At Web Summit, November 2022, The father of modern linguistics, Noam Chomsky, joins scientist, author and entrepreneur Gary Marcus for a wide-ranging discussion that touches on why the myths surrounding AI are so dangerous, the inadvisability of relying on artificial intelligence tech as a world-saver, and where it all went wrong.
Chomsky condemned the US ground invasion and carpet bombing of Kampuchea, which destabilized the country and I'm guessing the mass death of civilians from does not fit into your genocide definition.
In 1975 the coalition led, nominally or not, by Sihanouk gained control of Kampuchea (again, in the case of Sihanouk). The US and west said a genocide was happening between 1975 and 1979, but immediately somewhat covertly, and then openly, began arming the coalition with Pol Pot and what the west called the Khmer Rouge.
Read the section on Chomsky. I have no desire to engage with someone who does not acknowledge what Chomsky himself admitted. It is the equivalent of saying that Jews were lying about the Holocaust because the allies happened to be the ones who liberated them
I read this and Chomsky says what I said - the civilian deaths due to the US ground invasion and carpet bombing are ignored.
Also, as I said, the US began arming the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and began openly arming them in the 1980s. So if the Khmer Rouge had committed a genocide, then that's who the US was arming to put back in power.
I also changed the title to take out "Great AI Lie", which is obvious linkabit. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."
If anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
Chomsky fits the original definition including his absurd defense of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Also the fact he equates democracies and dictatorships and denies the idea that people have a right to freedom or say, to not be victims of genocide.
It's become obvious he's just been a Russian asset all these years...
These get trotted out without citations and it's boring each time.
Chomsky supports Biden supplying arms to Ukraine, but also wants him to negotiate with Putin to end the war. He has also called Putins action despicable but predictable. People get their panties in a bunch because he said it was predictable which is blasphemy for those following the religion of the state.
He also points out American aggression elsewhere, which is considered evil by folks like you.
> Prior to Putin’s invasion there were options based generally on the Minsk agreements that might well have averted the crime. There is unresolved debate about whether Ukraine accepted these agreements. At least verbally, Russia appears to have done so up until not long before the invasion. The U.S. dismissed them in favor of integrating Ukraine into the NATO (that is, U.S.) military command, also refusing to take any Russian security concerns into consideration, as conceded. These moves were accelerated under Biden. Could diplomacy have succeeded in averting the tragedy? There was only one way to find out: Try. The option was ignored.
> At the very least, the U.S. could withdraw its insistence on sustaining the war to weaken Russia, thus barring the way to diplomacy.
> Talk of nuclear weapons has been mostly in the West. Russia has reiterated the universal position of nuclear states: that they might resort to nuclear weapons in the event of a threat to survival.
> Well, one thing the United States can do is stop acting like that, stop — drop the position, the official position, that the war must go on to weaken Russia severely, meaning no negotiations. Would that open the way to negotiations, diplomacy? Can’t be sure. There’s only one way to find out. That’s to try. If you don’t try, of course it won’t happen.
Almost everything he's said about the war is that it's the US' fault the war is still happening, repeated a bunch of Russian propaganda about the evils of the west and nothing about the Ukrainians' right to self-determination and self-defence.
Ummm ... Thanks for confirming exactly what I said
"Chomsky supports Biden supplying arms to Ukraine, but also wants him to negotiate with Putin to end the war. He has also called Putins action despicable but predictable. People get their panties in a bunch because he said it was predictable which is blasphemy for those following the religion of the state. He also points out American aggression elsewhere, which is considered evil by folks like you."
Nothing you have cited contradicts what I have said and confirms several of the points I made. Chomsky wants Biden to negotiate for peace. An advice which Biden has apparently heeded -
"Biden Says He Is Willing to Talk to Putin About Ukraine, With Conditions"
Are you going to call Biden anti-american now that he has heeded Chomsky's advice.
Of course not!
The real crime of Chomsky has always been and will be "the act of blasphemy" against "the religion of state power". Which must be heeded without questioning at all costs. The sermons will be delivered via CNN and must be hastily adhered to. If Biden negotiates with Putin in the future this wouldn't be anti-American (unlike Chomsky) because CNN and WSJ will inform us that it is so - after all Biden is the representative of the state.
