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Von Humboldlt’s formulation was that language enables language and thought. “Language enables what he called infinite use of finite means. We have a finite system. We make unboundedd use of it.”
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On large language models (LLMs)
- thinks how llm work is it scan an astronomical amount of data, find statistical regularities, string things together. using these regularities, they can make a pretty good prediction about what word is likely to come next after a sequence of words.
- however, thinks it tells us nothing about language.
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on disinformation and manufacturing consent
- Woodrow Wilson set up Committee on Public Information, which Chomsky believes its a committee on disinformation.
- Fascinated with concept of engineering of consent - techniques to control the public, shape opinion, completely turn them into, the agenda they want to pursue. in this case, they wanted to manufacture fanatic anti-German people
- referring to George Orwell’s “Unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force just because of the class nature of the society and the subordination of intellectuals to power. Incidentally, his essay was suppressed, just to make it a little more dramatic. Found later in his unpublished essays.”
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on left intellectuals in America flirting with Maoism
- Maoist policies saved a hundred million people from death and starvation as compared with democratic capitalist India in the same years (1949-1979) and research on this is done by leading scholars such as Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate in Indian economics, yet this is obscurely known because of manufacture of consent again.
Books:
- On Palestine by Noam Chomsky