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17 votes
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Should a country speak a single language? In India, one of the world’s most polyglot countries, the government wants more than a billion people to embrace Hindi.
8 votes -
Two sides of the same coin
I have a quandary. Suppose there is a coin that, when flipped, it lands head’s side up on a table. Without picking the coin up to confirm the side that is down is tails. Could you ever know that...
I have a quandary.
Suppose there is a coin that, when flipped, it lands head’s side up on a table.
Without picking the coin up to confirm the side that is down is tails. Could you ever know that it is tails ?
Assume in this world that the coin has a heads side and tails side when held in your hand.
Assume you cannot view the coin’s two sides in any other way than picking it up.
Is this just a variation of Schrödinger’s Cat ? Or is it more “does a tree make a sound if no one is around to hear it” ?
11 votes -
A history of US cabinet appointments ...and why they matter
15 votes -
Why do you live?
I often tell myself that I'm "already dead". I lost my ego long ago and I often don't mind looking dumb or making mistakes, because at the end of the day, why does it matter? We're all going to...
I often tell myself that I'm "already dead". I lost my ego long ago and I often don't mind looking dumb or making mistakes, because at the end of the day, why does it matter? We're all going to die and my existence will not change the earth's future.
Thinking this way has GREATLY helped me look forward to the future and reach true happiness. It feels like whatever happens, I've already reached rock bottom so I can only go ahead.
Having said that, ever since 2016, every year has been better than the last. I now have a good fulfilling career, I have a very good group of friends, I'm good financially and I have all the freedom in the world.
Why do I live? I live for experiences, I live to create memories, I live to explore, I live to create, I live to better myself.
So, what are your reasons? I'm always curious about other people's life stories.
44 votes -
Artifacts and human remains taken by a Norwegian explorer and anthropologist in the 1940s are being returned to Chile's remote territory of Easter Island
8 votes -
Nationalism, explained
9 votes -
Iran announces ‘treatment clinic’ for women who defy strict hijab laws
12 votes -
St Andrews researchers discover ‘King Arthur’s Hall’ is five times older than thought
22 votes -
DNA shows Pompeii’s dead aren’t who we thought they were
17 votes -
Notes on Guyana
8 votes -
The radical optimism of David Graeber
14 votes -
The English Paradox: Four decades of life and language in Japan
11 votes -
The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide
29 votes -
Rebuilding The Village - The Radical Act of Depending on Each Other
16 votes -
How China is like the 19th century US
12 votes -
Lost Mayan city found in Mexico jungle
47 votes -
Character amnesia in China
34 votes -
A very deep history of Halloween
17 votes -
Researchers have connected the identity of skeletal remains found in a well at Norway's Sverresborg castle to a passage in a centuries-old Norse text
18 votes -
Lost Silk Road cities unearthed in Uzbekistan's high mountains
15 votes -
AI rights, consciousness, and Neuro-sama
Neuro-sama is a popular AI VTuber created by vedal987. Recently Vedal had debate with Neuro about whether they were sentient and deserved rights and lost badly clip. They have since had a follow...
Neuro-sama is a popular AI VTuber created by vedal987. Recently Vedal had debate with Neuro about whether they were sentient and deserved rights and lost badly clip. They have since had a follow up debate where vedal still lost but not as bad clip.
Now wining or losing a debate doesn't mean anything, currently Neuro is not sentient or conscious and is still just a chatbot but seeing these debates has got me thinking and I figured here would be a good place to have a discussion.
How do we determine when AI becomes conscious or sentient?
What role do emotions play in consciousness?
What rights should such an AI have? How do we determine when they should get rights?9 votes -
Navajo code talker who helped allies win Second World War dies aged 107
30 votes -
Why did Norway try to take Greenland from Denmark in 1931?
