Chomsky was right about Epstein; Michael Tracey isn't

Noam shouldn't've flattered the guy, but he's not a total moron.

With friends like these…

Appearing in the Epstein files is a bad look. It is not, as the kids used to say, it. I think we can all agree that it shows pretty bad judgement to have been swimming in those waters. But the meme- and headline-driven ecosystem of online discourse tends to flatten any association with Epstein as proof of participation in the trafficking of women and girls for sexual abuse, and I don’t think that’s a good read of the situation.

Noam Chomsky specifically has received a response which I find sorta odd. Without any indication (as far as I am aware) of him engaging in criminal behavior, it seems pretty hasty to denounce the professor as if he had been revealed a child rapist. Though even if he had, a lot of the garment-rending online would seem overwrought. Yes, it would be deeply disturbing to learn one of your intellectual influences had engaged in that sort of evil. But like, so did Michel Foucault, and that hasn’t stopped anyone from citing him.

Let’s park our judgements about how one should react to this knowledge.

All this is to say I don’t have a problem with Michael Tracey’s stance on Chomsky, or really an interest in the tear he’s been on with regard to Epstein in general. But I draw the line at insulting the man’s intelligence.

In “Noam Chomsky Was Right About Epstein,” Tracey does the professor the deep disservice of defending his emails with Epstein on the grounds that he “really did derive significant value from his friendship… And like so many other top academics and scientists, Chomsky genuinely appears to have found him intellectually stimulating.”

In support of this accusation, Tracey cites a single email exchange between the two:

In one email exchange, Epstein recounts some sort of abstruse experiment he says Chomsky inspired him to conduct, involving the neurological processing of music — apparently he overlayed Beethoven’s symphonies to extract certain audio wavelengths? Or something. I admit I don’t fully comprehend the nature of this experiment — Epstein’s perpetually garbled writing style doesn’t help — but Chomsky called it a “very interesting experiment,” ...

I submit that MT is relying on a deeply credulous, surface-level read of this interaction—though I applaud his honestly in admitting that he literally doesn’t understand it. Let’s see if we can do any better.

Epstein writes:

happy to provide some camegie deli sustenance for thought.

today I conducted an experiment encouraged by Noam's wholly justified aggressive and detailed directives to joscha. . joshcha focused on layers being developed in the brain . the timing for the development of each layer being different per species . I postulate that music might be a frosted window into that structure. symphonies begin with their first " layer " a theme. in fact , there might be more than one theme in the first layer „ the second part of symphonic form is the complex development stage. where those themes are inverted, deconstructed , reconstructed etc ,and the development stage takes the most time . in the conclusion of the symphonic form the recapitulation of all that has come before it forms a " phenenoma of the piece " a whole ,made up of its smaller concepts . As opposed to listening to music to record which neuron is firing, as most musciolgists attempt . I propose that the music may be the audible result of those neurons firing, made possible by a select few who would attempt to notate those neuronal firings. Beethoven for example.

Jeffery draws an analogy between the development of the brain in human childhood to the structure of a symphony, which he seems to suggest indicates that a symphony’s structure is literally a demonstration, a result, a symptom, of that development. As Tracey says, it’s garbled.

He states he has “conducted an experiment” in response to Prof. Chomsky’s “aggressive and detailed directives” to joshcha (sic). I just want to note that it’s not clear that this is an experiment in support of Chomsky’s position (which we do not learn), though Tracey is correct to say it was “inspired” by him.

The experiment . I mashed all of the four symphonies together , playing recordings of the 3rd 5th 6th 7th all overlayed on each other, playing at the same time. - the way a brain might develop. I expected an EFTA00707302 ordered noise but to the surprising contrary , IT WAS AMAZING. . you can hear new "concepts " forming,

Globe-trotting multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein reveals that his “experiment” consisted of playing four symphony recordings simultaneously and tripping out over the “concepts” he heard “forming.”

iI wonder whether in the mind of a blind child , the " music" would be created even without the visual referencial. but created none the less. later when the visual can be tied to concepts , the anatomy may be hijacked to produce sounds . that somehow relate to the concepts. .

