EDIT: I posted a response to this thread but I got a heart palpitations attack this afternoon and cant continue any discussions. I just need to focus on relaxing hobbies atm.

Intellectual work has a fundamental cooperative element to it, where you’re constantly challenged by other people. My guess is his social isolation from intellectual circles combined with a self-perception of brain superiority made it easy to spiral off into spouting nonsense.

Ah this makes me nostalgic. I remember when I was in my early teens and first got into philosophy and didn't know left from right, this looked intriguing. But even back then, it took pretty quickly to recognize this was all crank. I mean try reading it and it’s gibberish.

Just looked up what he's up to and he's now part of the Alt-Right. I feel sorry for Christopher, he has a sad backstory, but I guess this is another piece of evidence that high IQ by itself doesn't mean anything.

Well I wish there were better methods for me to cite for it look more official, but academics use these websites to share information and their perspective. I hate twitter’s format for instance, but academics for some reason gather there to talk more than any other website.

It looks to me you have an axe to grind on the subject to be honest. Like Jablonka & Dor in that paper you cited, they disagree with his generative approach and its implication for evolution of language, but they explicitly say that Chomsky brought valuable progression on the questions needed to be asked about language acquisition (it’s an old paper from 20 years describing a different state of the debate, but never mind that for now). Your portrayal of the ideas being debated, it’s hyperbolic.

I have no idea how you drew that interpretation from the quoted passage I linked, that talking about the capacity for language acquisition means it’s wholly biologically autonomous and determined or whatever.

Shrugs, I tend to believe they went to school for linguistics, as well people I know personally who definitely have went.

“A lot of people misunderstand what Universal Grammar (UG) is. UG is not about grammatical structures being in the brain at birth, or anything like that.

In its most simplified form, the argument for UG goes like this: all (non-mentally disabled) people learn languages. The ability to learn things depends on mental properties. Therefore, there must be some mental property all (non-mentally disabled) people have that allows them to learn languages. Let's call this mental property "Universal Grammar." That's it.

I don't think anyone really disagrees with the argument up to this point. I guess someone who doesn't think learning things is a mental process might, but that's kind of the fringe. Most people who disagree are usually just misunderstanding the argument. What people tend to actually disagree on is how much of UG is specific to humans, and how much of UG is specific to language and how much is domain general. Chomsky argues that UG is specific to humans and that there is at least one language specific feature in UG. Others argue that there aren't any language specific features in UG. (Fewer argue that it's not species specific, though there are some who do.)

A lot of people assume that being specific to language is an intrinsic part of UG, but it's not. Most people arguing against UG are actually arguing against UG being language specific: they are arguing that the mental property or properties that allow humans to learn languages are also applied in a variety of ways to tasks not involving language.”

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-universal-grammar-theory/answer/Michael-Wilson-11

As there is no consensus yet in what particular sense, thus the distinction between UG & theories of UG as pointed out by different people in the thread. UG just denotes an object of study, not a theory of how language is determined by the biological capacity. This isn’t so much an argument from authority (someone is more knowledgeable than me so their conclusion is correct) as much about testimonies of how the term is used in their field. I don’t see why I shouldn’t believe what they’re saying.

I don’t have any stake on this so I can only talk second-hand about the subject from personal conversations and reading comments by linguists, but all UG was coined to mean is the initial state of the language learner, what is the biological capacity for language. Not language universals. That’s why some people refer to it as the Faculty of Language to be less misleading. There’s a long back and forth in the comment section in the link I provided.

I ended up opening a thread in linguistics sub reddit and after reading all 90+ comments, the gist that I grasp about the subject corresponds with one friend of mine who went to graduate school in linguistics:

“Almost everyone who comments on UG can’t even define it. It just means ‘innate capacity for language’ That’s all it means.”

I’m mostly fed up with the subject, linguistics needs a centralized institution that decides and standardizes what all the terms mean just like Chemistry does as one of the comments pointed out. Hope they get their shit together on the subject in future decades.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/sa0tan/why_is_there_no_clear_definition_of_universal/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

This is going in circles because of this pick and respond at your convenience.

There's no problem if people disagree, in fact, it's welcomed. Others can build ideas on disagreements. — Manuel

It’s okay, this particular subject is just among the ones where I digress from Chomsky the most. I agree and disagree with him on the wide array of subjects he covers, just like I do with other people.