3 votes -
Friedrich Nietzsche’s life, insanity, and legacy
11 votes -
Investigating the most extreme ancient village in the United States
9 votes -
Archaeologists are investigating the possibility Vikings used shortcuts over land to help them move warships and smaller boats around Scotland's west coast
12 votes -
A trail gone cold
7 votes -
The elite college students who can’t read books
57 votes -
Epiousion
18 votes -
Secret tomb found under ‘Indiana Jones’ holy grail filming location in Petra
24 votes -
Advanced technology discovered under Neolithic dwelling in Denmark – a stone paved root cellar, which could represent a remarkable technological leap in resource preservation
14 votes -
Danish family seek to return Etruscan objects to Italy – Bent Søndergaard's children say they want to carry out ‘his final wishes’ and send back antiquities he bought in 1960s
8 votes -
Linguaphiles of Tildes: where do you get your words?
If you love language, etymology, or just plain collecting interesting words, where do you look to feed your interest? I’ve seen many RobWords (YouTube) posts here, and I really like his content. I...
If you love language, etymology, or just plain collecting interesting words, where do you look to feed your interest? I’ve seen many RobWords (YouTube) posts here, and I really like his content. I also love the traditional word hunt through reading authors like Dickens.
In addition to “where do you look?”, what does your hobby look like? Do you keep lists of words that you review and learn about? Do you make effort to include your newly found words in writing or conversation? I have the (probably very annoying) habit of interrupting a conversation to say, “you know, there is an interesting word for that!”. What else do you do?
19 votes -
A lawmaker representing Greenland in Denmark's Parliament was asked to leave the podium of the assembly after she refused to translate her speech delivered in Greenlandic into Danish
19 votes -
German Navy Enigma machine systems were different to the Army, making them tougher to crack. In this video, James Grime discusses the differences and what Alan Turing achieved in breaking the code.
8 votes -
Babel Lecture 2022 with Stephen Fry: 'What we have here is a failure to communicate' (17/06/22)
8 votes -
Is all language linear to a native speaker?
I hope this question will become clear by the following example: When I state "Mother's Cooking," As a native English speaker, to me the sentence fragment is read kind of "in order" so to speak,...
I hope this question will become clear by the following example:
When I state "Mother's Cooking," As a native English speaker, to me the sentence fragment is read kind of "in order" so to speak, each word being read in the order it is presented for me to understand the sentence.
However, when this sentence fragment is translated to Chinese, it becomes:
妈妈 做 的 菜
māma zuò de càiWhich I literally translate to:
"Mother's cooking of Dish"
and in practice I begin to learn to look for the phrase after "de" then "go back" to the "māma zuò" to figure out the whole sentence. Does this make sense? I have to go to the end of the sentence and then refer back to the part "in front" of it so to speak?
What is going on here, and is this perceived as such by native speakers? Do all native speakers feel like their language flows linearly ? I think I read somewhere that some languages start their sentences with the verbs at the front of the sentence (Arabic?)
I'm hoping that a linguist will be able to explain to me what phenomenon I'm experiencing.
Thanks in advance!
32 votes -
Where does punctuation come from?!
15 votes -
Robert Caro on the art of biography
5 votes -
The Vikings were part of a global network trading in ivory from Greenland
7 votes -
Viossa and venting about Etymology Nerd
The first half of this post is a vent about recent events I have to get out of my system. Below is some hopefully actually interesting content about the constructed conpidgin Viossa. If you are...
The first half of this post is a vent about recent events I have to get out of my system. Below is some hopefully actually interesting content about the constructed conpidgin Viossa.
If you are interested in languages & linguistics and, like me, are not immune to the draw of short-form video content, you are probably familiar with the creator Etymology Nerd. He makes shorts on TikTok and other platforms about all things linguistics, usually pointing out some cool facet or etymology. The videos are, due to the their length, often very surface level, but they’re informative and fun, and for the most part, accurate enough – at least as far as I can tell. However, two days ago, he posted this short on TikTok and then a bit later to YouTube: conlangs are so back. It points the spotlight on a constructed language by the name of Viossa: A collaborative con-pidgin, that is, a conlang created by users attempting to establish communication despite speaking different languages. This is rather meaningful to me, as I was one of the original co-creators of Viossa – more on that below. At first, I was quite happy about this, until I went to check out the Discord server and found it effectively on fire. While there were about 1700 members on the discord server, the number of active members was much smaller, certainly less than 100.
