Ask Noam Chomsky Anything (Reddit Video Interview) | Hacker News Reader

Ask Noam Chomsky Anything (Reddit Video Interview)

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Question for Chomsky:

Imagine a sci fi story in which a government creates a drug that makes people acutely aware of the nation's problems yet totally apathetic about them, reducing the risk that some awful truth will be revealed that might lead to revolution.

Is the Internet this drug? Is there anything at all that you could possibly say in this interview session that would motivate a single person watching to change his/her life course to take action?

people are not aware of the actual ills of the world. unlike the average joe Chomsky has no excuse for his elementary econ 101 mistakes. he is an entertainer first, educator second.

As a guess, by "elementary econ 101 mistakes" do you mean he doesn't adopt the (quite arbitrary) Ayn Rand Axiom System?

I think Chomsky's most valuable intellectual contribution is his focus on South/Central America and the atrocities that America funds there.

From a computer science perspective, I'd at least acknowledge his contributions to the theory of formal languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy

Certainly a valuable contribution, but I suspect someone else would have figured that out fairly soon if he hadn't. On the other hand, nobody else in the US cares about what the US does in South/Central America.

Oh please, you're going to deny that A is A??

Looter!!!!

no, i'm talking about marginal utility and ordinal preference ranking. ?_? not really sure where you pulled the randroid insinuation from?

Actually Chomsky and Rand share a similar view of Crony Capitalism and a corrupt regulatory state.

and rand was wrong about much as well.

Not sure what your point is. Everyone is wrong about something.

right, I don't know much about micro-biology. therefore I don't go spouting off about it. rand (and chompsky) routinely spouted off about things that were out of their domain.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1776

Wow, I was pleasantly surprised by the questions the redditors are suggesting. A good, intelligent mix of both political and linguistics related questions.

Indeed, I was expecting something more along the lines of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOIM1_xOSro

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