Noam Chomsky
American linguist and activist (born 1928)
Common Themes
Videos Mentioning Noam Chomsky
Eric Lewis on The Portal (with host Eric Weinstein), Ep. #028 - The Singular Genius of Elew
Eric Weinstein
Referenced in the opening anecdote about refusing an NPR slot and as an archetype of 'frame-breaking' public intellectuals.
Nic Carter: Bitcoin Core Values, Layered Scaling, and Blocksize Debates | Lex Fridman Podcast #173
Lex Fridman
Mentioned for his skepticism of charismatic people and his preference for speaking in a monotone way to let the ideas shine, not the speaker's charisma.
Johann Hari: Everything You Think You Know About Meaning & Happiness Is Wrong | E82
The Diary Of A CEO
A linguist and political activist whose biography Johann Hari is currently working on, noting it will be a long-term project.
Alex Gladstein: Bitcoin, Authoritarianism, and Human Rights | Lex Fridman Podcast #231
Lex Fridman
Referenced as someone who criticizes the US extensively, but whose criticisms would not be tolerated in an authoritarian state like Cuba.
Jay McClelland: Neural Networks and the Emergence of Cognition | Lex Fridman Podcast #222
Lex Fridman
Linguist who argued that a genetic fluke led to language, separating humans from other animals. McClelland contrasts this with a broader evolutionary perspective involving sociality.
How to Embrace Slow Productivity, Achieve Mastery, and Defend Your Time — Cal Newport & Tim Ferriss
Tim Ferriss
Linguist and political activist, used in a hypothetical example of content creators being reduced to clickbait thumbnails on YouTube.
The "Normsky" architecture for AI coding agents — with Beyang Liu + Steve Yegge of SourceGraph
Latent Space
Represents a school of thought in AI focusing on formal, precise systems like compilers and parsers.
Zev Weinstein: The Next Generation of Big Ideas and Brave Minds | Lex Fridman Podcast #158
Lex Fridman
A linguist and philosopher whose discussion on how language is used to develop thoughts internally, even more than to communicate them, is mentioned as an interesting perspective.
Max Tegmark: AI and Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #155
Lex Fridman
Cited for his quote on propaganda being to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism, implying higher quality propaganda in democracies.
Ilya Sutskever: Deep Learning | Lex Fridman Podcast #94
Lex Fridman
A linguist who believes language is fundamental to everything and underlies human understanding, with his theories sometimes contrasted with empirical deep learning approaches to language.
Michael Malice: Totalitarianism and Anarchy | Lex Fridman Podcast #200
Lex Fridman
Considered for inclusion in "The Anarchist Handbook" as a prominent contemporary anarchist thinker.
Jordan Ellenberg: Mathematics of High-Dimensional Shapes and Geometries | Lex Fridman Podcast #190
Lex Fridman
Linguist and activist known for his concept of universal grammar.
Robert Breedlove: Philosophy of Bitcoin from First Principles | Lex Fridman Podcast #176
Lex Fridman
Linguist, philosopher, and political activist, whose ideas on language as core to cognition are referenced.
Risto Miikkulainen: Neuroevolution and Evolutionary Computation | Lex Fridman Podcast #177
Lex Fridman
A linguist whose ideas about language being fundamental to cognition were referenced by Lex Fridman.
Take Back MIT | Eric Weinstein and Lex Fridman
Lex Fridman
A distinguished faculty member whose presence at MIT is used as an example of the caliber of minds that should be celebrated, and who has not been muzzled despite his outspokenness.
Eric Weinstein: Geometric Unity and the Call for New Ideas & Institutions | Lex Fridman Podcast #88
Lex Fridman
Linguist, philosopher, and political activist who has been a faculty member at MIT, cited as an example of an intellectually courageous individual who has not been muzzled by institutions.
Vladimir Vapnik: Predicates, Invariants, and the Essence of Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #71
Lex Fridman
Linguist and philosopher known for his belief that human language is essential to expressing ideas and forms of predicates.
How Does the War in Ukraine End?: A Conversation with Ian Bremmer (Episode #277)
Sam Harris
Mentioned as an example of someone on the far-left who agrees with the idea that the US should not be involved in the conflict.
Steven Pinker: AI in the Age of Reason | Lex Fridman Podcast #3
Lex Fridman
Linguist and cognitive scientist, known for his work on the structure of language and innate linguistic knowledge.
François Chollet: Measures of Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #120
Lex Fridman
Linguist whose perspective on language as fundamental to cognition is contrasted by Chollet, who views language as a layer on top of cognition.
Dileep George: Brain-Inspired AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #115
Lex Fridman
A linguist and political activist, whose concept of universal grammar is disagreed with by Dileep George in favor of grounded, pre-verbal concept understanding.
Oriol Vinyals: Deep Learning and Artificial General Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #306
Lex Fridman
A linguist and political activist, mentioned in the context of language being fundamental to intelligence and consciousness.
Jitendra Malik: Computer Vision | Lex Fridman Podcast #110
Lex Fridman
His belief that language may be at the core of human cognition is discussed, while Malik argues vision is more fundamental.
Peter Singer: Suffering in Humans, Animals, and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #107
Lex Fridman
Linguist mentioned as having dismantled behaviorism and for his criticisms of machine learning's lack of transparency.