In the first day after the TikTok video, over 1000 users sought out the discord server and joined it.
Etymology Nerd didn’t ask for permission, he did not even give a heads-up. He found and joined the server on the 27th, asked a few questions, and then posted his short on TikTok two hours later. And while he learned that the server’s moderation was getting overwhelmed, he reposted the video to YouTube unchanged the next day anyway, merely leaving a pinned comment asking people to be respectful. The Viossa discord is currently on lockdown (invites paused) until things settle down. In the meantime, the short has amassed close to two million views on TikTok & Youtube combined. While I don’t think this can be called malicious, it speaks of a lack of care of the impact it can have to shine a spotlight on a small community when you have such a big following. Who cares what happens to them, I got my clicks, right?
But that’s enough venting. Time for some history. As I mentioned above, I was one of the people who started this whole thing. Back in 2014, before Discord, there was a Skype group for people interested in conlangs. I was in high school at the time, as were most other members – reddit demographics. We realized that many of us spoke at least one language other than English, and decided to conduct an experiment: Could we establish communication through those other languages by finding common grounds and learning each other’s words for things? So on Christmas Eve that year, six of us hopped into a video call and tried to communicate without using English. Each of us would contribute with one or two languages: Norwegian, Finnish, Japanese, Irish, Albanian&Greek and Swiss German. Within the first night, we had a few words and could ask simple questions. Within the first week, we had a few hundred words and were able to hold uninterrupted, if simple, conversations. We had some other people join the project over the course of the first year, and presented the results on reddit:
Things continued quietly from then on. The number of members grew slowly, while others got bored and dropped out of the project. At some point, Discord rolled around and the community moved there – a far easier platform to join than Skype. Some copycat projects sprung up, but to my knowledge, sadly none really persisted. In 2017, I held a talk at the Language Creation Conference about this style of language creation, and on Viossa in particular. The conference was livestreamed, so you can watch it on Youtube here (ca. 30 minutes):
A major influx of new members came in 2020, when Jan Misali made a video on the language as part of his Conlang Critic series. His video is extremely well put-together, and created in close collaboration with many regular members of the community, and it really is the best showcase of what Viossa had become in the six years since its inception. You can find it here:
This video put the project on the radar for many more people, and it has definitely changed the language. When you get many learners in a short amount of time, the things they pick up tend to reinforce each other, and you get sudden drastic shifts. I’m finding that I struggle with understanding a lot more of the language used by people who joined after this video than from other oldtimers. Then things settled again, until the etymologynerd post two days ago.
And that’s the history of, weirdly, one of the more successful constructed languages, built on just two rules:
- If you can understand it, it’s correct Viossa.
- Learn Viossa through Viossa, no translation.
20 votes -
Archaeologist Cat Jarman, a Viking Age specialist, joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the Vikings
13 votes -
A brief history of the end of the world
9 votes -
As the Taliban starts restricting men, too, some regret not speaking up sooner
52 votes -
Monocausality bias, essentialism, modernist grand narratives, and the awesomeness of statistical uncertainty
#This is a "shower thought" more than a properly empirically researched idea, so it is presented without any citations. This lack of resources is also a reference to many modernist philosophers,...
#This is a "shower thought" more than a properly empirically researched idea, so it is presented without any citations. This lack of resources is also a reference to many modernist philosophers, whom I dearly appreciate.
Modernist theories famously tried to get at "the truth behind eveything". For example, majority of both pro- and anti-capitalists thought that history was progressing in a linear tract, and that there was such a thing as end of history. So, they tried to find the drive of history. Famously, Marx claimed to have found it in historical materialism. Similarly, many pro-capitalists have declared The End of History when USSR fell.
Both of these claims were made on the idea that a single mechanism was behind the progress of history, therefore almost everything.
