Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
Chomsky’s theory of language dying by many small empirical cuts, as it often happens in science.
What does it feel like when we die?
The complexities of raising geniuses.
Medical vs religious “miracles.”
On the weird notion of panpsychism (commentary coming soon…).
Crackpots are just as curious as real scientists, but they don’t have the means to succeed.
Hoping that the whole idea of cultural appropriation is a passing fad.
Do yourself a favor, don’t trust research funded by the food industry. Or any industry, really.
Footnotes to Plato 
Daniel, it makes no difference whatsoever whether or not I personally have a full grasp of the Chomsky paradigm of our past (as if my own education would actually sway such reality itself). Instead it’s that countless professionals like you do understand, and as you’ve just noted, there have been notable detractors for quite some time. Furthermore apparently things have recently come to look extremely bad for the man’s ideas. While this may be unfortunate news for his “old faithful,” as Max Planck might have surmised them, it may be great news for science itself! Yes in this particular game, good funerals make for good progress!
(And don’t play that I’m attacking the science of linguistics. I have a great deal of respect for this particular field, and consider it perhaps on par with the science of economics. No instead we’re discussing a science of mind here. I know that you of all people will not tell me that humanity has yet achieved any “hard” mental sciences.)
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I’m trying to imagine the owners of the Redskins deciding to change their name to something less offensive, and someone considering that as a sign that “things getting worse.”
However I do consider the ultra PC/SJW free speech issues on campus these days to be an example of things getting worse.
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Eric; You misunderstand the connotation that “hard” and “soft” convey, when attached to sciences. They are not terms of praise/derision. They indicate the degree to which lawlike generalizations are possible. And that is not a feature of the science, but of the phenomena themselves.
And given that you appear not to know any linguistics, your estimation of Chomsky’s fortunes are based on nothing but the authority of others, as you don’t have the ability to critically exam what they say about his theories.
And I don’t know about “things looking extremely bad for the man’s ideas.” A good part of any education in syntax involves learning generative grammar.
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If you think that peoples’ constant invocations of “offense” are themselves problematic, then it’s quite easy to see how caving in to them constitutes things getting worse.
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Robin: I was there 40 years ago, and the climate was nothing like this. And it’s not just a matter of people caving. Yes, the 60’s saw some pretty intense activism, but it had none of the reach and ubiquity that our current “offense” culture has.
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I’m also pretty suspicious of where many of these claims of “offense” come from. I’ve had countless white leftists tell me that I should say “Native American” rather than “American Indian,” while interestingly, every American Indian I know has told me that this is a lot of nonsense. Indeed, I had one get quite annoyed with the suggestion and say: “I’m not a ‘native American’. I am a Chippewa Indian.” And I’ve heard similar things from black friends and colleagues about “African American.”
The term ‘Native American’ is absurd anyway, since American Indians are no more “native” than anyone else here.
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Actually, Dan, the first version of Chomsky touted some of the same massive modularity of the brain ideas as has Pop Ev Psych, and Ramachandran and other neuroscientists blew that idea out of the water years ago. So, beyond the Tomasello critique, no, Chomsky, at least in his earlier versions, has been shot as dead as a doorknob in other ways.
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Chomsky also seems to operate on a presumption of a large saltational jump between semi-modern human language and its predecessors. I presume the development of human language was probably smoother and certainly more incremental, and as with the many species of Homo on the biological side, involved multiple bursts and outbreaks of development and advancement, cross-breeding eddies and swirls and much more.
All of this would negate the need for a universal grammar to have become a controlling feature of human language and more so, human language development.
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Daniel it seem to me that I’m using the exact same definition of “hard” and “soft” that you are regarding the sciences, though I happen to be optimistic that our soft sciences can harden up, while you seem to think that their current state happens to reside as an ontological aspect of reality itself. But then consider the state of physics 500 years ago. Was it “hard”? My goodness no, it was soft as jelly! It only hardened up in recent centuries. Actually this was about when science itself emerged. But shall we now presume that our mental and behavioral sciences happen to be made of different stuff, or are somehow beyond any potential for hardening? To me this seems extremely pessimistic, given that science itself happens to be very young. It just ain’t “art” (and many define philosophy in such pragmatic ways as well). Unless you can come up with something more damming than my own education, I will remain optimistic regarding progress in both science, as well as philosophy.