It’s just really odd to say we can’t refer to the word physical because Newton’s contemporaries once associated the word to mean things in the world worked like wheels and clocks.

Did we throw away the concept of space and time because they weren’t what Kant imagined or throw away the concept of life because vitalism was abandoned? Do you think the meaning of the words have to be left fixed, that they have to be abandoned if they were initially tied to disproven ideas? The definition of life for instance is a continued debate so it’s not like we’re talking about concepts in science that have settled metaphysics, but no one seems to have a problem with knowing what is referenced anymore than when we talk about changed concepts like physical or causation.

Anyways the other point being that the reason why they believed physical explanations had to be abandoned because Newton’s contemporaries were convinced we could never understand the mechanisms for Action at a Distance, which they were wrong about. So again who cares how they used these concepts.

So, you are saying that Keen's points have nothing to do with elementary thermodynamics, and that smug rant at the beginning of the video was just a strained metaphor? — SophistiCat

I didn't watch the video yet and just skimmed through the powerpoints, but his critiques of Nordhaus that most of the video seems to be based on focuses on the economics and isn't directly related to thermodynamics analysis (paper linked below). Keen is an important Post-Keynesian theorist and not a crank, but he does have a penchant for a polemical public persona. Either that, or it could just be that the first part of the video draws from Ecological Economics, a heterodox sub-field which I'm kind of skeptical of tbh.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2020.1807856

We can take measures to reduce our own species’ collective suffering. Other animals have been doomed to not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering

The wiki for Lord Kelvin with his "false pronuncements" is interesting though — 180 Proof

I just took a look, thanks

If you say General Relativity is more intuitive than mechanistic materialism, then we slightly differ in common sense understanding. — Manuel

Also

I've never said anything like this. Rather, I find the way the words "intuitive" & "mechanistic" as used by you to be irrelevant for the reasons me & have explained. The only reason why I mentioned General Relativity was Chomsky using the example of Newton & his contemporaries proclaiming the impossibility for any physical understanding of Action over a Distance. Both Mechanistic Philosophy and Newton were wrong, the former because it was always nonsense and the latter because of lack of foresight that we have now. It does not illuminate anything on how we should understand the scope of science today. Those are my last words on the subject.

I looked into it and the Kelvin quote seems to be misattributed and decontextualized. I agree with your larger point though.

https://www.quora.com/Which-19th-century-physicist-famously-said-that-all-that-remained-to-be-done-in-physics-was-compute-effects-to-another-decimal-place

I think psychoanalyzing involves speculating intent, but it looks to me that’s his biased emphasis at least.

I'm not in a position to psychoanalyze him, he came to his position through observation and experience of real difficulties in science. Those are real, I just take other things into account and don't agree with his philosophical conclusion.

(I finished reading the article thoroughly) I don't see any reason to adopt the vocabulary of what those in the 17th century thought was the criterion of scientific knowledge, that physical explanations equated to "common sense" and what counts as common sense were people's experience with engineered machines. Of course the world isn't a machine, the world is the world. The modern version of this nonsense is asking whether "if the universe is a simulation" now that we're familiar with video games. There's no reason the world has to comport with our everyday experience, but that doesn't mean increased knowledge of counterintuitive things isn't actual knowledge of how the world works.

The details in the article about Newton, Hume, Locke, etc. is all interesting intellectual history (and as a person on a philosophy forum, I do have great interest in what the old guys think), but I start from an understanding of scientific explanation in terms of conceptualizing what we know from the sciences today, so it doesn't matter to me if Newton's discoveries betrayed some old promise. As I said, as far as I can tell, General Relativity is a more descriptively physical (not just mathematically) explanation of action at a distance than the notions Newton were able to provide. Chomsky conspicuously doesn't mention any of this, and spends many pages talking about how Newton completely dismantled mechanistic philosophy and that what proceeded its course is what tells us about the nature of science. Well, there's no reason to take mechanical philosophy or its corollary seriously now that we have completely new notions, we know what Newton and his contemporaries did not know. The piece is one-sided, a long list of historical roadblocks of when we figured out how much we don't know as science progressed without mentioning any progressive changes of our picture in reality that science has given us.

