It's rude to insult anyone. And I am rude sometimes.
It's not nice of me to call Tom Scott a cuck, but I don't think of him as a real person. The only reason why I am able to insult him in the first place is because Tom Scott, the person, does not exist. I wouldn't speak like that about anyone I know, because they would be real, and even just thinking badly of them would make me feel terrible.
Insults deindividualize a person. In the case of Tom Scott, he's already deindividualized as an online entity to me. However, you can't call your coworker a midwit without knowingly engaging in deindividualization. I, on the other hand, could call her that.
Edit: I will not respond to your comment if you wish not to continue the conversation. I will, however, make a note here that I have thought and written about this topic at lenght. The labor of deindividualization significantly differs based on familiarity, on whether you know someone or not. This is what makes insults bad. And rudeness is only a partial reflection of this labor.
CSsmrfk
10mo ago
You asked me a question. I responded with my reasoning. And my opinion is not going to change, red modhat comment or not.
That person called their coworker a midwit. Not in passing, but as a directed insult. This is rude and I don't like it.
CSsmrfk
10mo ago
You called a person you Know a certain species of midwit. I think "midwit," even in the abstract, is not nice, but it's at least excusable.
I believe that capitalizing words improves readability. This is something I'm used to seeing in philosophy. Capitalized terms denote specific concepts or ideas that are different from the general meaning. For instance, when you capitalize "Company," it signifies your specific workplace. I find it clear. I mean, even Rationalists do this a lot too.
CSsmrfk
10mo ago
Stop being so hateful and condescending. Proper "improper" capitalization can actually improve clarity. There's a reason why people do it.
CSsmrfk
10mo ago
Thank you for the advice.
You are correct. First world labor, even at minimum wage, will most of the time beat whatever you're likely to make online.
However, online work is my only option currently.
I'll compete with them regardless of what I choose to do. That's the problem with a lack of passion. The only question now is what should I do? I was also thinking of setting up Youtube slopfarms by training Loras for local LLMs to generate scripts. These would be much more entertaining compared to what GPT-4 generates.
I am very talented but I lack passion. I don't feel the urge to do or create anything. I don't want to express myself. I do absolutely nothing, and this has started to bother me.
Occasionally, I am motivated to make something, but it's because I see someone else's work and think I can easily do better. I always do.
Due to circumstances, I am going to be stuck in a limbo state for the next year, unable to pursue the only goal that I do have. During this time, what can I do to earn extra money online?
Game development seems like a good enough grift, right?
And, to be honest, what actually bothers me isn't that I don't do anything, but that I don't seem to have the natural urge that would lend itself to monetization.
CSsmrfk
1yr ago
At that point it would no longer be a medieval language. This would be the case of material conditions creating a need for abstract language, to which the medivial man would in turn adapt by changing his language.
The word "tomorrow" does not begin at the letter t an does not end at the w. Conceiving it in this arbitrary manner is a strawman.
Specific words give us only a glimpse of what frameworks, processes, non-verbal categories, etc. might exist in a language.
But those words have to be situated in the context of the language as a whole. As you say, your language does distinguish between yesterday and tomorrow, but "words" for those are stretched over the lenght of a sentence and are defined contextually, as opposed to being visibly delineated on a page by a cluster of letters flanked by spaces, and generally existing as definite categories not signified by proper words (which would still be only contextual).
This is why we have to consider the entire linguistic landscape and structure when discussing the depth and limits of a language. Illiterate Uzbeks, lacking abstract language, could not thus correctly employ abstract categorization in a similarity exercise with pictures of a hammer, saw, log, and hatchet. This kind of thought is unexpressible in their language.
Thanks!
Going through my old bookmarks and posts on various forums, I noticed that the term "linguistic determinism" is rarely used, though it is still sometimes implied or at the very least can be shoe-horned in. Linguistic relativism is easily defensible. Anyone who disagrees is dumb and wrong. For example, I found this post on Language Log, which I often reference. It's about Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria in 1930s Uzbekistan and Kirghizia and their relevance to our current discussion about language, IQ, and cognitive differences.
This is what Luria writes in the first chapter of Cognitive Development:
The way in which the historically established forms of human mental life correlate with reality has come to depend more and more on complex social practices. The tools that human beings in society use to manipulate that environment, as well as the products of previous generations which help shape the mind of the growing child, also affect these mental forms. In his development, the child's first social relations and his first exposure to a linguistic system (of special significance) determine the forms of his mental activity. All these environmental factors are decisive for the sociohistorical development of consciousness. New motives for action appear under extremely complex patterns of social practice. Thus are created new problems, new modes of behavior, new methods of taking in information, and new systems of reflecting reality.
Here, in line with the Soviet school of psychology, emphasis is put on the importance of material and historical-cultural environmental conditions in shaping language and conscious existence.
It has become a basic principle of materialistic psychology that mental processes depend on active life forms in an appropriate environment. Such a psychology also assumes that human action changes the environment so that human mental life is a product of continually new activities manifest in social practice
In 1930s Luria traveled to Uzbekistan and Kirghizia. There he found that "illiterate (oral) subjects identified geometrical figures by assigning them the names of objects, never abstractly as circles, squares, etc. A circle would be called a plate, sieve, bucket, watch, or moon; a square would be called a mirror, door, house, apricot, drying-board." They didn't perceive these figures as abstract shapes but rather as representations of tangible things they knew. While, on the other hand "teachers' school students... identified geometrical figures by categorical geometric names: circles, squares, triangles, and so on."
