@@5Gazto If you are looking at things from the scope of semantics, rather than an appreciation of a great mind... who is a relentless contributor to Society and the World by sharing his perspective on many subjects, that may help others through his willingness to share with everyone, and also taken from his knowledge, understanding, rationale, and his personal experiences, that could apply personally for some people, or politically, or even religiously, and so on. Chomsky to me is stirring the curiosity of many in a world full of facts, and false gestures, and opinions without proof, and his approach to topics with fact and rational is in part what makes him a great mind, and one can take, or leave it.
This was true for me. I knew absolutely everything about everything when I finished my BS in chemistry, but when I finished my PhD, I realized I knew very little about anything. I know even less of what there is to know now. People like Chomsky should be in leadership positions, unlike most of our politicians, who seem to consider themselves polymaths.
Chomsky would refuse a leadership position. He doesn't want power, doesn't believe in rule by philosopher kings. He values the wisdom of common people.
@@michaelsmith8665 After our last two elections election, I’m not sure we should value the so-called wisdom of the commoners. Trump received the second most votes in U.S. history in 2020. That doesn’t speak well for the intelligence or morality of 1/2 of Americans.
@@HeathWatts you also have to take for consideration also how brainwashed Americans are through their government’s and corporations’ decades old propaganda campaigns, you can thank Edward Bernays for that. This makes it simplistic to say 1/2 Americans intelligence and morals are questionable because they voted for trump, since trump took advantage of that same conditioning present in the American’s mind over the years and practiced his own propaganda similar to Bernays, and it translated very well.
It's sad that we live in a world where people like Noam Chomsky are self-effacing about his knowledge and people like Trump go about saying "I'm really smart".
The only thing I know is that I know nothing. Socrates was right. Only wise people know that there is no infinite knowledge. No matter how big is our knowledge it is still tiny comparing to those things we don't know nothing about, and we'll probably never know because we are limited by our lifetime and imperfectness of our nature. Only arogant and stupid people are not able to realize this.
I'm always tying to read a lot and go to lectures and still I have the constant feeling of not knowing barely enough. Fuck I'd give my left arm to posess a fraction of Chomsky's deep wisdom.
This adage about true knowledge being the knowledge that you know nothing-- it's more than a cute saying, and it's not even about the awareness of how much there is to learn vs how much you can learn. There's a deeper point. If you don't study science carefully, and maybe you just know some facts and rudiments of theories and don't think too hard about it, you might naively assume that there's a march of progress under way in the sciences. It's true that there is progress, but not in the way we might assume, and not in the way that thinkers believed at the beginning of the scientific revolution. It's not as if there's a finish line, which is knowing everything about how the world works, and every new thing that science learns is another step closer to that goal. That's how normal life works for us, whether it's finishing a book or reading a whole library or taking a literal journey step by step. But learning about how things really work is different. That's because the most basic processes in the universe are essentially unintelligible. We can model parts of them at a time, but we can't directly understand the things they refer to. Common sense can't make head or tail of them. So you can learn a theory, like quantum mechanics, but that's different from understanding the thing it's referring to. That thing happens to be unintelligible. You know a theory, a model, not the thing itself. And that is what you find out when you learn this stuff, if you think about it carefully. That's what it means to be wise enough to know only that you don't know. I think that Socrates understood this on some level, even though he didn't have access to the bizarre observations of modern science. Plato, too, and Heraclitus and Lao Tzu. That's remarkable, to understand intuitively that the world around us is essentially mysterious.
Its really depressing that one of the smartest people alive says that he dont know so much about the world and he would need centuries of life to understand some problems.
The more you learn the more you realize how powerless you are. You also find how all these brilliant minds, haven't made the World a better place. They've only made it easier for evil to prevail and deceive. They only looked for their own personal gain not betterment of greater good. While us nobodies were trying to do better and be better. Our deeds and effort was ignored, erased, and forgotten. What a wonderful World.
I can easily relate. The older you get, provided I guess that you were ever curious about knowledge to begin with which is certainly not a given, the more it starts to dawn on you that you're part of a species wide grandiose delusion. This stuff is so deeply engrained in our psyche that it takes many decades of questioning things before it starts to perforate, if you ever get there. Young people are usually full of conviction. Enamoured as they naturally are with their newly discovered perceived ability to grasp concepts etc. They conclude that they've got it all figured out very quickly indeed, as did I when I was that age. That kind of naivety is a parallel to our young species in general, and we base large parts of our culture on fiction. One thing that stuck with me these past years is a video I saw with one of the superstars of theoretical physics communication: Sean Carrol. He had a talk with a guy about understanding the universe, and he said with a straight face that he pretty much understood everything there is to know. If this species was even remotely conscious of its limitations, such a guy would be laughed out of the picture, but instead he is a celebrated authority on not just physics, but on reality.