*Chomsky clearly doesn't believe in the reductionist program when it comes to unification of the sciences, very quite the contrary actually. My use of the term reductionism was atypical because it was addressing Chomsky's portrayal of even foundational physics as superficial manifestations of the real underlying principles governing the world, that we're not actually obtaining descriptions of scientific phenomenon unless we see what's happening regarding totality at the very bottom, like what Laplace's demon supposedly sees or something.

There are probably people on the opposite side of the spectrum who confuse appearances of things with knowledge of scientific principles. I really liked this video here of Chomsky's skeptical argument of A.I. programs as revealing something about human cognition:

https://youtu.be/RdbWSQyfa2g

I just happen to think he takes his position way too far with the whole mysterianism thing.

Georges Rey has a book released relatively recently critiquing Chomsky on the mind-body problem. Haven't picked it up yet, but there may be a review out there somewhere.

Chomsky sees knowledge of what’s “really there” as grasping the deep principles at the fundamental baseline, what you call intuitive knowledge. General Relativity is admittedly itself partial (until we have a confirmed theory of Quantum Gravity, which itself may not be the end), but I have a hard time seeing if Newton was brought to the future, that he would not see it as a closer clarifying answer to what confounded him about Action at a Distance, it became less mysterious so to speak. It helped narrow our view about the nature of phenomenon, and that counts as an improvement of our knowledge of what’s “really there” as far as I can tell, and on the way it continuously redefines what we understood as physical/material.

The world is not continuous, we’re made of discrete atoms, spacetime is an entity and not just a construct of the mind as Kant thought. That this doesn’t count as knowledge of the physical world if we don’t grasp causation all the way down and amounts to just examining theoretical constructs on the surface strikes me as a rather extreme reductionist way of thinking of Chomsky’s. He is perhaps correct in the really long term if we’re talking about a complete penetration of reality, but he speculates specific scientific problems to be beyond us when he doesn’t actually know that, unless he has the foresight of an angel with infinite knowledge.

On the Cartesian question, I was just responding to when you cited the part where Chomsky talks about Lewontin’s claim.

The threshold for the big questions that Newton imagined were lowered because the state of body of knowledge was not ready for them at the time, so yes they had to work within the frameworks of the theory. Science advances by answering smaller subquestions through working on the finer empirical details and math and not answering the big questions we’d like, but to suggest that answering more and more of these small subquestions doesn’t give you a new perspective of those big questions, even redefining the big questions, is a claim that’s really odd to me. I mean the action of a distance principle that Chomsky cites that Newton was so bewildered by, we confirmed evidence for gravitational waves just recently. That’s not a complete picture yet, but that’s why we have a century or more of fundamental physics to go.

On evolution of language, that seems to me more akin to something like the problem of Abiogenesis. Both only happened once and we don’t have the comprehensive historical data for it, so we can only make educated guesses. Abiogenesis we can hypothesize through lab experiments and computer simulations, evolution of language is probably tougher (depending on how complicated it actually is. Chomsky’s complicated formalism is a small minority position in generative linguistics, which itself is only one of the theoretical approaches in the broader linguistics field) Yes these are technically examples of our limits of knowledge, but I don’t think that says much about our cognitive constraints, and definitely not generalizable to the extent that it tells us lessons on where to pinpoint our limitations on answering some completely different question.

Our limits to knowledge is figured out on a case by case basis, and even then we may unexpectedly breakthrough an impasse. There’s no way to make detailed generalizations about this unless you already know everything there is to know from the start.

I admit skimming it because I've recognized the various arguments he made articulated elsewhere (I saved the document and will get back to it though) but I never understood the point of his mysterianism. If we're not angels and have cognitive limits, there's no way to know and pinpoint how distant the gap actually is, yet he seems to be confident in how he asserts the implications of such and mapping it directly onto specific scientific examples.

I didn't read that yet, I'll take your recommendation. Note I cited Schrodinger's book not because I hold his worldview, but because I learned from it the interesting historical tid-bit that Pre-Socratic atomism borrowed from Anaximenes's observation of changes of states of matter, that condensation and rarefaction wouldn't make sense if materials were just a continuum.

