Chomsky vs. Polya on boring lectures.

Darth Rotor said:
Chomsky suffers from the combined curse of brilliance, which he has in abundance, and arrogance: he is convinced he is right and has slammed the door shut on other points of view long since . . . or at least his writing suggests that. My real complaint with his positions is his continued harangue on an imagined American conspiracy to do evil.

Absent that canard being recycled over and over in his talking points, I find his rhetoric compelling. Don't always agree with him, I rarely do, but I like his incisiveness and wit.

DR
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I haven't read everything Chomsky's writen, but I don't recall him ever saying that America is controlled by "evil" conspiratorial overloards.
 
Piggy said:
Going hypothetical here, then.... Yeah, seems to me, if you're going to speak publicly, you have a responsibility to engage your audience. Deliberately making your presentation dull in order to go under the radar, that's cowardice in my book. If you have enough conviction to speak about a topic to an audience, then you ought to have enough conviction to face potential misrepresentation of your ideas, and the energy to counter those misrepresentations.
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He's not deliberatly dull, he's dry. He has a dry wit, a dry demeanor, and a he discusses a sober topic. You seem to be suggesting that anyone who doesn't sing, dance and impersonate Elvis to wow and amuse their audience is a bad speaker.
 
FreeChile said:
I have highlighted the only statement I would like you to substantiate here. Not because I want to defend Chomsky, but because you have made an accusation and I would like to know if your claim is true or false.
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Dear FreeFool

Acusation? How about analysis, and synthesis, based on reading his stuff for about 15 years?

http://www.chomsky.info

Feel free to read his stuff and come to your own conclusions.

DR
 
ImaginalDisc said:
I haven't read everything Chomsky's writen, but I don't recall him ever saying that America is controlled by "evil" conspiratorial overloards.
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He's not that clumsy, he is very good with words. :) The subtext becomes obvious, or became so to me, after a few hundred pages of his critiques, essays, and opinions.

That didn't stop me from reading his articles as I came across them, however. He's a fine writer.

Here is a sample of his BIAS:
With the Gulf war officially over, broader questions come to the fore: What are the likely contours of the New World Order, specifically, for the Middle East? What do we learn about the victors, whose power is at least temporarily enhanced?
A standard response is that we live in "an era full of promise," "one of those rare transforming moments in history" (James Baker). The United States "has a new credibility," the President announced, and dictators and tyrants everywhere know "that what we say goes." George Bush is "at the height of his powers" and "has made very clear that he wants to breathe light into that hypothetical creature, the Middle East peace process" (Anthony Lewis). So things are looking up.1

Others see a different picture. A Catholic weekly in Rome, close to the Vatican, writes that Bush is the "surly master of the world," who deserves "the Nobel War Prize" for ignoring opportunities for peace in the Gulf. Bush "had the very concrete possibility of a just peace and he chose war." He "didn't give a damn" about the many peace appeals of Pope John Paul II and proposals of others, never veering from his objective of a murderous war (Il Sabato).
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==
All of this was before the glorious "turkey shoot" in the desert and the "euphoria" and unconcealed bloodlust it evoked until the news managers thought better of the project and suddenly called it off.
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Or this moral equivalency piece

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200205--02.htm

ETA Or this whinge:

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199903--.htm

DR
 
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Darth Rotor said:
Dear FreeFool

Acusation? How about analysis, and synthesis, based on reading his stuff for about 15 years?

http://www.chomsky.info

Feel free to read his stuff and come to your own conclusions.

DR
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So we should just take your word that the results of your analysis are wrothy, oh Lord.

You don't seem to understand the ways of logic. You made the accusation. The burden is on you.
 
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FreeChile said:
You don't seem to understand the ways of logic. You made the accusation. The burden is on you.
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I offer you a portion of his body of work. You don't care for my turn of phrase, wonderful. It doesn't change Chomsky's themes a bit.

So, freefool, until your turn of phrase is to my liking, analysis versus "accusation," you get no more from me. Time bandits I don't need.

You are free to freeload off of ID, however, whose challenge and critique of my remark I have answered.