He suggests that these patterns demonstrate “the anatomy [being] hijacked to produce sounds,” thus explaining why Beethoven could compose even as a blind child, seeming to forget that Beethoven was deaf and got that way during his adult career as a composer.

I tried to mix music from different cultures- it didn't work. African does not work with western europe,- chinese works with neither of the other two. but within the same cultural music ( the brain of the local species ) the mash ups are beautiful.

I would note that computers engage in "parallel processing" only in order to take a hard problem and break it into its component parts , working on each component separately, here each problem Interacts and the their resolutions interact in remarkable ways.

He ends reporting that African and Chinese music did not layer evocatively, unlike music created by “the brain of the local species,” and suggesting that these four Beethoven pieces are demonstrating the developing brain engaging in “parallel processing,” like a computer breaking down a complex problem.

Professor Chomsky (who studies linguistics) responds:

What is better for thought than echt Jewish delicatessen food. Glatt kosher, I hope.

Very interesting experiment. It might tell us a lot about musical genres and their underlying structure, and the cognitive capacities that organize thought, creativity, and experience in these apparently human-specific ways.

This is the sum total of Chomsky’s remarks upon the “experiment.” Note that he barely engages the cognitive speculations. I read his suggestion that it “might tell us a lot about musical genres and their underlying structure” as a note that it would make sense for music within one genre composed by one individual to layer more harmoniously than it does with music from entirely different time periods, cultures, and sets of instruments. But maybe I’m wishcasting.

The rest of the email is spent on a basically unrelated tangent about the development of language use in blind children, citing research which shows blind children developing concepts of “sight” which seem adapted to their physical experience of sense perception, which he takes to indicate that language acquisition works pretty similarly to other forms of biological development:

On blind children, you might want to look at the fascinating study by Landau and Gleitman on the language of the blind: Language and Experience: evidence from blind children (or something like that). What is striking is that without visual experience, the blind learn language virtually in parallel with sighted children, with the same changes that plainly have to do with maturation and the very specific internal concepts of human cognition, leading finally to understanding of extremely refined visual concepts, all with only minimal experience that can't be directing these developments any more than the nutrition of the embryo, while obviously necessary for development, can determine that we have a mammalian rather than visual system. There are also some quite intriguing differences. E.g., at the age when sighted children acquire the words/concepts see, look at, etc., blind children also do, but necessarily give a tactile rather than visual interpretation. So for the blind child, to look at something is to touch it, and to see it is to grasp what it is. The child is therefore surprised to find that its mother cannot see the back of the dolls they are holding, since the child can. Lots of results like these.

What is particularly striking, however, is how similar the cognitive growth is to normal physical growth, of course elicited by experience but then substantially following its internally determined path. The widely-held belief that cognitive development is somehow different from the rest of biology in that it is experiencedetermined is, I think, a residue of traditional dualism -- a kind of "methodological dualism," which is, I think, more pernicious than traditional metaphysical dualism, which, in fact, was quite serious and reasonable science at the time.

Long story.

Noam

To be fair to Tracey, I am also not a scholar of linguistics and don’t fully grok what Noam is getting at here, other than the fact that it has nothing to do with Beethoven or his symphonies.

It’s super clear to me what’s happening in this exchange—Epstein is gurgling the addled thoughts of a stoned college freshman, and Chomsky is humoring him, trying to find any possible response that allows him to avoid criticizing this bullshit. In short, he’s schmoozing.

From what little I know, it seems like Epstein, like many people who want to be considered important, collected intellectual references to sound smart, and that academics tend not to insult the intelligence of very rich men who want their approval.

“Chomsky, to his great credit, was resolutely unwilling to be buffaloed by such nonsense,” Tracey closes, referring to the “moral panic” which surrounds Epstein associates. But the quality of his knee-jerk “defense” reminds us that standing up to a mob is no guarantee it hasn’t buffaloed you.