Goodbye to Noam Chomsky, OpenAI's trust problem, Crows caw numbers, Star signs of Dyson spheres?
Goodbye to Noam Chomsky, OpenAI's trust problem, Crows caw numbers, Star signs of Dyson spheres?
Desiderata #26: links and commentary
The Desiderata series is a regular roundup of links and thoughts for paid subscribers, as well as an open thread and ongoing Ask Me Anything in the comments.
1/10. Since the last Desiderata, The Intrinsic Perspective published:
(🔒) We live in a culture of magpies. Internet fame usually requires theft.
Making a living as a book author is as rare as being a billionaire. Cultural billionaires vs. actual billionaires.
(🔒) Pronatalism has a repugnant conclusion problem. On the necessity of a softer pronatalism.
Academia is dangerously close to "network or perish.” A managerial climb rewards managers.
2/10. You haven’t read an official obituary or anything, for Noam Chomsky is still alive, but it was finally made clear last week that Chomsky would likely no longer be a member of public life due to health decline. Since he corresponds with so many people, and is such a figure, his longtime assistant made the news public:
In a nutshell, Noam is 95 years old and suffered a medical event in June. As many have noticed, he has not been writing, corresponding, or interviewing, as his health situation has taken the majority of his time and energy. He is still with us, now watching the news (he doesn't look happy about what he's watching).
It does not seem recoverable, for it was added that:
His ability to speak is complicated by factors I can’t yet disclose. When the relative I’m in touch with visited him a month ago, he did not communicate with her. He is not ambulatory. I’m not sure for how long this will go on. He is not in pain. His eyes are open and he seems to be watching what’s happening around him.
The identity of the assistant was recently confirmed by TIME.
I think, given such a dire health update for a 95-year-old, we should not expect to hear publicly from Noam Chomsky ever again. Like so many victims of stroke (it was almost certainly a stroke which occurred last June) it seems likely he has left us before leaving us.
If this is the end of Chomsky, what did he leave us with? I think, in many ways, Chomsky leaves a legacy so grand in scope it dwarfs most public intellectuals today, who too often are TV science guys with absolutely no contributions of their own, not even one little pet theory. All just commentary. Even their public-facing output, so wan in comparison. Chomsky published one hundred and fifty books. These were not serial detective novels. He’s not James Patterson. They were either dense academic tomes, or sharp political screeds, spiny but well-crafted things regularly loosed onto shelves to terrorize his political opponents.
Academically Chomsky has been known, of course, for his work on language, particularly the idea of a generative or transformational grammar. To his academic work, which continued being dominate into the 70s, I myself owe a particular historical debt: it was Chomsky that was key to dethroning the behaviorism of B.F. Skinner (including Chomsky’s influential and devastating book review of Skinner’s theories of language) and therefore Chomsky helped end what I’ve called the “consciousness winter” of the 20th century, paving the way for consciousness to fall under the purview of science once again, and therefore, for me to have an academic career at all.
But he’s also been known, moreso as time went on, for his left-wing politics, books like Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. While I never found Chomsky’s personal politics very convincing, I don’t think that just because someone believe something I don’t makes them stupid—no, the world is not that easy. Noam Chomsky was smart, and that raw intelligence was something I always appreciated about him. A youthful Chomsky was, objectively, one of the last true polymaths of the 20th century. Even if you think all his politics were wrong, like that he downplayed the Cambodian genocide, and so on, his facility with political concepts was undeniable, like the famous Firing Line interview where he sparred with William F. Buckley. In the debate, which is well worth a watch even now, if just to remember how verbally far intellectual culture has fallen, Buckley accuses Chomsky of possessing a “theological certitude… upon every application on which you touch” which, I think, is an accusation many critics shared over the years. But Chomsky in his heyday was just so smart that he often got away with it.
That’s why I think it is so tragic, in the end, for such an intelligent man. Whatever it was happened fast, and it happened to Chomsky’s mind. Some biological error, some floodgate cracking open. I imagine a storm washing away a cathedral, huge waves roiling and crashing through stained glass windows, idols floating by half-submerged, a bedlam of destruction as whatever it was rocked and flooded and ruined the architecture of his brain. A quick storm of blood unwinding almost a century’s worth of work.