You already confirmed several of the points I made. Thanks for digging up the citations. You did not provide a citation for when Noam Chomsky called Putin's acts despicable. So, I will provide you with one.
"On February 24th, Putin invaded, a criminal invasion. These serious provocations provide no justification for it. If Putin had been a statesman, what he would have done is something quite different. He would have gone back to French President Emmanuel Macron, grasped his tentative proposals, and moved to try to reach an accommodation with Europe, to take steps toward a European common home."
In fact, I will go further and elaborate more on the quotes that you have excerpted.
"The U.S., of course, has always been opposed to that. This goes way back in Cold War history to French President De Gaulle’s initiatives to establish an independent Europe. In his phrase “from the Atlantic to the Urals,” integrating Russia with the West, which was a very natural accommodation for trade reasons and, obviously, security reasons as well. So, had there been any statesmen within Putin’s narrow circle, they would have grasped Macron’s initiatives and experimented to see whether, in fact, they could integrate with Europe and avert the crisis. Instead, what he chose was a policy which, from the Russian point of view, was total imbecility. Apart from the criminality of the invasion, he chose a policy that drove Europe deep into the pocket of the United States. In fact, it is even inducing Sweden and Finland to join NATO — the worst possible outcome from the Russian point of view, quite apart from the criminality of the invasion, and the very serious losses that Russia is suffering because of that.
So, criminality and stupidity on the Kremlin side, severe provocation on the U.S. side. That’s the background that has led to this. Can we try to bring this horror to an end? Or should we try to perpetuate it? Those are the choices.
There’s only one way to bring it to an end. That’s diplomacy. Now, diplomacy, by definition, means both sides accept it. They don’t like it, but they accept it as the least bad option. It would offer Putin some kind of escape hatch. That’s one possibility. The other is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many ...
Chomsky is saying what he has basically been saying for a while - deep learning neural networks are "strong" (as he called it) in engineering, but "weak" in being scientific.
Chomsky’s gotta hate all forms of reinforcement learning successes. After all, what else are those if not the proof that his arch enemy BF Skinner was right.
Chomsky came to fame by criticizing Skinner’s book “Verbal behavior“, arguing, there was more to language and intelligence than statistics. Now here we are, 30 years after Skinner’s death, and the closest thing we have to general artificial intelligence is based exactly on what Skinner described.
Ot once you consider paucity of the stimulus arguments and compare the data ingested (though also compute isn't there to match the brain yet so it is possible that goes away with more compute).
> the closest thing we have to general artificial intelligence is based exactly on what Skinner described.
Didn't know about Skinner's book. My thoughts on encountering ChatGPT were exactly the same: this is statistics and not reasoning, yet it is truly powerful, in explicable ways.
22 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 57.1 ms ] threadIn 1975 the coalition led, nominally or not, by Sihanouk gained control of Kampuchea (again, in the case of Sihanouk). The US and west said a genocide was happening between 1975 and 1979, but immediately somewhat covertly, and then openly, began arming the coalition with Pol Pot and what the west called the Khmer Rouge.
Read the section on Chomsky. I have no desire to engage with someone who does not acknowledge what Chomsky himself admitted. It is the equivalent of saying that Jews were lying about the Holocaust because the allies happened to be the ones who liberated them
Also, as I said, the US began arming the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and began openly arming them in the 1980s. So if the Khmer Rouge had committed a genocide, then that's who the US was arming to put back in power.
I also changed the title to take out "Great AI Lie", which is obvious linkabit. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."
If anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
Chomsky is insufferable.
It's become obvious he's just been a Russian asset all these years...
Chomsky supports Biden supplying arms to Ukraine, but also wants him to negotiate with Putin to end the war. He has also called Putins action despicable but predictable. People get their panties in a bunch because he said it was predictable which is blasphemy for those following the religion of the state.
He also points out American aggression elsewhere, which is considered evil by folks like you.
> Prior to Putin’s invasion there were options based generally on the Minsk agreements that might well have averted the crime. There is unresolved debate about whether Ukraine accepted these agreements. At least verbally, Russia appears to have done so up until not long before the invasion. The U.S. dismissed them in favor of integrating Ukraine into the NATO (that is, U.S.) military command, also refusing to take any Russian security concerns into consideration, as conceded. These moves were accelerated under Biden. Could diplomacy have succeeded in averting the tragedy? There was only one way to find out: Try. The option was ignored.