Since it doesn't seem to me that philosophy of mathematics is getting close to converging to a satisfying answer any time soon (I think we are in some areas of philosophy, like metaethics), I just see this as intriguing speculative thought and that's perhaps the best kind of contribution that can be made at this point. I have no clue what type of evidence or piece of reasoning will leave the matter at rest, it's at the stage of the Pre-Socratics (whose atomic speculations were actually not entirely without basis at the time, although obviously not sufficient. See Schrodinger's book "Nature and the Greeks" So maybe someone today is right.)

Btw 's reading seems correct based on a summary given by Tegmark in his exchange with Scott Aaronson in the comments here:

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1753

"Physicalist: I think there’s no “secret life sauce” distinguishing living from non-living things.
Critic: That’s an unscientific theory, since you can’t experimentally prove there’s no secret life sauce!

Integrated information theorist: I think there’s no “secret consciousness sauce” distinguishing conscious information processing systems from unconscious “zombie” ones.
Critic: That’s an unscientific theory, since you can’t experimentally prove there’s no secret consciousness sauce!

MUH advocate: I think there’s no “secret existence sauce” distinguishing physically existing mathematical structures from other mathematical structures.
Critic: That’s an unscientific theory, since you can’t experimentally prove there’s no secret existence sauce!

I think that in all three cases, the first person makes a simple Occam-style claim, and the the onus should be on critic to experimentally detect the sauce!"

Yup

jamalrob actually did a pretty good piece on this way back

http://articles.thephilosophyforum.com/posts/the-argument-for-indirect-realism/

The WikiLeaks leak basically added onto a pile of scandals HRC already had. Since the vote between Trump and HRC was really close, it’s plausible it could have had a small effect in tipping it over. I would have leaked it after the election, it’s clear that Assange was acting on personal spite. But it’s a small impact on top of way bigger factors, is odd to describe the affair as something akin to hacking the election, especially because its releasing information citizens should ultimately know to make political decisions. In another context, more people would have interpreted that as aiding democracy instead of election tipping.

As for Russia, it’s completely understandable why they preferred Trump over Clinton, but in terms of the direction American Foreign Policy took, the evidence is overwhelming that Trump Administration’s overall foreign policy was more hawkish towards Russia than his predecessor. Breaking arms treaties, to arms sells to Ukraine, adding on sanctions, to NATO enlargement. Not hard to google “Trump was more hawkish towards Russia”. Russia wanted Trump to be Putin’s puppet but that’s not how he turned out.

As for Assange, what I think of him personally outside the election thing, he’s not like Chelsea Manning. He showed himself to be an asshole and increasingly political reactionary on social media, but some of that could have partly been the result of being not in the right state of mind being couped up under house arrest. I’m not in a position to judge as I didn’t sacrifice myself for political causes. (EDIT: There's that whole leaking innocent people's personal information scandal which is pretty bad)

Awesome answer, props to your experience with this.

Good resources on the topic:

http://peacehistory-usfp.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change

I would say the founding of the U.S. rooted in the American Indian Wars is the most directly relevant, oddly missing in this thread.

"Everyone knows words can be used wrong. That's trivial and uninteresting. Witt is ultimately concerned about words which are, as it were, 'not even used' (to paraphrase the old 'not even wrong'). Employments of language which do nothing, which serve no purpose."

Is there a common fumble, a contemporary example in mind that illustrates "words that are misused in contrast to words said that are not actually used" I don't really know what the difference is in practice.

Ramanujan was a mathematical pioneer despite little formal education in mathematics. That was awe-inspiring back then, but a modern-day Ramanujan would be an impossible miracle at this point, it takes great lengths to come up with something new, you have to build upon the work of others.

I think that's probably also true for other fields including philosophy, if to a lesser extent. You need to read philosophy to do proper philosophy, in the sense that your ideas and arguments are not being bested by someone out there with the training. Or you can prove us wrong and be a paradigm shifter.

By the way, I don’t mean academic training, or that you have to master schools of thought. But you still have to read a lot and engage with what’s out there.

Do you not juggle different priorities in your life? Is it really so tightly formulaic where you handle everything in one category all at once before moving onto another? Can they not be synergistic, while at the same time, being within a hierarchy of priorities? I'm not sure what you don't understand by "end suffering first, other improvements in well-being second"

The Wikipedia article lays out that reducing suffering is the first priority and priorities to maximize happiness (and other criterion) come after. The idea is that it's a greater immediate priority to prevent people from being tortured and slaughtered than improving someone's life that is already relatively doing well, not that the latter is never a priority/concern. This intuitively makes sense to me, and it gets around counter-arguments against utilitarianism like Nozick's Utility Monster.

