this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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There's a Sean Carrol video somewhere talking about how the average graduate student in physics understands Relativity far better than Einstein did, and it's because lots of people with lots of different specialties and insights have thought really long and hard about it and come up with deeper, more elegant ways to describe it.
I had a similar realization when studying undergrad linguistics.
One of the classes had us read Chomsky's "Remarks on Nominalization" paper. The overwhelming sense I got from it was that the author did not understand X-Bar theory, despite knowing that Chomsky was the one who came up with it (and not realizing at the time that this paper was essentially Chomsky's first paper on the subject).
I will also say that it is a credit to his writing that the paper still holds up pretty well; even if it spends an entire section coming up with bad answers to what was literally a syntax 201 homework assignment.