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Author Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O  (Read 14845938 times)

Sergarr

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116535 on: January 10, 2017, 09:16:38 pm »

Highly relevant. It's a shame this isn't required reading.
Ohoho. That made me remember quite a few things.

It's not required reading because it's based entirely on outdated ideas about language shaping thought.
Language does not shape thought? What shapes thought, then? Because I see plenty of language shaping thought in the world, there's even a special word for the most recent incarnation of it, short phrases that have a high impact and are spread and repeated a la a virus - memes.
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Akura

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116536 on: January 10, 2017, 09:28:43 pm »

Listening to my parents reactions to Obama's farewell address. Just... I can't even come up with the words.
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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116537 on: January 10, 2017, 09:30:52 pm »

Highly relevant. It's a shame this isn't required reading.
Ohoho. That made me remember quite a few things.

It's not required reading because it's based entirely on outdated ideas about language shaping thought.
Language does not shape thought? What shapes thought, then? Because I see plenty of language shaping thought in the world, there's even a special word for the most recent incarnation of it, short phrases that have a high impact and are spread and repeated a la a virus - memes.

That's not the same thing. The outdated idea is that your language inherently affects your thoughts merely by existing - things like "until somebody teaches you the word "green", it is literally impossible for you to tell the difference between the color of the grass and the color of the sky" (or, more precisely, "Because ancient Greeks had no word for purple, they thought the sea and wine were the same color, as evidenced by the use of the phrase "wine-dark sea" in Homer and other classical writing"). Orwell was a huge fan of this theory (to the point where a huge part of 1984 was built around it) but modern research has found it to be about as credible as phrenology.
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Rolan7

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116538 on: January 10, 2017, 09:35:51 pm »

That's honestly interesting, and I could easily be convinced that Orwell went too far.  But I currently agree with the idea that language directs thought to a large degree, and I'd like to see some reference otherwise.  Something more than dismissing Orwell outright.
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Rolepgeek

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116539 on: January 10, 2017, 09:48:08 pm »

Well, it can direct thought, but it doesn't control it. Otherwise no one would invent new words. It's largest influence is on the ability to express oneself, for obvious reasons. And since we only can tell how others think based on how they express themselves, it seems like it directs thought.
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Rolan7

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116540 on: January 10, 2017, 09:53:58 pm »

And since we only can tell how others think based on how they express themselves, it seems like it directs thought.
That's a good summary of what I *think* Orwell was saying.  Or just an explanation of how vocabulary influences thought in conversation.

It's not, like "direct control".  I just think it's important, and I'm not sure where Orwell specifically (supposedly) went too far.
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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116541 on: January 10, 2017, 09:55:30 pm »

So the Sapir-Worph Hypothesis is bunk? That's a shame.

And since we only can tell how others think based on how they express themselves, it seems like it directs thought.
That's a good summary of what I *think* Orwell was saying.  Or just an explanation of how vocabulary influences thought in conversation.

It's not, like "direct control".  I just think it's important, and I'm not sure where Orwell specifically (supposedly) went too far.
And since people tend to align their thoughts with their perception of other people's thoughts, then shaping conversation indirectly shapes thought.

Newspeak is just a way of harnessing groupthink. Come to think of it, groupthink sounds vaguely Orwellian...
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Rolan7

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116542 on: January 10, 2017, 10:00:03 pm »

Like when someone deflects an argument, and 2 pages later people are like...  "Wait, wasn't the topic.... No time for that!  They're still being WRONG, and ever more flagrantly!"
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Tawa

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116543 on: January 10, 2017, 10:07:29 pm »

So the Sapir-Worph Hypothesis is bunk? That's a shame.
Are you sure that it's a bad thing that people can't have their ideas and thoughts shaped by the language they speak?
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Lord Shonus

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116544 on: January 10, 2017, 10:23:21 pm »

So the Sapir-Worph Hypothesis is bunk? That's a shame.


Strong Sapir-Whorf (aka linguistic determinism) is heavily discredited, but the weak version (aka linguistic relativism) is less so. This isn't the most scholarly of works, but it gets the basic concept across.
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MetalSlimeHunt

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116545 on: January 10, 2017, 10:53:50 pm »

Given what I've seen of studies on culture and color perception, I'd say it's all experiential in nature. If the culture has a conception of something, people in it are inevitably going to get good at recognizing it. So if you have a cultural concept for a dozen different shades of turquoise, you're going to know all those shades better than a culture who just considers them all turquoise.