Feel free to offer a counter analysis.

ETA:
So we should just take your word that the results of your analysis are wrothy, oh Lord
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You admit (in your accusation opener) to ignorance from the opening. You now insist that your ignorance incurs on me an obligation to familiarize you with a significant body of work. The link is provided.

Do your own homework. Then we can talk.

DR
 
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ImaginalDisc said:
He's not deliberatly dull, he's dry. He has a dry wit, a dry demeanor, and a he discusses a sober topic.
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He's dry, and he's also dull. He doesn't seem to care about delivery at all. But to be fair, not everyone has a talent for speaking, and that shouldn't stop him from giving lectures.
 
Piggy said:
He's dry, and he's also dull. He doesn't seem to care about delivery at all. But to be fair, not everyone has a talent for speaking, and that shouldn't stop him from giving lectures.
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His material is certainly engaging. Let's not forget that he's a linguist too. I imagine he probably choses his words and syntax very carefully. Perhaps too carefuly to be a peppy speaker.
 
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Darth Rotor said:
Chomsky suffers from the combined curse of brilliance, which he has in abundance, and arrogance: he is convinced he is right and has slammed the door shut on other points of view long since . . . or at least his writing suggests that. My real complaint with his positions is his continued harangue on an imagined American conspiracy to do evil.
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I've only seen one lecture by him and I thought his performance was so laid back it was verging on being insulting to his audience.

Not that they were bothered. They all seemed to be agog just to be in the presence of the Great Man and it wouldn't have mattered to them what he said or how he said it. Maybe that's how he's become so lazy?

Then again his arguments seemed as lazy as his delivery. I think there's a kind of inverted jingoism in thinking that your country is so powerful and evil that they are responsible for all the bad things in the world. At least it mean's your country's special, right? The wealthy looking college kids in the audience semed to get quite a thrill out of the idea that their daddys were the evil rulers of the world.
 
ImaginalDisc said:
His material is certainly engaging. Let's not forget that he's a lignguist too. I imagine he probably choses his words and syntax very carefully. Perhaps too carefuly to be a peppy speaker.
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One of the best to ever earn the title, if Daniel Dennet is to be believed. Perhaps a price of this gift was a deficit in charisma.

You can't have it all. Oh, wait, maybe you can.

Note some of this fine wordsmithing, implying evil intention to Reaganites and recycld reaganites. He is good. From his old article "A Modest Proposal."

True, many Iraqis and Iranians will die. But that can hardly be a concern. The Bush circles – as noted, mostly recycled Reaganites -- strongly supported Saddam when he attacked Iran, quite oblivious to the enormous human cost, either then or under the subsequent sanctions regime. Saddam is likely to use chemical weapons, but that too can hardly be a concern. The current leadership firmly backed the "Beast of Baghdad" when he used chemical weapons against Iran in the Reagan years, and when he used gas against "his own people": Kurds, who were his own people in the sense in which Cherokees were Andrew Jackson's people. The current Washington planners continued to support the Beast after he had committed by far his worst crimes, even providing him with means to develop WMD, nuclear and biological, right up to the invasion of Kuwait, fulfilling “our duty to support U.S. exporters,” as they explained (John Kelly, Assistant Secretary of State with responsibility for the Middle East, early 1990). England joined happily. Bush #1 and Cheney also effectively authorized Saddam's slaughter of Shi'ites in March 1991, in the interests of "stability," as was soberly explained. They withdrew their support for his attack on the Kurds only under great international and domestic pressure. So surely the human costs cannot be a concern.
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DR
 
chriswl said:
I've only seen one lecture by him and I thought his performance was so laid back it was verging on being insulting to his audience.

Not that they were bothered. They all seemed to be agog just to be in the presence of the Great Man and it wouldn't have mattered to them what he said or how he said it. Maybe that's how he's become so lazy?

Then again his arguments seemed as lazy as his delivery. I think there's a kind of inverted jingoism in thinking that your country is so powerful and evil that they are responsible for all the bad things in the world. At least it mean's your country's special, right? The wealthy looking college kids in the audience semed to get quite a thrill out of the idea that their daddys were the evil rulers of the world.
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Standard symbolic inversion, and of course playing to the natural rebellion of youth.

