bolzano

I was going to leave a similar comment, you've done much better at expressing my own objections to the OP. I've tried to upvote you but I don't have very much karma (not sure that that matters?). Sorry to see this sort of thing happen on HN too :(

It would be great if the people who are downvoting you would tackle any of your bullet points.

We are certainly descended from animals, but we are also wildly unique from anything else we've ever seen in the biological world, past or present, mostly due to our cognitive capacities for art, science, morality, math, language, you name it.

Our capacity for language (and its core property of digital infinity) alone, as pointed out by Chomsky, doesn't seem to have an analogue anywhere in the biological world down to perhaps the level of DNA.

That's a great puzzle and mystery, we shouldn't run away from it but rather we should embrace it with humility and awe.

Where does Chomsky claim this? As far as I know, he has never claimed any particular part of the brain is responsible for language.

The claim of Chomsky's UG is that there is a genetic component to the language faculty of humans. That's pretty much a truism given that we can speak and our closest biological relatives can't. Presumably this cashes out somewhere in our brain.

There's evidence that certain regions of the brain are involved in Language (Broca & Wernicke's areas) given evidence from brain injuries and their effect on language.

He does posit an LAD (language acquisition device) but this is a logical/theoretical construct, to aid in theory building. It seems very likely that we have this given the universality of language in our species and our ability to learn the language of our own culture. The LAD though has not been claimed to be physically located somewhere in our brains by Chomsky (again afaik). Though presumably if we have it, it is fairly likely to be somewhere within our skulls.

This isn't true at all. Chomsky created a paradigm shift in linguistics. For that alone he deserves great credit. In fact, his review of BF Skinner's Verbal Behaviour [1] was enough to break new ground and help start the cognitive revolution.

You may or may not think Generative Grammar (or his more recent Minimalist program) is correct, but it's certainly not KNOWN to be wrong, and has yielded some insights. Has it changed over the years, of course, that's normal science. New data is found, new explanations are posited.

Further, Chomsky is still heavily and actively involved in linguistics. See his Feb 4th 2021 presentation [2] to eminent linguistics researchers in the field.

I'm not sure where this kind of comment comes from?

[1] http://www.ugr.es/~fmanjon/A%20Review%20of%20B%20%20F%20%20S...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4F9NSVVVuw

I'd like to read more about that, could you give a source?

From my own readings, I thought that there is very good evidence adults don't bother to correct children in a lot of cases, and that children ignore the corrections completely anyway. They also don't seem to make the kinds of mistakes that you'd expect.

A great summary of some of some research I've been reading on this is the paper [1]. Also Steven Pinker's early work [2] is fascinating and easy reading.

I would love to bring myself up to date though, if these things have changed lately. Any help appreciated.

[1] Gleitman & Newport paper The Invention of Language by Children - https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~gleitman/papers/Gleitman%20&%20Ne...

[2] Steven Pinker - Why the Child Holded the Baby Rabbits - http://socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/courses/readings/Pinker1995Ch5...

While The Economist has some redeeming factors and is often worth reading, it should be noted that it is not the objective dispassionate newspaper it claims to be. The Financial Times is far more honest about its commitments.

It is one of the main journals of the liberal business elite and has a fairly awful (and fascinating) anti labour history. It cloaks itself in a casual Oxbridge patina of disinterested expertise, but at its core, it radically advocates for liberal international capital, deregulation and privatisation. Neoliberalism to use a modern polysyllabic word.

Its stance towards the Irish famine should give one a taste of its beliefs, and they haven't changed much in 170 years or so... There have been some wonderful articles written on this publication, and I'd urge anyone to take a look at the publication from another angle.

[1] What the Economist doesn’t tell you - https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/what-the-economi...

[2] "The Economics of the Colonial Cringe," about The Economist magazine; Washington Post, 1991 - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/1991/10/-quot...

[3] How The Economist Thinks - https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/how-the-economist-thi...

Dude, you basically called Russell a racist and when you got called out on it, you didn't retract.

Please have the decency to retract or provide some kind of source for your claims. I don't recall anything I've read of Russell showing any element of racism or sympathy towards it.

Nice, do you have a link to any details on this ongoing battle?

You're not the only one! :D

Yeah, a great loss to Cog Sci, I love his humour too

He is fantastic, I've only been able to find a couple of videos of him on Youtube. If you have any links at all, I would really really appreciate the share, even just plain old audio recordings would be awesome. Thanks!

No, you can't because "race" isn't a useful or well defined term or object and doesn't apply (is incommensurable) to genetics.

Worse it comes absolutely loaded with social and political implications. It doesn't describe anything we can really point to, but is just a highly charged, culturally variable label we place on a cluster of outward appearances (e.g. excess or lack of melanin, hair or eye color, height).

You might be able to tell if a particular individual is likely to have a lack of melanin or blue eyes from DNA, but you can't say genetic differences are caused by race. That in the famous words of Pauli is not even wrong.

It's a category error, and even if it were useful it also inverts the causality. We apply the label "race" to a cluster of possibly DNA influenced outward markers. We humans cause "race" and apply it to people. Not genetics.

Using a poorly defined term like race in an argument like this is worse than just poor reasoning. It will confuse people at best and cause harm at worst.

It's not unacceptable because people are afraid of the truth or something.

It's unacceptable because it's incoherent, vacuous and empty. It adds nothing to the discourse.

I'm not an expert in this area, though I do have a strong interest in more abstract child cognitive development not related to locomotion (Elizabeth Spelke and related work in particular).

So I'm going by what is generally well known and accepted about visually impaired development (the time line and stages). Here are a couple of references below which might be helpful. Infant development is a pretty noisy process though which makes definitive statements difficult.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/dmcn.12860 [1] https://www.tsbvi.edu/curriculum-a-publications/1053-early-d...

The obvious counter to this argument is that blind babies follow roughly (often slightly delayed) the same developmental pattern and stages as sighted children, with the mostly likely cause of the delay being motivational rather than anything to do with processing visual imagery of what walking/crawling looks like. Both are usually crawling in 6-12 month range.

+1 I used Password Safe for more than 10 years, and the developers are top notch and really into their security. I eventually moved to KeePass just because I wanted to store attachments but if that's not a deal breaker Password Safe is awesome.

Big fan of KeePass. On Mac KeePassXC is great, on Windows KeePass, but on iOS I use Strongbox [1] which is excellent. Auto fill works well, it's open source [2] and actively developed, I really don't trust none open source password managers

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/strongbox-password-safe/id8972...

[2] https://github.com/mmcguill/Strongbox/

That sounds absolutely amazing! At that price I could stay longer! Are there many English speaking people there I could socialise with? Or is it just tourists passing through?

Yes, someone mentioned this site, and it's been excellent, thank you! Great job

Sounds great actually, another one I hadn't considered. Thank you

Is it a bit cheaper than Lisbon, I'm not sure I could get by on $1500 in Lisbon from a previous short experience. It would be close... but I haven't tried Porto before

Yes, have heard very good things :) Thanks!

Interesting! How about English speaking, is it possible to get by there? Socialise?

Interesting... I hadn't really thought about the UK... Wouldn't the cost of living be quite high though (I'm used to London prices which are expensive!)

This is great! Thank you

Yes, I'd love to go to India, seems so vibrant and colourful! Thanks for the suggestion