While there's some things in this I find myself nodding along to in this, I can't help but feel it's an a really old take that is super vague and hand-wavy. The truth is that all of the progress on machine learning is absolutely science. We understand extremely well how to make neural networks learn efficiently; it's why the data leads anywhere at all. Backpropagation and gradient descent are extraordinarily powerful. Not to mention all the "just engineering" of making chips crunch incredible amounts of numbers.
Chomsky is extremely ungenerous to the progress and also pretty flippant about what this stuff can do.
I think we should probably stop listening to Chomsky; he hasn't said anything here that he hasn't already say a thousand times for decades.
I've been saying this my whole life, glad it's finally catching on
Noam Chomsky, the man who has spent years analyzing propaganda, is himself a propagandist. Whatever one thinks of Chomsky in general, whatever one thinks of his theories of media manipulation and the mechanisms of state power, Chomsky's work with regard to Cambodia has been marred by omissions, dubious statistics, and, in some cases, outright misrepresentations. On top of this, Chomsky continues to deny that he was wrong about Cambodia. He responds to criticisms by misrepresenting his own positions, misrepresenting his critics' positions, and describing his detractors as morally lower than "neo-Nazis and neo-Stalinists."(2) Consequently, his refusal to reconsider his words has led to continued misinterpretations of what really happened in Cambodia.
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Chomsky often describes the Western media as propaganda. Yet Chomsky himself is no more objective than the media he criticizes; he merely gives us different propaganda. Chomsky's supporters frequently point out that he is trying to present the side of the story that is less often seen. But there is no guarantee that these "opposing" viewpoints have any factual merit; Porter and Hildebrand's book is a fine example. The value of a theory lies in how it relates to the truth, not in how it relates to other theories. By habitually parroting only the contrarian view, Chomsky creates a skewed, inaccurate version of events. This is a fundamentally flawed approach: It is an approach that is concerned with persuasiveness, and not with the truth. It's the tactic of a lawyer, not a scientist. Chomsky seems to be saying: if the media is wrong, I'll present a view which is diametrically opposed. Imagine a mathematician adopting Chomsky's method: Rather than insuring the accuracy of the calculations, problems would be "solved" by averaging different wrong answers.