DR
 
Darth Rotor said:
Standard symbolic inversion, and of course playing to the natural rebellion of youth.

DR
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Ok, you get that you dislike him, dislike anyone who likes him, and think he's a bad person.

Now that you've made your opinion clear, is there anything substantive you'd like to say, or are you just going to keep replying to everyone's posts with more bile about Chomsky? If so, just say yes and pretend you've done it.
 
ImaginalDisc said:
Ok, you get that you dislike him, dislike anyone who likes him, and think he's a bad person.

Now that you've made your opinion clear, is there anything substantive you'd like to say, or are you just going to keep replying to everyone's posts with more bile about Chomsky? If so, just say yes and pretend you've done it.
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I comment on technique. This is dislike? No value assigned. I was asked to provide some reasons behind my assessment. You have had enough. OK, I agree, this horse is dead. :)

DR
 
Piggy said:
Chomsky (whom I admire) is making excuses.

If you're going to get out there and give a talk in front of human beings, for God's sake, make it interesting to them!

There's no good reason not to engage your audience. Your "issues" are still what they are. Making your speech compelling doesn't in any way detract from that.

You're just being lazy, Noam!
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I tend to agree. If he's right, why even bother speaking? Just hand out copies of his books instead.
 
ImaginalDisc said:
His material is certainly engaging. Let's not forget that he's a linguist too. I imagine he probably choses his words and syntax very carefully. Perhaps too carefuly to be a peppy speaker.
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This sums up for my why Chomsky and so many other highly educated people are bad speakers. They know so much but they get wrapped up in all that they know and their own opinions and forget that to get their point across they have to imagine what it's like to be in the shoes of the audience, most of whom are regular people instead of intellectuals.

It's ironic that Chomsky is a noted linguist and yet he can't use language effectively, or at least not in the context of public speaking. He was probably a better communicator when he was 20 years old before he learned all the things that make him a noted linguist. Which goes to show that intellectual knowledge and real world knowledge aren't necessarily the same thing. Doing something and analyzing how to do something are two different things and just because you're good at one doesn't mean you'll be good at the other.
 
FreeChile said:
Since everyone is trying to re-rail this thread and get back to the issue of boring lectures, EGarrett, why did you choose to post this thread on the politics section and not the education section of the JREF forums? You were sure to get derailed by posting it here.
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In support of your re rail, not every smart person, nor every expert, is a good teacher. I'd offer as an example my materials science prof (undergrad) who was a whiz at advanced materials structures, whose hiring was a great coup by our engineering department, but whose ability to put a class (small, 12) to sleep, or into mass confusion, was uncanny.

DR
 
AmateurScientist said:
Agreed, except that I find Chomsky to be a USA hating Commie.

George Will or his mentor from his early career William F. Buckley are extremely intelligent and equally eloquent, and more fun to listen to as well. My politics are closer to George's than either of the other extremes. I find it curious that so many think George to be ultra-conservative (it's the bow tie), when in fact many, many of his ideas are pure libertarian (little "l"). He is a strong believer that government should deliver only a bare minimum of services, and he's an outspoken champion of the free market. He's just got a really dry wit. Chomsky appears to have none at all.

AS
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Would you agree that you were the first to derail this thread, making it a political discussion instead of a technical discussion about public speacking? What does this say about you and your bias?
 
Darth Rotor said:
In support of your re rail, not every smart person, nor every expert, is a good teacher. I'd offer as an example my materials science prof (undergrad) who was a whiz at advanced materials structures, whose hiring was a great coup by our engineering department, but whose ability to put a class (small, 12) to sleep, or into mass confusion, was uncanny.

DR
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I know precisely what you're talking about. I myself had many computer instructors who were not even US nationals and you could hardly understand what they were saying. That seems to be the nature of the technical fields. I also had history professors that were very dry and preferred that memorize dates and names as opposed to focussing on the historical issues.
 
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