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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4444 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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My sense was that the popular rejection of S-W was almost entirely motivated by aesthetics rather than hard data

The popular rejection is based on the strong version being basically voodoo that defies laws of physics, and is at times backed by outright fraud. There are "reputable sources" out there claiming language can cause you to not be able to perceive the color blue (a claim made about ancient Greeks), or that you can pick a shade of green from a lineup, that is off by 2 bits on the RGB scale from the others, if your language has more names for the color green.

I think i buy SW in conceptual spaces. There are lots of abstract topics that are pretty difficult if not impossible to discuss without the proper vocabulary. Could you really explain something complex like artificial intelligence to someone from the year 1500 that doesn’t have the language necessary to understand computers, algorithms, or machine learning?

Most languages lacked the vocabulary for that up until a few decades ago, but they adapted rather quickly. It seems obvious to me that if you'd take people from medieval times and confront them with this knowledge, they'd also struggle for a while, but develop the necessary vocabulary and then not really do worse (all else being equal, so not accounting for developmental stunting due to malnutrition etc.).

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.

Is it a question of language, or is it a question of them never seeing any of f those things before? If they had a language with those words, would they have a clue what they mean?

I can buy that language affects how you see things, but not what you see.

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