this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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What is Noam Chompsky or Daniel Elsburg. If you ever have a conversation with folks like this, you know there is a level of genius that is unbelievable
Never heard of the latter guy, the former had some interesting takes on linguistics which had seminal importance in CS, the rest of what he says is pretty much genocide denial after genocide denial.
Lol wut
Kraut has a video in it. Well, actually more about the Bosnian one other highlights not mentioned include the Red Khmer and Rwanda. Ukraine I think, too, at least he's defending the Russians.
He doesn't defend the Russians. He just makes the point that what they're doing is equally as bad as what the US has been doing for decades.
I see this shit about Chomsky being regurgitated like once a week somewhere, and every time I actually read the source material that someone like a YouTuber is referring to, I just come to the realization that people can't read for shit and don't understand philosophy and hypotheticals.
Not that I do, but Chomsky is definitely not full of shit, nor a genocide denier.
Just skimmed his position on Ukraine and it's the ole "only diplomacy will end the war" thing, ie. he ends up regurgitating Kremlin propaganda. Nah, Russia's economical and political collapse will end it because Russians won't have the collective will to get rid of Putin before that.
He somewhat relented on the Red Khmer issue in retrospect but defended how he came to the initial conclusion, which is how he managed to repeat and repeat the same mistake again. The shit he said about Bosnia as far as I'm aware he never corrected even in parts and you shouldn't even ever *begin" to refer to starving concentration camp inmates behind barbed wire as "thin guys".
I understand when USians value him for writing Manufacturing Consent (and I'll lump Canucks into that category because broader political sphere), but there's also a fucking reason he's persona non grata in Europe.
Thanks. I've never seen this misinformation before now.
I believe the point is to dispel myths about geniuses. I don't know about Elsburg but wouldn't you say Chomsky is both a specialist (linguist and politics) while being working very hard? He is 95y/o and STILL working affiliated to institutions like MIT or University of Arizona, publishing, answering interviews, writing reviews, etc.
How I interpret it is that he is putting such amount efforts in such a concentrated fashion, probably even strategically, that it is "normal" that he is so good relatively to the vast majority of people. He did not became so knowledgeable by "just" being.
I don't think most people could have the same capacity to store the knowledge in their brain (with immediate recall) no matter how hard they worked.
I bet, but that's just my intuition, that being a linguist and an academic, again just by the very practice of having to study the tool that is language and writing about it, makes it a very different situation compared to "most people" who have never written essays since high school and I possess only a very basic understanding of grammar, etymology, etc. I bet the very topic and context makes his situation not normal.
That does not mean he does not have cognitive capacities that most people might not have, but, again the practice itself most likely changed him, not solely "selected" him for the practice.
I don't believe it.