Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning (2011)

But his politics centers around the moral failings of the West so I think yes, if he was involved in the sexual exploitation of trafficked children, then this would devalue his criticism of the morality of the Western political system.

There's also still a lot to his arguments that we are much more sample efficient and likely have some built in capacity from genetic endowment rather than strictly learned.

It isn't much worth engaging with because it is unfortunately quite out of touch with (or just ignores) the core issues and ignores the major advances in causal modeling and causal modeling theory, i.e. Judea Pearl and do-calculus, structural equation modeling, counterfactuals, etc [1].

It also, IMO, makes a (highly idiosyncratic) distinction between "statistical" (meaning, trained / fitted to data) and "probabilistic" models, that doesn't really hold up too well.

I.e. probabilistic models in quantum physics are "fit" too in that the values of fundamental constants are determined by experimental data, but these "statistical" models are clearly causal models regardless. Even most quantum physical models can be argued to be causal, just the causality is probabilistic rather than absolute (i.e. A ==> B is fuzzy implication rather than absolute implication).

IMO I don't want to engage much with the arguments because it starts on the wrong foot and begins by making, in my opinion, an incoherent / unsound distinction, while also ignoring (innocently, or deliberately) the actual scientific and philosophical progress already made here.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causal-models/

Pearl defines a ladder of causation:

1. Seeing (association) 2. Doing (intervention) 3. Imagining (counterfactuals)

In his view - most ML algos are at level 1 - they look at data and draw associations, and "agents" have started some steps in level 2 - doing.

The smartest of humans operate mostly in level (3) of abstractions - where they see things, gain experience, and later build up a "strong causal model" of the world and become capable of answering "what if" questions.

I think Chomsky's political views were pretty terrible, especially before 1990. He spoke favorably of the Khmer Rouge. He dismissed "Murder of a Gentle Land", one of the first Western reports of their mass killing, as a "third rate propaganda tract". As the killing became impossible to completely deny, he downplayed its scale. Concern for human rights in distant lands tends to be a left-leaning concept in the West, but Chomsky's influence neutralized that here. This contributed significantly to the West's indifference, and the killing continued. (The Vietnamese communists ultimately stopped it.)

Anyone who thinks Chomsky had good political ideas should read the opinions of Westerners in Cambodia during that time. I'm not saying he didn't have other good ideas; but how many good ideas does it take to offset 1.5-2M deaths?

Today it would not matter in the least if Nixon were understood to have covered up a conspiracy to break into the DNC headquarters. Most of his party would approve of it and the rest would support him anyway so as not to damage "their side".