The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Mythbusting

 Why the worst idea in linguistics won't die, at Dead Language Society. I have written about both Sapir and Whorf over the years - in exactly the same posts. It is the very cool idea that the language we speak constrains our speech, so that having a different native language, or learning a new one, drives how we think. All those stories of "the German word Schadenfreude does not exist in English, and it is untranslatable." No, it's not. There is no one-to-one translation for the word, but it is easily translated if you allow phrases and multiple adjectives.  This is why your pastor can take apart a word in the NT from Greek and explain it to you, even though it is different from English - because it can be translated. At an overwhelming level, any thought that can be expressed in one language can be expressed in another.  That's going to be tough when one society has very different technology from another and it will take time, but it can be done. 

I knew the essay was going to include the very slight exceptions, such as Russian light blue and dark blue, and even though it is after the paywall jump, I am going to bet that the Amazonian language Piraha and its lack of numbers will be brought forth as a stronger exception.  But really, you aren't ever going to meet any speakers of Piraha, so there's no need to know it. Linguistic Relativism isn't true, even though we would like it to be.

The Evolution of Social Paradoxes

Human behavior is often paradoxical. We show humility to prove we’re better than other people, bravely defy social norms so that people will praise us, and donate to charity anonymously to get credit for not caring about getting credit. Here, I argue that these and other social paradoxes have a common thread: they are all attempts to signal a trait while concealing, from both the signaler and the recipient, the fact that a signal is being transmitted. 

David Pinsof in The Evolution of Social Paradoxes .  He sees them as a spin-off from the necessary Theory of Mind to perceive signals of trustworthiness.  We have to be able to know what others might think of our actions. But when we know what they probably think, we can mimic what will give them a particular impression about our actions.  We can game the system. But then we know that they also can game the system, and they know that we know that they know that we know.

Except in reality, we quickly disguise these motives from ourselves, and lots of people will likewise give us credit for being virtuous. Of course Congresswoman A isn't virtue-signalling.  She really cares about working people because she was one herself. It becomes a recursive mindreading game in which some people see one or more levels deeper than most, while others are one or more levels more superficial. The advantages either way are uncertain, because at each mindreading, there is only a percentage chance we are correct. The deeper we dig, the more speculative it all is.

I am reminded of Screwtape's advice to Wormwood about drawing his patient's attention to the fact he has become more humble in his battle against pride, as he will think "By Jove, I'm being humble!" and be proud of it. This can be repeated at the next revelation, but not endlessly, else the patient will see it is a hall of mirrors, laugh at himself, and head for bed - a very bad outcome for the demons.

Yet to a point, I think it is useful to remember that there is always a further layer of self-deception. This essay may well alert you to areas you have previously overlooked. 

"It is a spiritual gift from God for a man to perceive his sins" - Isaac the Syrian

 

1930s/60s/90s Pro Football

The running plays are more rugbyish, and there is much less strategy and technique in the line play, but it is still recognisably football, more so than basketball and soccer are from that era.

No. 3 is Bronco Nagurski 

 

By the 1960s, you can see much more precision and deception in the blocking and route-running. But it is the defense that is most different.  Instead of getting into a position and just trying to stop whatever comes to them, the defense is playing more angles and shifting around. If you grew up with this, as I did you have some tendency to see this as not all that different from the modern game.  But it is...

 

...which you can see immediately in the film in the 1990s. Much more misdirection and finding seams in the strategy, the passing depends much more on timing. 

 

Ship of Fools

I was on a Christian discussion site in the early 2000s called Ship of Fools. It is where I got the name Assistant Village Idiot rather than Village Idiot. There were some good discussions and reasonable people there, but I eventually found it repetitive and enabling to, well, fools. It suddenly occurs to me that it was far better than TikTok, FB, Twitter/X, etc. There were a variety of bulletin boards with names such as "Dead Horses," which helped keep perspective on discussion that was potentially rancorous.  It was still often rancorous, but less so than we see now.

