Noam Chomsky irritates me here's why - he's vague, so astonishingly vague that he can hide his uselessness within it.
> Chomsky derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that mimics something in the world, but who don’t try to understand the meaning of that behavior. Chomsky compared such researchers to scientists who might study the dance made by a bee returning to the hive, and who could produce a statistically based simulation of such a dance without attempting to understand why the bee behaved that way.
> But the number of parameters in his theory continued to multiply, never quite catching up to the number of exceptions, until it was no longer clear that Chomsky’s theories were elegant anymore. In fact, one could argue that the state of Chomskyan linguistics is like the state of astronomy circa Copernicus: it wasn’t that the geocentric model didn’t work, but the theory required so many additional orbits-within-orbits that people were finally willing to accept a different way of doing things. AI endeavored for a long time to work with elegant logical representations of language, and it just proved impossible to enumerate all the rules, or pretend that humans consistently followed them. Norvig points out that basically all successful language-related AI programs now use statistical reasoning
> But his fundamental stance, which he calls the “algorithmic modeling culture,” is to believe that “nature’s black box cannot necessarily be described by a simple model.” He likens Chomsky’s quest for a more beautiful model to Platonic mysticism, and he compares Chomsky to Bill O’Reilly in his lack of satisfaction with answers that work. “Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that,” O’Reilly once said, apparently unsatisfied with physics as an explanation for anything.
In which way is he vague? He basically reinvented a Turing Machine with human language and brought linguistics around to the idea that, yes, language isn't something that's vaguely "out there" tabula-rasa-style, it's built into our genetics at a very fundamental level. Fundamental enough that he tied linguistics DIRECTLY to math and from there to programming. The Chomsky Heirarchy is no joke.
Your link relating to statistical models is only a tiny, tiny part of Chomsky's fundamental arguments and even then is debatable.
> it's built into our genetics at a very fundamental level.
Chomsky's evidence for this is.... iffy at best. Yes, I think we are predisposed to HAVE language, but I don't think we can learn as much as he proposes about the structure of modern language from the human genome.
2) I don't think the problem with learning about language from the genome is specific to language. There are just so many layers of molecular interactions between the genetic code and activity at our level of reality that trying to link the two is incredibly difficult, and we are not even close to having the computing power or theoretical models necessary to link them up. But that doesn't mean that language and genes aren't linked.
Being cited doesn't mean he has something specific to say about those fields. He's an influential scientist so people may cite him when they found something vaguely related to his theories, to make their findings seem more important.
I didn't imply a yearning for anything, I was just saying a citation can mean different things in different circumstances. I think you've fallen prey to the polarization that Chomsky is putting forth: either you are dealing with huge amounts of data and don't care about theory, or you're a rationalist whose theories don't need any empirical support. The reality of successful science is on neither of these extremes, of course.
And by the way I do think that judging human performance by simple metrics is problematic, but not because it's statistics or not 'high-level', simply because it doesn't take enough information into account; it's a shortcut to the actual concept of quality, which is dangerous when metrics are used in decision-making. Automated metrics give an air of objectivity which an expert opinion doesn't have, even though the latter may well be much more informed.
> Chomsky derided researchers in machine learning who use purely statistical methods to produce behavior that mimics something in the world, but who don’t try to understand the meaning of that behavior. Chomsky compared such researchers to scientists who might study the dance made by a bee returning to the hive, and who could produce a statistically based simulation of such a dance without attempting to understand why the bee behaved that way.
-- http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-f...
What does that even mean?
> But the number of parameters in his theory continued to multiply, never quite catching up to the number of exceptions, until it was no longer clear that Chomsky’s theories were elegant anymore. In fact, one could argue that the state of Chomskyan linguistics is like the state of astronomy circa Copernicus: it wasn’t that the geocentric model didn’t work, but the theory required so many additional orbits-within-orbits that people were finally willing to accept a different way of doing things. AI endeavored for a long time to work with elegant logical representations of language, and it just proved impossible to enumerate all the rules, or pretend that humans consistently followed them. Norvig points out that basically all successful language-related AI programs now use statistical reasoning
> But his fundamental stance, which he calls the “algorithmic modeling culture,” is to believe that “nature’s black box cannot necessarily be described by a simple model.” He likens Chomsky’s quest for a more beautiful model to Platonic mysticism, and he compares Chomsky to Bill O’Reilly in his lack of satisfaction with answers that work. “Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that,” O’Reilly once said, apparently unsatisfied with physics as an explanation for anything.
-- http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-f...
AI went wrong when Chomsky came around with his rule based translation ideas that were hideously wrong and probably set us back 20 years - see here:
http://norvig.com/chomsky.html
He's a more irritating linguistic version of Richard Dawkins (who doesn't have an active research career).
> Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Jelinek