This is obvious. They didn't yet find a need for abstract geometrical categories and definitions, and it still could be said that the illiterate Uzbeks understood and were able to express the concept of roundness, but unlike us, they understood and expressed it concretely.
However, the following finding is much more interesting. If linguistic determinism is false, then a person's illiteracy should not affect their ability to categorize things into groups based on set criteria. But, it seems like thought that requires abstract categorization is unexpressible in the illiterate and oral language of the studied subjects:
Subjects were presented with drawings of four objects, three belonging to one category and the fourth to another, and were asked to group together those that were similar or could be placed in one group or designated by one word. One series consisted of drawings of the objects hammer, saw, log, hatchet. Illiterate subjects consistently thought of the group not in categorical terms (three tools, the log not a tool) but in terms of practical situations — 'situational thinking' — without adverting at all to the classification 'tool' as applying to all but the log. If you are a workman with tools and see a log, you think of applying the tool to it, not of keeping the tool away from what it was made for — in some weird intellectual game. A 25-year-old illiterate peasant: 'They're all alike. The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces, If one of these has to go, I'd throw out the hatchet. It doesn't do as a god a job as a saw'
So, in a culture and language that is stagnant due to a lack of material pressure to develop abstract language, there can not possibly be a way to "correctly" categorize a hammer, saw, log, and hatchet. It's a thought that is unexpressible under those conditions. While those peoples' potential can be assumed to be the same as ours, they are limited by their language.
Is this linguistic determinism? Yes? It satisfies the cop-out definition widely given online: "Linguistic determinism is the theory that a language determines the way you think of the world." But for linguistic determinism to be controversial and more than something everyone should take as a given, I could have expected it to claim that language determines not only "the way you think of the world" but also the world itself, its material conditions. But as it stands now, it's boring. Back to the dialectic we go.
And in general, is this not the point of Flynn? That it is the twentieth century’s cognitive revolution, "in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories," that made the IQs go up? That this doesn't strictly measure smartness, but reflects the increasing cognitive demand of the times? And, finally, that the undemanding life of 1930's illiterate Uzbeks didn't yet have a place for abstract similarities, used as measures of literacy and "intelligence," and that their thought was determined by this limitation?
Tom Scott is a cuck.
Also I did manage to find in my bookmarks a racist blog post, but I still have yet to read it.
I just saw this video by Tom Scott on linguistic determinism, or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
"Does the language you speak change how you think?" This is the title of the video. And my answer is: Yes! Of course! Obviously! It's a concept I was aware of before, but always took it as a given. I didn't even think that it's a controversial position. But Tom calls it 'not serious' and "easily disprovable."
Usually I will find some snarky blog post or a racist Substack defending a widely rejected theory, but I have not been able to find anything using my usual search terms, eg. "In defense of..." etc.
What are the best essays, papers, and books in defense of linguistic determinism?
CSsmrfk
1yr ago
You base your gotcha on the assumption of symmetry in attraction between sexes. This is false. Male and female sexuality are not comparable. Women are inherently sexual in them embodying animality and eros. Both men and women find the female form attractive. This is not the case for the male, who only the woman finds attractive, as she is not him.
CSsmrfk
1yr ago
Those who volunteer simply enjoy volunteering. But incentives go against the spirit of volunteering. There is a gain. You gain something, even if that something is so minor "that only people volunteering" would want it.
I like critiquing. I write detailed critiques and analyses of people's creative writing on anonymous message boards. There is no other incentive beyond the act of critiquing itself. No updoots. No badges. No awards. There is no gain.
The volunteering system on The Motte is good. It's really satisfying. Essentially, you are critiquing other people's posts, judging their writing based on set rules of this community, and you are limited to only a few response options. It's simple. I don't need anything else, and neither does any other volunteer.
CSsmrfk
1yr ago
At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers...
Giving people better incentives to volunteer goes against the idea of volunteering. Perverse incentives. Volunteers volunteer because they enjoy volunteering. There is no need to add janny-lite badges next to their names.
CSsmrfk
1yr ago
Any benefits that might come from posting are always secondary to the lulz, trolling, and shit-stirring.
CSsmrfk
2yr ago
Is a filter currently the best way to prevent trolling? After noticing my comment was not appearing, I was discouraged to write any more. Could a keyword- or post-length-based filter work better? But that would probably take too much time to implement, making it not worth it...
CSsmrfk
2yr ago
Could this not be explained by the vastly different lived-experience of man and woman?
These stories exist within a culture, with moral lessons addressing current social ills.
The heroine thinks there is a flaw. And that thought was put into her head (and the heads of other women) by an oppressive patriarchal society.
The tragic event -- it is not one specific event that happened to the heroine, but rather a continuous and systemic oppressive event that happens to all women everywhere.
As such, the heroine's story addresses a societal issue, rather than an individual one
It's not mental gymnastics; I'm sincerely expressing why I don't mind insulting someone I don't know. And this extends beyond insults to all aspects of life. Our concern is naturally highest for those closest to us. When this isn't the case, we start caring more about rocks than our families.
The badness of an insult derives from the labour of deindividualization required in producing it. The closer someone is to us, the more challenging it should be to express negative thoughts about them. I find it horrifying how somone can casually insult their coworkers and not feel anything.
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