> The world’s preeminent linguist Noam Chomsky, and one of the most esteemed public intellectuals of all time, whose intellectual stature has been compared to that of Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, tackles these nagging questions in the interview that follows.
By whom?
People who particularly agreed with Chomsky's inherently politicized beliefs, presumably.
In all seriousness tho, not much of anything he says is taken seriously in an academic sense any more. Univeral Grammar, Minimalism, etc. He's a very petty dude. The reason he doesn't engage with GPT is because it suggests that linguistic learning is unlike a theory he spent his whole life [unsuccessfully] promoting, but he's such a haughty know-it-all, that I guess dummies take that for intelligence? It strikes me as not dissimilar to Trump in a way, where arrogance is conflated with strength, intelligence, etc. Fake it til you make it, or like, forever, I guess.
The comparison to Trump seems very unfair. I'm not in the academy and didn't know the current standing of his work, but he was certainly a big name that popped up everywhere (as a theorists in the field, not as a general celebrity) when I took an introduction to linguistics 20+ years ago.
As this is Hacker News, it is worth mentioning that he developed the concept of context-free grammars. That is something many of us encounter on a regular basis.
No matter what personality flaws he might have and how misguided some of his political ideas might be, he is one of the big thinkers of the 20th century. Very much unlike Trump.