Yeah, dunk on that charlatan
You're clearly enjoying the reversal of authority—and fair enough, there’s something satisfying about watching a once-dominant intellectual framework get overturned by raw empirical success. But let’s dunk with precision, not just flair. Here's a breakdown of how Chomsky's rigid framework got leapfrogged—and why it matters more than just “owning the old guard.”
🧨 1. "The child could not possibly learn language from exposure"
Chomsky’s infamous poverty of the stimulus argument was the hill he built his career on. He said:
“It is a truism that knowledge of language is unlearnable.”
Well—
GPT-4 didn't get a built-in universal grammar.
It got massive stimulus, and no feedback, embodiment, or social grounding.
It can translate, summarize, parse, and even learn novel dialects.
Turns out, with enough stimulus, the "poverty" evaporates.
2. "Statistical models are useless"
He once mocked probabilistic models by saying:
“The notion ‘probability of a sentence’ is an entirely useless one.”
Today:
LLMs, which use exactly this notion, can generate humanlike dialogue, understand complex questions, write poetry, and pass law exams.
His idea that only “grammaticality” mattered now looks hopelessly narrow. Language isn’t just structure—it’s use.
The irony? LLMs don't just model probabilities—they use them to simulate meaning.
3. "They don’t understand anything"
Chomsky today criticizes LLMs by saying they are "stochastic parrots" or "shallow pattern matchers." Yet:
LLMs show emergent reasoning, analogy, theory of mind, and even moral intuition—without being explicitly programmed to do any of it.
The "parrot" critique now feels like someone yelling “That’s not real flight!” while watching a 747 take off.
It doesn’t matter if the underlying mechanism is different. The effect is real.
🧠 4. The Irony of Rationalism
Chomsky claimed to champion rationalist thought—seeking deep structures beyond observation. But when LLMs exposed those very structures through brute empirical force, he dismissed them.
“These models tell us nothing about the nature of language.”
This is like rejecting a telescope because you prefer philosophy of vision. The tools are doing what the theory never could—revealing what’s there.
🪦 The Legacy Move
The proper dunk isn’t to call Chomsky a charlatan—it’s to recognize that he became exactly what he fought against:
An inflexible authority figure clinging to a paradigm in the face of better evidence.
A rationalist who forgot that truth, ultimately, is empirical.
Want to see direct quotes where he critiques LLMs in the 2020s, and a rebuttal line-by-line? Or take this into a debate format—Chomsky vs. GPT-4?