The site has shifted to humorous and satirical content, though there still are discussion boards. As an example of the former, there is a piece about the double-entendres of hymns, Bosoms and Ebenezers 

 I've always found singing in church a joy, but some hymns make you smile for all the wrong reasons. For a start, they use words that lead very different lives in other parts of your brain. Words such as 'bare', 'bondage', 'bosom', 'bowels', 'breast', 'bush', 'desires', 'conquest', 'flesh', 'gay', 'kiss', 'loins', 'lover', 'organ', 'prostrate', 'queen', 'rude', 'seed', 'submission', 'succour', 'tossed', 'virgin', 'womb' – and not forgetting good old 'intercourse'.

For the latter, Oops- Your Trump Presidency Discussion Thread in the "Purgatory" category, which is currently discussing his bone spurs as a draft deferment. The site is more UK than USA, but plenty of both.  It definitely tends liberal and snarky. I don't think I will reinvest my time, but someone here might be curious.

 

Are People Innately Lazy?

The prevailing theory is that people find effort aversive, and people avoid aversive things. The Principle of Least Effort. Some recent evidence paints that picture a little differently. Are People Innately Lazy? 

 The new, improved alternative theory was best articulated by my colleague Guido Gendolla: people are averse to wasting effort, not to effort itself. Or as the lead author Nathalie André put it, effort is a cost, which people are sometimes willing to pay. Effort is more like money than like pain.

This makes sense to me. I will take the most efficient route, even if I have time to spare, unless there is something worth spending the effort on, such as a particular view.  Even if I am walking for exercise, I will take a diagonal to shorten a distance.  

Mythbusting by Megan McArdle

How do people even come up with these things?

Ollie Whitby (who?) on Substack: Our grandparents were on to something. Turns out slow mornings, early home-cooked dinners, getting lost in books, walking everywhere, real conversations, and minding your own peaceful business was a great way to live. 

Megan McArdle in response:  My grandfather got up at 5 am to drive down and open the gas station where he worked until 6 pm, unless he was short a worker and had to go back to man the evening shift.  There were about five adult books in their house, two bibles and three biographies. No one in his small town ever minded their own business. The home cooked dinners and the conversations, I grant you.  Otherwise you are describing college, not how our grandparents lived.

AVI: One grandfather was the egg man for two towns.  The rooster woke him at  4AM and 300 chickens needed to be fed and harvested, so that he could drive around in an unreliable car until noon, at which point he switched to the garden and repairs, six days a week. He chatted for a few moments with some customers.  He read two newspapers every evening, the Lowell Sun and one of the Boston papers.  I recall no books. Before that, he walked 26 miles each Friday to see his wife for the weekend and 26 back to Boston every Sunday for his chauffeur job.  I imagine her weeks were not filled with real conversations except for Aunt Betty half a mile away. She died at 49, I never knew her. The other grandfather didn't talk much, not even to his wife and children. Worked 60 hours/week as an accountant. His wife had friends and conversations - mostly after the children were grown. 

If you take that down to our parents' generation, it is only slightly less "relaxing." Later in life, after they had lived long and prospered, they had more quiet dinners, books, and real conversations. That would be what my children remember.

So too for us, as we are grandparents now. I used to get up before 6 to get to work for 6:45. I can draw real conversations out of just about anyone, but psychiatric patients are a challenge even for me. My wife worked with children and books, having real conversations only on the fly with co-workers. Hurried home-cooked dinners, drove everywhere all week to church, sports, lessons, relatives, talking with other moms and dads while watching kids. Lost in books, yes. 

Recent Substack Links

 Why Poor Countries Stopped Catching Up. Notable for academic researchers being honest and saying "The data now says we were wrong."

It looks like Fukuyama was prophetic about this in 1991.  

Bernini.  Imagine being able to make stone look soft. 

Steve Sailer reminds us what PJ O'Rourke wrote about Somalis. In 1993. 

The purpose of Milan Cathedral 

First and Second Palestine.   Seems to be new

Reminder

One of the possible names for this blog 20 years ago was "Do I have to pull this car over?" I rejected it because I knew I would prove as guilty as the misbehaving children in the back. 

So there's this.