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Sure they did. Remember McCarthy? Loyalty oaths? The motion picture ‘production code’? Abortion? Anti-sodomy laws? Jim Crow?
etc., etc., etc.
On Panpsychism
Every electron is sacred? Even if they are all the same?
Panpsychism makes no sense in the light of QM!
E.g., see ‘Quantum Transubstantiation’ https://skepticalsciencereviews.wordpress.com/reviews/
(it is a Catholic joke).
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Socratic: I took the course in syntax up through the Masters and it was primarily generative grammar. And it wasn’t in 1970. It was the mid to late 1990s.
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Eric: I’m sorry but you don’t know what you’re talking about. The reason for the softness lies in the subject matter itself, not the science.
Look, you’ve been told this a hundred times and not just by me. Don’t want to listen? Fine. But it becomes incredibly tiresome to hear you say the same ignorant thing about the social sciences for the 500th time.
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The trouble with battles over names is that they take energy from more important things and direct them toward ‘easy’ targets.
Kill ‘Sambos’ let Denny’s go on discriminating against customers and employees. After all their name is not offensive unless your name is ‘Denny’ and you’d rather not be associated with the food.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar
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“This land’s not your land, it’s our land …”
“We stole in fair and square…” (referencing to the Panama Canal which the Spanish had already stolen form the ‘native’ population).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._I._Hayakawa (a linguist)
Are there only ‘native’ Africans?
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It is really too bad language doesn’t fossilize well.
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Commentary on campus speech with a statement on free speech at Oxford.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/16/safe-spaces-free-speech-university-prevent-no-platforming-academic-freedom
Another disturbing occurrence was the lock-out of LIU faculty by administration. I don’t doubt that most universities have more administrators than faculty, so they could easily fill in as scabs. The problem is few are academics and most have not been in a classroom for decades.
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Hi synred,
“Sure they did. Remember McCarthy? Loyalty oaths? The motion picture ‘production code’? Abortion? Anti-sodomy laws? Jim Crow?”
No one was caving into them because they were in actual power. They didn’t have to cave in to themselves.
But, yes, I do remember when there was a law against me. We could actually get sent to prison. In our state this law was repealed – ironically – in 1984.
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Perspective Gentleman (and ladies if any).
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Yes Daniel, I do know that it’s the subject matter. You believe that the soft sciences happen to be soft in a fundamental way, while I believe that like physics, the soft can become hard. (BTW, since I was logged in the “like” was activated when I copied.)
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Massimo, I’ve had a bit of a crush on Sabine Hossenfelder from around the time that you mentioned her from your December conference in Munich. I’m sure that you recall telling us, “Seems to me this was one of the best and most on target talks at the workshop.” Of course my affections only grew when she responded to me on your blog (comment found here: https://platofootnote.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/why-trust-a-theory-part-iii/comment-page-1/#comment-1484). I slightly smile every time her “Backreaction” posts alert me, even though I rarely have time for physics anymore (beyond teaching the stuff to my son). She continues to remain one of the most sensible people who I’ve ever encountered, or exactly the type that brings me hope.
As far as her perhaps profitable experience with “crackpots” goes, I am heartened that she felt the need to make a distinction between physics and sociology. Her suggestion was that one contains “a demarcation problem,” while the other does not. Why? Well I suppose because one is “hard,” while the other aspires to become more like physics!
Given the radical nature of my own ideas in the soft sciences, it’s certainly understandable why an invested professional might assert that I’m “a crackpot.” Of course it may just be that such people have personal interests in keeping things the same rather than taking any radical steps which may be needed in these fields. As mentioned earlier, Max Planck had something to say about the mentality of invested professionals.