@@meech3576 He did indeed. When the interviewer followed up and said: "Even quantum physics?" Carrol said that he had a good enough overview and understanding of quantum physics as well. I don't remember his exact wording, but he summed the topic up by basically saying that there were details and finer points he didn't know of course, but that by and large anything worth knowing about the universe he knew.
thats how i feel, after i listen to noam especially.....i'm trying to write a book, but i feel i have no right to write, my ignorance is too breathtaking,,,,,people like noam make me feel so incredibly unworthy and inept to speak about anything...its actually debilitating
As Noam put it, the important thing is to know that you don't know (actually Socrates also said the same thing). And you are there already. The next challenge is to make peace with it. Then, go after what you want to learn. Piece of cake ;-)
It's the opposite in my case. Chomsky has probably had the biggest impact on my decision to run a socio-political blog on wordpress. And it's just great as if to me, that there are people like him who set a higher bar not only for knowledge itself but also on how we approach and share knowledge, serving as a navigational beacon for inquiring minds :) But, to be honest, your comment sounds a bit too self critical. I say just try to focus on one specific topic, narrow it down as much as possible, dig in the field for a couple of months and then give it a try and start small. Too much contemplation is going to harm more than help, the matter will unwind itself along the way, as you start your actual work.
I am in the same boat, but you've articulated so well what I didn't even realise about myself till I read your comment. I too am paralysed and feel unworthy to write what I want to.
Well, one man's ceiling is another man's floor. Think of how many people are actually unable to even understand Chomsky and who could really benefit even from our limited understanding and paraphrasing of his ideas (very young children, for example). You can write for them. Try to write a textbook for smart 7-8-9 grade school students. By the way, you'll be astounded how much you will learn in the process.
Noam Avraham Chomsky is a Utopia for knowledgeable thinkers of 🛸🌹🏛️ empires like U.S.A. and European Nations... Asians .... IWE ARE in love of him honestly👩🚀✍️🎩💃🕴️🇮🇱....!
We are swimming in this vast ocean of knowledge, but what we have is just a drop. Knowledge is infinite No matter how many books you read or how many degrees you accomplish you still wont know everything. How frustrating!
"it's better if we dont understand anything and know what we don't" if there's a variant of ignorance that is actually bliss i think chomsky's got it down
The Dunning-Kruger effect. Ignorant people have great confidence in their knowledge while authorities in their field understand they know absolutely nothing lol
Very true...the more you learn the less you know. It's the way God made humans. It's his master plan to keep us learning endlessly into the indefinite future, that is forever! Ecclesiastes 3:11 Nice video! 👌
I think its better to start learning stuff from pure ego than from humble ignorance. If you start from ego i think you become wiser but retaining courage and past opposite perspective wich is very helpful in the long run. I might be wrong
Why can't we change the system that not everything is about money wealth and advertising.?We have and live in a society where mental illness is rife.Due to the stress of surviving we are a species who think we are advancing but are we?
Well I want to comment to "up" the video in the old algorithm and I like the quotes so heres another which I like. "A wise man speaks because he has something to say, a fool speaks because he has to say something" By (sorry I forgot)...
If you can not disagree with Professor Chomsky. Then what? Something has got to be done to get his perspective, the word, the truth, out. Example: we have this person with a brilliant mind. I wish he were wrong. Think, I also, really wish he were inaccurate. Unfortunately, he is NOT wrong. I read critical lititure, it is boring to everyone I know. To my-self it is a fun and truly entertaining and a productive use of time. I am almost never wrong about a plate full of issues. That is what I talk about. Professor Chomsky is never wrong about an entire table full if issues. Of course he in not wrong. That is what he does. Not be wrong. He doesn't know who Miles Davis is... Not to any great extent or what the Birth of Cool is all about ...though for Goodness sake HE DOESN'T TALK ABOUT JAZZ THEORY. HE TALKS ABOUT WHAT HE KNOWS ABOUT. DAMN. Please listen to what he has to say. If the is a discident than he he is the most common sense rational discident who ever existed. Every-body wants him to be incorrect about how much money we can possibly pocket in a life Time fbliving. Professor Chomsky is not at all like me. He is a gentileman. Why you would want to talk to my-self instead, is beyond my understanding. Though it seem few people want to talk about finite rescources. I don't want to talk about finite rescources. Do you really think I want to spend day and night talking about a more common distribution? It doesn't matter what I want to talk about in that way. I don't know much about bhow to smooth out the way for everybody a-littlebsonwe can make this country for all. I don't want to talk about how we have to curb our wants for exterme comfort. I am sorry for my-self. And I apologise that The American dream has to be one of freedom, Peace and Equality. Not how a big screen TV has changed our world. Open up. It is two minutes to midnight. Time to stop whispering about what all wars are really all about. Money/rescources. With the exception of Germany is n WWll - what ever psychopatologicl misanthropic reason that was all about... it was an perversion of all that the gift of being humon is all about. So, you don't know of Professor Chomsky. So, what? I didn't know or like all sorts of people until I conversed with them only to find out, it wasn't lack of wisdom and good judgement that was the reason I didn't like a politician I was the cause. Do what you need to do to find the real truth, not your favorite truth.
