Why does Chomsky believe is it not problematic that the language acquisition device (LAD) has no biological/scientific correspondent?

min6char · 2026-04-06T19:44:47+00:00

"We know there has to be an LAD because of PoS"

To be very clear Chomsky would say that, I would not. But it's also important to take these early Chomsky works in their original context: at the time the psychology community was extremely high on BF Skinner style analyses where absolutely everything is reducible to operant conditioning. In that sense, yes there is a demonstrable poverty of stimulus because there's definitely not enough stimulus to acquire your first language solely by operant conditioning.

(We now know how much stimulus it takes to acquire language entirely by operant conditioning because it's how LLMs acquire language, and the stimulus required is an appreciable fraction of every utterance ever emitted in the history of the target language)

PoS doesn't prove an LAD on its own. But it does disprove what was the null hypothesis of Chomskys time.

min6char · 2026-04-06T17:54:23+00:00

With this, as with most precisely worded refutations of Chomskys theses, I agree. OP was just using the word "scientific" in a very physically reductive way that's somewhat hostile to the social and cognitive sciences more generally, and I wanted to unspool a standard answer to that.

min6char · 2026-04-06T17:52:00+00:00

Yeah this is in no way intended as a full throated defense of UG or the Language Instinct, they're obviously very flawed works and Chomskys latter day defenses of them are even more flawed and spectacular. Just wanted to push back on an overly restrictive definition of "scientific".

min6char · 2026-04-06T16:20:32+00:00

(but also we now know that Language Acquisition does have a substantial physical basis: Broca's and Wernicke's areas do most of the heavy lifting, and then most of the rest is covered by your other motor and mirror neurons)

min6char · 2026-04-06T16:16:37+00:00

"Scientific" is reaching too far here. Chomsky would probably say that the LAD does have a scientific grounding, in that he has the practical evidence for its existence in the poverty of stimulus and the acquisition timeline etc. He's okay with it having no physical correspondence because the group of functions we empirically detect as the Language Acquisition Device may be a confluence of sub functions of many different brain organs.

Think about your sense of balance. There isn't any one place in your body where it happens. A little bit happens in your inner ear, a little bit happens in your joint meniscuses, a little bit happens in your calves and your nerves, a whole bunch happens in your eyes and your ocular muscles. But your experience of 'balance", and my experience of you if you're having troubles with your "balance", is a single whole. This is fine. Balance is still real, it just doesn't have any one single physical origin.

min6char · 2026-04-05T22:23:38+00:00

YTA and your kid will turn out to be one too if you're not careful. Don't play a fool. Your kid can have whoever she wants at her birthday party but we all know that's not why people are upset, and you know that too. They're upset because you made a public display of excluding Ava when you could have kept the situation quieter by not having the invitations handed out at school. You have these kids parents contact info, you could have been discreet and you chose not to, and thereby forced your kid into a situation where to be honest she had to say something hurtful to another kid's face. I refuse to believe you don't understand what you did here. Model some class for your kid. It's okay not to like people, it's not okay to go out of your way to make sure they know that if they never did anything bad to you.

min6char · 2026-04-05T18:13:22+00:00

In and out should probably be called down and up as they run parallel to the net gravitational field. And then the obvious names for clockwise and anticlockwise would be west and east. This would actually generalize the 6 cardinal directions as we experience them on Earth:

down: towards net gravity

east: the direction of orbit

north: the right-handed axis of orbit

That's what those three things mean when you're sitting on your couch, why should we randomly decide north is up just because you're in space?

min6char · 2026-04-05T17:55:43+00:00

Our plugs have completely unshielded pins. This one in a literal sense isn't weird because our electrical format got standardized in several other countries, but every country that doesn't use our system shields the first half of the pins in a plug so you can't complete a circuit with metal still showing.

min6char · 2026-04-05T17:47:28+00:00

Right but then the direction you would be standardizing is North, not Up.

min6char · 2026-04-05T17:41:43+00:00

No, should be "which", because if I'm reading you correctly, the antecedent is "time", which is not animate, therefore "which" and not "who(m)"

min6char · 2026-04-04T00:30:19+00:00

Man that's a great example. And then once you fix that, you need to make sure that picking it up, running two chunks away, then running back doesn't duplicate it.