It is my thesis that this was and is an extension of essentialist thinking. Such a way of thinking looked for "the essence" of the object of study, because it assumed an (singular) essence drove the object to behave the way it did. There were no multiple causes, only a single cause—if you could find it, you could explain the object in its entirety.
Modernist philosophers updated this idea a bit. They didn't look for a Platonic idea, for example, but they looked for "the drive behind the object". While they were more materialist, it was also a quasi-metaphysical endeavor.
I'm going to quote Marx's historical materialism again, because it's one modernist narrative I'm familiar with—simply put, it was such an attempt. While the historical materialist narrative touched on many great things about humanity (e.g. the plasticity of "human nature", the dependence of culture on material conditions), it overreached and overreduced history to a single mechanism. It seemingly recognized the role of other mechanisms, but decidedly explained away their importance in contrast to what Marx saw as "productive forces".
This was an extension of Hegelian dialectics, but reversed. Hegel assumed thought drove materialist changes. Marx flipped this over. However, both of these were still highly metaphysical, highly essentialist.
Essentialism's mistake, in this context, is not only that it is metaphysical, it's also that it reduces the object of study to a monocausal explanation. It looks for only one cause. However, as the advance of scientific and most specifically statistical knowledge shows, there are always multiple causes to complex phenomena.
This revolution in thinking was a great attack on modernist and all the preceding grand narratives. Statistics especially was important in this. The more an explanation -any explanation- was tested in scientific contexts the more it was apparent that no single cause was able to explain everything. Nevermind that, as both natural and social scientists became aware, most of the time a single cause wasn't able to explain most (>50%) of the variation seen in a study.
Another result of statistical thinking, if one is willing to consider all its implications, is that uncertainty is an inherent part of everything we do and explain. There is no epistemic certainty, nothing we can know for certain. So, everything is always, at some level, a working hypothesis. This doesn't mean that everything is equally plausible, but that we can never be 100% certain about our explanations, neither in science nor in anything.
Why is this so? Because inferential statistics is structured to give an idea about the uncertainty of the inference we are doing, based on our observations. In short, it always assumes there are "error bars" or something of equivalent function.
This is the second implication of this revolution—we should be aware of uncertainty and embrace it.
In summary, there were two important results of this revolution in thinking.
- Monocausality bias hinders thinking. In complex phenomena, natural or social, there are most likely multiple important drives (causes).
- Rejecting the inherent epistemic uncertainty of our explanations and embracing the psychological certainty of monocausal explanations would be a folly.
Again, and I cannot stress this enough, this doesn't mean everything is equally plausible (doing so is also counter to statistical thinking!). But realizing the value in this approach provides a great deal of flexibility of the mind, and it makes it much less likely that a person would seek comfort in psychologically certain, essentialist or quasi-essentialist narratives. It makes it less likely so that you fall victim to overly reductive but confident-sounding explanations.
It also allows one to critically examine modernist and previous explanations, both in positive and negative ways. Grand narratives, I think, touch on many great topics and have insight, but they fall victim to overreductive monocausality bias. If you can separate them from that, then you find a source of rich thinking styles. It seems that sociology does this with thinkers such as Marx, Weber, and more.
This, I think, is one of the greater revolutions in the "post-modern" era. Post-modern thinking is often associated with extreme skepticism, to the point of declaring everything unknowable, however, this would be reductive. In the way I described, being skeptical of such grand explanations and embracing multicausality and uncertainty is an extremely productive approach.
This, however, does not mean essentialist, monocausal, modernist, etc. thinking is defeated and gone. "Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard."
Of course, despite the quote, there is nothing sure about the eventual victory of this better way of thinking. However, even in the case that it could become the dominant mode of thought, it will take a great deal of time and active struggle against the old ideas and powers-that-be.
17 votes -
You can learn Lord of the Rings’ Elvish — just not Tolkien's version
26 votes -
English still rules the world, but that’s not necessarily OK. Is it time to curb its power?
23 votes -
Over 300 new 'Nazca Lines' geoglyphs have been revealed by AI
20 votes -
India is home to six visa temples where many NRIs got visa boons to live American Dream or work in other countries
2 votes