Now it's not a sharp dichotomy in my opinion, improving the general welfare of the population can reduce suffering causally. The fact that Scandinavian countries are the happiest in the world is relevant to the fact that the crime rate there is also relatively low. When you're happier, you're less tempted towards certain destructive behaviors. But I think the reduce suffering first is a pretty good normative guideline for the most part.

As for how that comports with positions like anti-natalism, I’m not particularly interested.

Anand Gopal's (author of "The Other Afghan Women" piece posted above) interview here is useful too:

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/biden-s-afghanistan-withdrawal-could-ve-gone-so-differently-n1278163

"Zeeshan Aleem: Was there a significantly better way to withdraw from Afghanistan?

Anand Gopal: Well, there was and there wasn't.

There was a better way to do it if Washington faced certain hard ground truths. What would have been the better way was if the U.S. government had secured a deal with the Taliban that began a process of transfer of power to them, while the U.S. was still in the country. But that would have meant completely undermining the Afghan government to do that; it would've meant recognizing the Afghan government, basically, is a creation of the U.S. entirely, and has no real legitimacy on the ground. So that would've been a pretty major paradigm shift, almost a greater paradigm shift than just simply cutting and running, I think.

What the U.S. did is kind of buy into its own fiction that the Afghan government was somehow a sovereign actor.

Because the way the Afghan government is structured is that almost all of the funding, something like 80 percent of its revenue, comes from international sources. This is what political scientists call a rentier state. It's a state that owes its very existence to foreign aid, so it's not a really sustainable state whatsoever. It's a creation of Washington and elsewhere.

What the U.S. did is kind of buy into its own fiction that the Afghan government was somehow a sovereign actor and try to treat it as such. So how they sequenced the withdrawal was, "We're going to have a deal with the Taliban, and one of the conditions of that is that the Taliban are going to have to talk to the Afghan government to come to a peace deal."

But why would the Taliban talk to a government that's not a sovereign entity, that has no real stake on the ground? The U.S. should've recognized that and used that leverage over the Afghan government to force the Afghan government and the Taliban to come to a deal before they withdrew. And I think, if they had done that — or, at least, if not come to a deal, come to some sort of mechanism that would've been better than what we see now — that could've also bought time for more orderly withdrawal, especially for all the Afghans who helped the U.S. and want to leave and things like amnesty measures [for people who worked with the U.S. or served in the Afghan government]."

I'm a voracious manga and novel reader so in between that and my other readings, I practically have no time left on the side for video games as I did during my adolescence. I used to be very into Starcraft (a lot of strategic depth and high skill ceiling) and I wasted a lot of time on different MMORPGs (I don't fully regret the time spent, a lot of world immersion)

Btw, I agree Generation 2 Pokemon is the best. Also on the Zelda games.

the two aren't remotely in the same ballpark.

It wasn't really my point that they were. I just don't think regimes that do really bad things can be just labeled "good" (FDR goes well beyond the inevitably of doing some bad things as head of state because of lack of political capital)

Imagine someone who dedicated their life to humanitarian causes and saved people's lives, but he beat up his wife and kids. I wouldn't call him a good person. That's all there is to it. I don't have to weigh him in comparison to a serial killer to make those judgments.

Now since the bar for my evaluation of U.S. Presidents is pretty low because we had so many terrible Presidents, I would say FDR is one of the best Presidents we had. In a relative sense. It’s the way the state-corporate nexus is structured so that mostly terrible people end up reaching the top.

FDR supported Mussolini and worked with racist-Southern Democrats to block anti-lynching laws. Can you imagine yourself doing that? I mean if I were to look at myself from another timeline doing such, I would call myself evil.

It's also true that FDR did a lot of good things. It's a weird reality, but I guess there are human beings that are just like that, they can exhibit cruelty but also show sympathy to suffering in other instances. I don't think that erases the fact that they were cruel. One should exhibit self-doubt of their moral blinders in the face of that fact.

I guess if I were forced to answer, I would say FDR is less evil than Stalin, but I also don't find it a productive question.

My impression is contemporary Continental Philosophy is getting much better at that though.

Sorry for the pause, but do you have anything to recommend by Raymond Tallis?