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Eisenhower was ‘in power’ He could have knocked McCarthy flat, but was too chicken to do it. He ‘caved’.
Anyway if it was ‘people in power’ doing it rather than merely ‘caving’ to some noisy ‘activist’ (wasting their time on drivel) is that not worse?
I recall seeing the Army McCarthy hearings on TV, but it might be a false memory induced by the many repetitions of “Have you no shame,..” I’ve seen over the years.
Anyway the way to deal with ‘bad words’ is to co-opt them. The American Indian Movement might or might not be poorly named but why is Leonard Peltier still in jail? Why aren’t we giving back the black hills that belong to the Sioux Nation by treaty (which is supposed to have the force of the constitution) and instead letting a private company bulldoze their sites on ‘private’ land? What we call them does not matter nearly has much as what we do to them.
The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, signed with the US by Lakota and Northern Cheyenne leaders following Red Cloud’s War, set aside a portion of the Lakota territory as the Great Sioux Reservation. This comprised the western one-half of South Dakota, including the Black Hills region for their exclusive use.
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synred: “native” strikes me as largely a political term, when the people in question aren’t native.
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synred: And given that they likely killed the people living here before them?
Maybe we should just stop this whole victim competition and just make good policy. And as you would probably suspect, I am very much for the sorts of policies that would significantly improve the conditions of many American Indians. Changing the names of things, while easy, unfortunately, is not one of them, serving primarily to proclaim the virtue of the advocate rather than producing any real tangible benefit.
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Dan, It strikes me that people who were there a few 1000 years before you is a reasonable definition and widely used. Of course, it has ‘political’ implications; there’s nothing wrong with that!
The war against the Lakota was presumably ‘politics by other means.’
A few protest, esp. if all they result in is a few ‘politically correct’ name changes, seems a small price to pay for what we got.
This land is our land. this land is my land
— we stole it ‘fair and square’
we’re goin’ to keep it
Unless Citibank forecloses…
this land belongs to you and me.
(not very singable -{/;-(= )
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What if we had a world where there were no winners and losers, no predators and prey, no hierarchies, no struggles, no conflicts, no competition, in groups and out groups, etc.
How well would that play out, long term?
The problem with oughts is they are ideals and there are reasons why ideals don’t actually exist.
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To have goals, we have to have reasons to seek them and if everything is hunky dory, there would be no reason to want anything else. We could all be little amoebae swimming around in pools and it would be just fine.
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Dan:
That I agree with 100% as noted w.r.t. to Sambo’s and Denny’s, though I admit a bias — Sambo’s had 10 cent coffee and decent food.
I had ‘chili’ once at the Denny’s in Bloomington, Indiana. Tasted awful, not sure what it would have done to me had I ate it.
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I think “Native eAmerican” does apply to natives who came here years before my ancestors did. (1600s).
Lets’s not get all conservative alt-tight here.
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There were no people here before them. They likely killed off saber tooth tigers, mastodons and such. There weren’t any large primates (just monkeys).
They were an ‘invasive’ species, but wait long enough and those become the ‘natives’.
They certainly gave killing each other off the old college try, but so did everybody else. The Aztecs where not a nice socialist democracy. The Spanish were worse.
The Iroquois were pretty good, but it didn’t help them. We paid the continental army in their land. Some pittance was paid to them while we were living in Ithaca (for philosophers: I mean Ithaca,New York -{/:-)= ). Kept many of the charming Indian names though…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayuga_Lake
Ca·yu·ga
noun
noun: Cayuga; plural noun: Cayuga; plural noun: Cayugas
1. a member of an American Indian people, one of the Five Nations, formerly inhabiting New York.
2. the Iroquoian language of the Cayuga.
For Massimo there’s also a Lake Seneca . I’m not sure if it’s named after Seneca or it’s a Romanization of a Cayuga name.– a the ‘Senacas’ were one of the tribes of the five nations. It’s a confidence. Or perhaps synchronicity.
”’
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