alt Hacker News>Jay McClelland's office had a little corkboard thingy with Chomsky mockery on the side, for example.
I've never understood why the idea of linguistic nativism is so upsetting to people.
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Well that anecdote is referencing the Scruffies v. Neat war[1], within which the nativism debate was merely a somewhat-archaic undercurrent.
IMHO, a lot of the more specifically anti-nativist sentiments of today are based in linguistics itself rather than philosophy, CS, or CogSci, where again it is part of a broader (and much dumber) debate: whether linguistics is the empirical study of languages or the theoretical study of language itself. People get really nasty when they're told that they work in an offshoot field for some reason, which is why I blame them for the ever-too-common misunderstandings of Chomsky -- the most common being "Universal Grammar has been disproven because babies don't speak English in the womb".
If Chomsky weren't so obviously right, this would be a worrying development! Luckily I expect it to be little more than a footnote in history, so it's merely infuriating rather than depressing.
[1] Minsky, 1991: https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article...
Indeed, operating human lips, teeth, tongue, and larynx is far beyond language models.