do in life that someone won’t do better in future ?