> At the very least, the U.S. could withdraw its insistence on sustaining the war to weaken Russia, thus barring the way to diplomacy.
> Talk of nuclear weapons has been mostly in the West. Russia has reiterated the universal position of nuclear states: that they might resort to nuclear weapons in the event of a threat to survival.
https://therealnews.com/noam-chomsky-ukraine-climate-crisis-...
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/10/10/noam_chomsky_vijay_p...
> Well, one thing the United States can do is stop acting like that, stop — drop the position, the official position, that the war must go on to weaken Russia severely, meaning no negotiations. Would that open the way to negotiations, diplomacy? Can’t be sure. There’s only one way to find out. That’s to try. If you don’t try, of course it won’t happen.
https://newpol.org/interview-on-the-war-in-ukraine-with-noam...
And so on...
Almost everything he's said about the war is that it's the US' fault the war is still happening, repeated a bunch of Russian propaganda about the evils of the west and nothing about the Ukrainians' right to self-determination and self-defence.
"Chomsky supports Biden supplying arms to Ukraine, but also wants him to negotiate with Putin to end the war. He has also called Putins action despicable but predictable. People get their panties in a bunch because he said it was predictable which is blasphemy for those following the religion of the state. He also points out American aggression elsewhere, which is considered evil by folks like you."
Nothing you have cited contradicts what I have said and confirms several of the points I made. Chomsky wants Biden to negotiate for peace. An advice which Biden has apparently heeded -
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/us/politics/biden-macron-...
"Biden Says He Is Willing to Talk to Putin About Ukraine, With Conditions"
Are you going to call Biden anti-american now that he has heeded Chomsky's advice.
Of course not!
The real crime of Chomsky has always been and will be "the act of blasphemy" against "the religion of state power". Which must be heeded without questioning at all costs. The sermons will be delivered via CNN and must be hastily adhered to. If Biden negotiates with Putin in the future this wouldn't be anti-American (unlike Chomsky) because CNN and WSJ will inform us that it is so - after all Biden is the representative of the state.
You already confirmed several of the points I made. Thanks for digging up the citations. You did not provide a citation for when Noam Chomsky called Putin's acts despicable. So, I will provide you with one.
https://chomsky.info/20220616/
"On February 24th, Putin invaded, a criminal invasion. These serious provocations provide no justification for it. If Putin had been a statesman, what he would have done is something quite different. He would have gone back to French President Emmanuel Macron, grasped his tentative proposals, and moved to try to reach an accommodation with Europe, to take steps toward a European common home."
In fact, I will go further and elaborate more on the quotes that you have excerpted.
"The U.S., of course, has always been opposed to that. This goes way back in Cold War history to French President De Gaulle’s initiatives to establish an independent Europe. In his phrase “from the Atlantic to the Urals,” integrating Russia with the West, which was a very natural accommodation for trade reasons and, obviously, security reasons as well. So, had there been any statesmen within Putin’s narrow circle, they would have grasped Macron’s initiatives and experimented to see whether, in fact, they could integrate with Europe and avert the crisis. Instead, what he chose was a policy which, from the Russian point of view, was total imbecility. Apart from the criminality of the invasion, he chose a policy that drove Europe deep into the pocket of the United States. In fact, it is even inducing Sweden and Finland to join NATO — the worst possible outcome from the Russian point of view, quite apart from the criminality of the invasion, and the very serious losses that Russia is suffering because of that.
So, criminality and stupidity on the Kremlin side, severe provocation on the U.S. side. That’s the background that has led to this. Can we try to bring this horror to an end? Or should we try to perpetuate it? Those are the choices.
There’s only one way to bring it to an end. That’s diplomacy. Now, diplomacy, by definition, means both sides accept it. They don’t like it, but they accept it as the least bad option. It would offer Putin some kind of escape hatch. That’s one possibility. The other is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many ...
Chomsky came to fame by criticizing Skinner’s book “Verbal behavior“, arguing, there was more to language and intelligence than statistics. Now here we are, 30 years after Skinner’s death, and the closest thing we have to general artificial intelligence is based exactly on what Skinner described.
Didn't know about Skinner's book. My thoughts on encountering ChatGPT were exactly the same: this is statistics and not reasoning, yet it is truly powerful, in explicable ways.
PV=nRt