This does not mean that you cannot conceive of the shades without a cultural construction of them, merely that having a cultural construction of them is a heuristic.
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scriver

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116546 on: January 11, 2017, 01:49:43 am »

I heard somewhere the theory that one partial reason east-Asians do better at math is because their number language is well suited to calculating. As opposed to this was the Danish language (with it's infamously convoluted numbering system) making it harder to do math. Since I don't speak any east-Asian languages I can't really say if even the underlying idea is correct, but it sure seems like it when you look at Danish :P
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Rolepgeek

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116547 on: January 11, 2017, 03:10:13 am »

I heard somewhere the theory that one partial reason east-Asians do better at math is because their number language is well suited to calculating. As opposed to this was the Danish language (with it's infamously convoluted numbering system) making it harder to do math. Since I don't speak any east-Asian languages I can't really say if even the underlying idea is correct, but it sure seems like it when you look at Danish :P
Simple way to test that; look at scores for people who are East Asian by heritage but don't speak the language.
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misko27

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116548 on: January 11, 2017, 03:34:19 am »

Newspeak is just a way of harnessing groupthink. Come to think of it, groupthink sounds vaguely Orwellian...
That's because the word was a deliberate invention, purposely designed to remind you of Newspeak. The book by Irving Janis pioneered it and an examination of its role in the failed Bay of Pig's invasion and American failure to prepare for Pearl Harbor, and examining how the response to the Cuban Missile Crisis avoided it.


That language follows thought is an obvious point to anyone whose argued a pendantic point on the internet. Often two sides agree on the substance of a point but cannot agree on terminology. This is often because one or both sides wishes to claim or avoid a certain word which is variably suited to the point at hand, often because of the words political or social connotations. An example: Two sides basically agree on the definition of degrees of racism in some circumstance, but one side wishes to use "discriminatory" or "biased", while the other insists that those words are synonymous with the more charged word "racism". Even if both sides agree on what is what, they cannot necessarily agree on what to call it. Does this matter? Absolutely. Because then when people go around with their own definitions of racism, it matters hugely when they get into arguments. Suddenly one side is saying racism is not a problem, another is saying it's always existed and impossible to get rid of, a third is saying it's a real problem with specific solutions, and all these people are essentially discussing different things entirely.

This isn't a trivial issue either! One of the reason lawmaking is a profession and not something you or I do with our spare time is that the law needs to be complex in order to avoid letting people interpret as they would like, not as how the lawmakers intended it.
I heard somewhere the theory that one partial reason east-Asians do better at math is because their number language is well suited to calculating. As opposed to this was the Danish language (with it's infamously convoluted numbering system) making it harder to do math. Since I don't speak any east-Asian languages I can't really say if even the underlying idea is correct, but it sure seems like it when you look at Danish :P
Simple way to test that; look at scores for people who are East Asian by heritage but don't speak the language.
Having gone to a form of highschool for gifted kids, that happened to have a staggeringly high proportion of Asians (primarily east-asian, although a hefty proportion were Indian, and a non-trivial proportion were what I guess you could call west-asian), I can say that there is definitely more than language involved. Some, I might say most, of them were so thoroughly Americanized they were generally indistinguishable from the average American teen, albeit far nerdier (it was a nerd's school).

I might suggest that such a thing is intrinsic to immigration and parenting instead, as the ethnic make-up was interesting in general: the white population in my school was largely eastern-european   in origin, with most being children of immigrants (as were most east-asians and west-asians in my school), and very few, say, Irish (who have all already been here in New York for many decades.) for example. Technically I fall into that category as well. It's hard to explain such a thing without considering the difference between people whose parents were raised here and not.
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Shub-Nullgurath

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #116549 on: January 11, 2017, 06:48:10 am »

Having gone to a form of highschool for gifted kids, that happened to have a staggeringly high proportion of Asians (primarily east-asian, although a hefty proportion were Indian, and a non-trivial proportion were what I guess you could call west-asian), I can say that there is definitely more than language involved. Some, I might say most, of them were so thoroughly Americanized they were generally indistinguishable from the average American teen, albeit far nerdier (it was a nerd's school).

I might suggest that such a thing is intrinsic to immigration and parenting instead, as the ethnic make-up was interesting in general: the white population in my school was largely eastern-european   in origin, with most being children of immigrants (as were most east-asians and west-asians in my school), and very few, say, Irish (who have all already been here in New York for many decades.) for example. Technically I fall into that category as well. It's hard to explain such a thing without considering the difference between people whose parents were raised here and not.

My hypothesis: it's because they beat their children when they don't do so good.
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