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.
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.