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Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"

(simonwillison.net)
724 points simonw | 3 comments | 11 Jul 25 00:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.651s | source
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marcusb ◴[11 Jul 25 01:22 UTC] No.44527530[source]▶
This reminds me in a way of the old Noam Chomsky/Tucker Carlson exchange where Chomsky says to Carlson:

  "I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting."
Simon may well be right - xAI might not have directly instructed Grok to check what the boss thinks before responding - but that's not to say xAI wouldn't be more likely to release a model that does agree with the boss a lot and privileges what he has said when reasoning.
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breppp ◴[11 Jul 25 05:51 UTC] No.44528766[source]▶
and neither would Chomsky be interviewed by the BBC for his linguistic theory, if he hadn't held these edgy opinions
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cess11 ◴[11 Jul 25 07:22 UTC] No.44529261[source]▶
What do you mean by "edgy opinions"? His takedown of Skinner, or perhaps that he for a while refused to pay taxes as a protest against war?

I'm not sure of the timeline but I'd guess he got to start the linguistics department at MIT because he was already The Linguist in english and computational/mathematical linguistics methodology. That position alone makes it reasonable to bring him to the BBC to talk about language.

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bsaul ◴[11 Jul 25 08:23 UTC] No.44529610[source]▶
chomsky is invented not just for linguistic. Simply because linguistic doesn't interest the wider audience that much. That seems pretty trivial.
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1. jonathanstrange ◴[11 Jul 25 08:41 UTC] No.44529739[source]▶
Chomsky published his political analyses in parallel with and as early as his career as the most influential and important general linguist of the 20th Century, but they caught on much later than his work in linguistics. He was already a famous syntactician when he got on people's radar for his political views, and he was frequently interviewed as a linguist for his views on how general language facilities are built into our brain long before he was interviewed on politics.
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2. bsaul ◴[11 Jul 25 10:59 UTC] No.44530739[source]▶
Yes, i don't think that's a contradiction to what i said. i'm well aware chomsky's initial fame is due to its academic achievements.
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3. ◴[11 Jul 25 13:21 UTC] No.44531835[source]▶