The horizon analogy seems valid for sociopolitical improvement also. That horizon seemed close to many earlier this year. Now recent events reveal that it's been caused to move quite some distance away.
+PwntsRocksU Depends upon your sociopolitical leanings, if any. To me Mr. Sanders held out the prospect of some timely and desirable changes. His opponent employed unethical and illegal tactics to deny him the nomination, timing it so that her victory seemed questionable until enough state ballot filing deadlines had passed to make his election as an Independent untenable. Now any of the legislation Sanders proposed will be enacted piecemeal and slowly, if at all.
If I had to guess, he probably was referring to Bernie Sanders becoming president and making significant change. But, the established power structure has proven capable of overcoming popular movements and keeping power within the hands of the few.
+88CrazyLegs88 You're exactly right. You didn't see my reply to PwntsRocksU because it somehow got hidden in the "earlier replies". YT's comments section does that frequently or maybe it's just my phone.
Darren Swift My question to both of you people... Was it more surprising how power would protect itself, or the rise of popularity in Bernie Sanders and his platform?
The chief concern is not about how much science does not know. It is about how it proceeds to know what it does not know. Would you support a knowledge that is not falsifiable nor verifiable?
i think a lot of these so called "trolls" are just people who are angry at everything, and will strike out at anything and anyone to share their pain with others
It looks like some stats might be older than the 13.8 billion years that the universe exists for. MIGHT is the key word because we can't get enough information about those stars with our current technology, but it seems that the more information we get, the younger those stars appear to actually be, so while there is a big chance (like 20% or sth like that) that they're actually older than the universe, there is also a big chance that they're not. The future and better technology will tell.
Chomsky talked about fluidity, humbleness and openness of concepts. If you forget about the interdependence of something (concept, person etc.) you miss a big part of the map and walk the wrong direction. SOHA
Trump’s persona is a current and very relevant counter example to Chomsky’s last statement in this video. Although I do agree, it’s a little annoying to constantly hear him brought up in every conversation about anything
Contrast with Jordan Peterson - knows almost nothing and talks with the presumption of a man who knows something (socialism, evolutionary biology, climate change).
The Chinese Identified the Energies of the Universe Thousands of Years Ago..The Book of Changes...The Eight Hexagram's & 64 Trigram's..The Empirical Proof in the Hands of the Beholder..John Jack Rousseaus Empirical Sensationalism Springs to Mind ..These Energies Can be Harnessed Found I Controlled for Health & Self Defence in High Level Gung Fu Systems...
This adage about true knowledge being the knowledge that you know nothing-- it's more than a cute saying, and it's not even about the awareness of how much there is to learn vs how much you can learn. There's a deeper point. If you don't study science carefully, and maybe you just know some facts and rudiments of theories and don't think too hard about it, you might naively assume that there's a march of progress under way in the sciences. It's true that there is progress, but not in the way we might assume, and not in the way that thinkers believed at the beginning of the scientific revolution. It's not as if there's a finish line, which is knowing everything about how the world works, and every new thing that science learns is another step closer to that goal. That's how normal life works for us, whether it's finishing a book or reading a whole library or taking a literal journey step by step. But learning about how things really work is different. That's because the most basic processes in the universe are essentially unintelligible. We can model parts of them at a time, but we can't directly understand the things they refer to. Common sense can't make head or tail of them. So you can learn a theory, like quantum mechanics, but that's different from understanding the thing it's referring to. That thing happens to be unintelligible. You know a theory, a model, not the thing itself. And that is what you find out when you learn this stuff, if you think about it carefully. That's what it means to be wise enough to know only that you don't know. I think that Socrates understood this on some level, even though he didn't have access to the bizarre observations of modern science. Plato, too, and Heraclitus and Lao Tzu. That's remarkable, to understand intuitively that the world around us is essentially mysterious.
