And yes, as you say, Chomsian followers are a highly guarded, closed camp. There is a strong tradition of giving maximal support to acolyte who wants to work in this area while casting out the "heretics".
Ah, that's interesting. Because that describes very well what I felt when I read the early Chomskian works. Very cool theories and models with very little data to support them. At some point, I was wonderering whether the authors of those theories had any practical experience with languages apart from their own (English) mother tongue. And then the models became more and more complex, seemingly in an attempt to make them somehow work with real data, and at the end they became so complex that any data could be matched and no scientifically verifiable predictions could be made.
I hear lots of broad brush criticism of generative linguistics, but in almost all cases it turns out that the proposed alternative approaches are just working on different problems, and aren’t really alternatives at all.
The point to make is that interpretation makes use of multiple sources of information, of which syntax is just one. You don't need an elegant, tight fitting, constrained syntactic structure to use language. Which incidentally is why we can understand things even they are not grammatical. I firmly believe that the issue of "grammaticality" simply boils down to convention. Not to mention that many constructed examples used to motivate formal grammar research (be it syntax or semantics) are borderline acceptable themselves to many native speakers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_grammar
I didn't work in the field at all after finishing the studies, so I cannot really tell you any actual implications of the different grammar approach anymore.
I've heard this about Chomsky before and I don't get it. It sounds like he's criticised for doing what any researcher would do- defend his work and criticise competing approaches. I know that's what I do and what everybody else I know does (and has done to me too). Of course any researcher worth her salt will defend her work and of course they will criticise competing approaches. Robustly so. That is how research works and that is how researchers work.
He "systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own"? Yes, that's precisely what you do when you think the other approach is rubbish, you fight to put it out like a fire that threatens to burn down your beloved field. You only ever stop criticising others' work and promoting your own ideas when you are 100% convinced -no doubts at all- that it's your work that's flawed.
Otherwise, how does science advance? Nobody has the absolute truth in any scientific question. Our best chance to know the truth is to try to formulate an answer and then have everybody's answers duke it out, like pit fighters in Conan the Barbarian. The alternative is to let your ideas go without putting up a fight - but then you run the risk of letting ideas that are worse than yours prevail. And I'm probably getting all this from Schopenhauer on the art of dialectic, which I read a while ago, but this is how debates go. And science is a debate. And if you're having a debate, it means there is disagreement- that's the point of having a debate; and the point of having research: that we can't agree about what the truth is in the first place. Otherwise, we wouldn't need research.
So I think that those complaints are best explained as sour grapes by those who failed to convince of the merit of their ideas, and blame Chomsky for doing his job as a scientist better than them. Of course you're starting at a disadvantage if you're going up against an established authority in your field, no less one of the size of Chomsky, but that's exactly what everyone else spends all their time trying to become, an established authority in their field. And they want that so that they can defend their own ideas more easily. So that, too, is not such a great piece of criticism.
No, I am pointing out the shortcomings in this statement:
>> He "systematically worked to block any researchers in the U.S. working on ideas that ran counter to his own"?
> Yes, that's precisely what you do when you think the other approach is rubbish, you fight to put it out like a fire that threatens to burn down your beloved field. You only ever stop criticising others' work and promoting your own ideas when you are 100% convinced -no doubts at all- that it's your work that's flawed.
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> The correctness of the ideas which failed to gain traction is irrelevant.
Do you perceive yourself to have knowledge of what difference an alternative outcome would have made in the world?
> The burden is on the authors of those works to explain and decent the merit of their ideas. If they failed to convince their peer reviewers then that is on them.
It is also "on" anyone else who would have been affected by good ideas not being "put out like a fire". Things that do not happen are not stored in your mind, therefore it is quite natural for them to not exert much influence on your thinking.
> Unless you are accusing the peer-reviewers of acting in bad-faith.
I have no knowledge of their actions and therefore no opinion, I am simply pointing out shortcomings in thinking.
When ever you see someone trying to quell debate, you should immediately recognize it as counter to the scientific method.
That said I’m not aware of Chomsky defending Chavez, though I’m certainly aware of him challenging US intervention. And his general stance of non-intervention is often interpreted as support for the would-be intervened regime.
Is there a more clear position of support/defense on record? I know that I’ve been disappointed by some of his later in life positions dismissing Palestinian efforts, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s regressed on other topics, I’m just not familiar in this case. And asking sincerely.
I don’t agree with him on numerous topics, but that doesn’t mean that I have a credible critic of his work.
It's happened in health too, arguably it has in all subjects, whether due to regulatory capture of government policy and/or academic capture influencing what research gets done via funding - the system is broken, well - it works for industrial complexes who generally have ulterior motive than wanting the very best for society.
Edit to add: why the hell would anyone downvote this comment?
LOL. Citations needed. Please point to the peer reviewed criticism that disproved his math. You've clearly never watched him speak to people about mathematics - there hasn't been a person he hasn't been able to dance with when discussing mathematics/physics principles.
criticism that disproved his math
He's working on publishing a paper version soon to hash out all the math for people.
As far as I know predictions wise, all of the math equations fit within his foundation, allowing a connection between string theory and relatively - which AFAIK didn't previously have math that allowed them to interconnect/co-exist.
He's been trying for 15 years to get people in physics interested in it - and realized he has run into what he calls DISC and GIN, as mechanisms that keep outsiders ideas out and status quo narratives perpetuated. And so he's built an audience to educate, to share interviews/talks with high level conversation with a wide range of people, and build momentum/attention for his Geometric Unity theory because the existing institutions seem so indoctrinated into the last 50 years that they aren't looking into other ideas (yet); and an example of this is right here on HN, the previous commenter who called him a charlatan - with what experience are they themselves basing that off of, or who did they hear that narrative from, and how much time did that person invest investigating [interesting how invest is in the word investigating, it takes time which is an investment] and did they actually engage with Eric to see if they perhaps weren't understanding themselves and so then Eric could help them understand, etc.
It's possible this has changed somewhat since my formal education, but it was the status quo for quite some time.