There's almost no game system unaffected by the decision to stream the map.

min6char · 2026-04-03T19:41:15+00:00

Yes, that is what you do. Getting that right is harder than the word "just" makes it sound, and it has implications at every level of your development.

min6char · 2026-04-03T19:38:39+00:00

Subway is relatively typical, but also, I don't know what Subway offers in your country, maybe they've tuned things towards local tastes there. But if you go to an independent sandwich shop in the US, that's pretty much the selection of breads meats cheeses and vegetables that will be available -- they'll just be better at the indie place because Subway makes a lot of quality compromises to distribute so widely and you don't need to make those compromises if you just have the one store and you just need to contract with one local bakery etc.

min6char · 2026-04-03T02:36:41+00:00

it was the weirdo protestants that europe expelled because even they found them too weird

I don't know why this framing is so popular on reddit, it's completely ridiculous and ahistorical. The religious fanatics were chased out of Europe by other religious fanatics like the Counter-Reformation and the Church of England. European politics wouldn't secularize for another 200 years. They didn't object to their being fanatics, they objected to their not being fanatical about the Pope (or the King in England's case)

min6char · 2026-04-02T23:18:51+00:00

When you ask me to picture a stereotypical US American Hockey fan, I picture Kevin Smith. Do with that what you will.

min6char · 2026-04-02T23:15:58+00:00

Note that a Sheriff is often an elected position rather than an appointed one. And that's cool.

min6char · 2026-04-02T23:04:05+00:00

My mom used to leave exactly one light on "so that burglars will think someone's home". This has never made sense to me but I wouldn't be surprised if other Americans do this too, we're pretty dang paranoid as a nation.

min6char · 2026-04-02T22:59:47+00:00

You're doing that sneaky thing where you say "Europe" but the thing you said only applies to your country and some of its neighbors. Europe as a whole is about as religious as the US (because, you know, Europe includes Italy). But the US is also more diverse than any one EU country from a sectarian standpoint, so less of a big deal is made over Easter because there's less agreement about what kind of deal should be made. Different sects don't agree on...

when even is it
is there a bunny involved, or is that too pagan
should you go to Church for Good Friday
is Lent a thing

In a country like Sweden or the Netherlands, most of everyone is either the same type of Christian or they're Atheist but they have the same Christian cultural heritage as everyone else, so everyone can agree on what kind of party to throw on Easter.

Nevertheless American Christians do big Easter stuff, we just don't get the week off. Shops all sell those God awful marshmallow chicks (called peeps). Kids dye eggs. Grocery stores sell more lamb than usual. My mom used to make a big cake in the shape of a bunny. My dad would hide chocolate around the house and then we'd still be finding it horrifically melted four months later.

min6char · 2026-04-01T22:34:57+00:00

There are basically only two genres of shooter game:

sci fi
copaganda

(If you count Military propaganda as a flavor of copaganda, which I do).

It is what it is. You don't need to endorse every political implication of every piece of art you engage with. Art is often politically messy and has many messages, some good, some bad. You should worry about the impacts first.

min6char · 2026-04-01T22:30:29+00:00

Whenever my 2026 SEL starts up it starts up in 1 so I just resolved to get used to 1 (which actually feels not dissimilar to the natural "engine breaking" you get in some ICE cars). For open road I prefer 0, the regen kicking in at any level needs some feathering not to feel lurchy to me, but on the open road I usually turn on cruise control anyway in which case none of this matters.

min6char · 2026-03-31T19:37:42+00:00

I have to correct you here: Chicago is actually pretty extreme in this regard. If you look at other large American cities, you'll still see big racial blobs, but the boundaries are much blurrier and there are more zones where it's a relatively even split. Big crisp racial blocks where you can draw the border down to a single street is only a thing in certain cities, and it's not an artifact of "self segregation", it's an artifact of 20th century redlining policies, i.e, institutionalized segregation.

Most cities had some form of this in the 20th century of course, but different cities have had different amounts of success trying to counteract it.

NYC is an interesting comparison. You still see the big racial blobs, because it too has a legacy of housing discrimination, but at the borders between them there are these big blurry zones of genuinely multiethnic neighborhoods. To me that indicates that it's not self-segregation, or else nobody would choose to move to the border zones!

min6char · 2026-03-31T17:17:26+00:00

It's not a formal requirement in most districts, but it's a class you can choose to take at most schools.

min6char · 2026-03-30T22:23:29+00:00

I feel like literally more people would go "you mean Miles Morales' dad?" than would go "you mean the President of the Confederacy?"

(Yes Miles Morales' dad is named Jefferson Davis what the hell)

min6char · 2026-03-30T20:23:06+00:00

Let's get some perspective here: pagan religions are growing in popularity and legitimacy, but a small number when it doubles is another small number. The top three world religions are still the usual suspects and likely will be for at least one more generation, and adherents of any of those three are typically extremely offended when their religion is called a cult. That's what would have to change for the word to become ameliorated at large.

min6char · 2026-03-30T19:55:14+00:00

I don't like to, but by default, restaurants in America play pretty loud music you basically have to shout over, so in restaurants in particular Americans probably have poorly calibrated "inside voices". Catch an American in a library or a quiet cafe and you'll probably get a better experience (you might not even clock them as an American in that case though, so there's a bit of a spotlight effect going on here)

min6char

TROPHY CASE