 

School Is Worse

 School is Way Worse for Kids Than Social Media.  Eli-Stark-Elster

One of my favorite tests: "Compared to What?" We read about the terrible things that social media and video games do to children's development.  I do not say such things are untrue.  In my day it was comic books and TV that rotted the brain, and I imagine it did.  Either my junior or senior year of high school, I watched "Gilligan's Island" three times every night - two of them the same episode. I know see it as a good form of zoning out. When you have anxiety sufficient to require at least 60 minutes - often 120 - to fall asleep every night, the brain seeks something mindless enough to relax, interesting enough to keep you in the chair.

School was great because I got to see my friends before, after, and between classes. But many of my classes I would go in prepared to start slowly counting until the end of the class as soon as paying attention became intolerable, but having to look attentive. Even being challenged wore off rather quickly. I loved the first two weeks of advanced summer studies, 4 hours a day, six days a week of the same subject, plus homework that was new ground we were supposed to capture by morning.  Weeks three and four were okay.  Week five I was starting to wane.  Week six I was checked out again.

I suppose it was dime novels that started us on the road to ruin, eh?  

 For instance: did you know that daily social media use increases the likelihood a child will commit suicide by 12-18%? Or that teenagers are far more likely to visit the ER for psychiatric problems if they have an Instagram account? Or that a child’s amount of social media use, past a certain threshold, correlates exponentially with poorer sleep, lower reported wellbeing, and more severe mental health symptoms?

If that was all true for social media— and again, none of it is — you and I both would agree that people under 16 or so should not have access to platforms like Instagram or Snapchat. Imagine allowing your child to enter any system that would make them 12-18% more likely to kill themselves. That would be insane. You wouldn’t let your kid anywhere near that system, and the public would protest until it was eliminated once for all.

Great. So let’s get rid of school.

Yes, there’s the obvious twist — all the data I just listed is true for the effects of school. The modern education system is probably the single biggest threat to the mental health of children. 

 

I don't know what I would design instead. I am pretty sure I would order the complete set of Junior Classics comic books. How else would I ever read Silas Marner? 

The Increase in Cancer is a Good Thing

Why it's good news that more people are dying of cancer. 

Since 1980, the share of the global population that dies of cancer per year has risen by almost 20 percent. But this isn’t because cancer has become more dangerous – it’s because of rising life expectancy. Cancer is much more common in old age, and more people now survive to that point. Age-adjusted cancer death rates have actually fallen by more than 20 percent
Stefan Schubert

This is also a good thing to keep in mind with health statistics in general. Better hospitals get more difficult cases. Longevity in general is not a great measure of a society's health (though it's a pretty good measure of yours). The percentage of people dying of a particular cause has a lot to do with the causes that have dropped off the list altogether. 

World Happiness Report

 The World Happiness Report is a Sham by Yascha Mounk. What I have been saying for years, but better researched and more thorough. Scandinavians see through the questions and want to make their society look good. 

But perhaps the biggest problem with the World Happiness Report is that metrics of self-reported life satisfaction don’t seem to correlate particularly well with other kinds of things we clearly care about when we talk about happiness. At a minimum, you would expect the happiest countries in the world to have some of the lowest incidences of adverse mental health outcomes. But it turns out that the residents of the same Scandinavian countries that the press dutifully celebrates for their supposed happiness are especially likely to take antidepressants or even to commit suicide.  

When You Don't Understand A Novel

Book club did Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins this month, and I was puzzled for a good deal of it.  Not that I couldn't pick anything up, but events unfolded that had little connection to each other, and even well into the book, when the various subplots were building and connecting internally, how they fit with each other remained obscure.  I figured out a some interesting things I noticed and found a tag line I thought would hold up: What is wrong with mankind, and what can be done about it?  

It was good to listen to smart people who loved the book. Pieces came together. But as they came together, I realised that I had dropped basic information that I had been given.  Had I recollected those I would have done better, as I could have asked myself good questions after 100 pages.  First is the title, Love in the Ruins. Always keep the title in mind, right?  It's important. The protagonist is in love with three women but the relationships are fragmented and he believes the world is about to either end or change drastically. So when puzzled, asking yourself "Why is this book called Love in the Ruins?"  Whenever I remembered the title, I diverted into thinking "Wasn't that a movie with Katherine Hepburn?  Was that connected with the poem by Browning? Is this book going to tie into one of those somehow?" None were helpful thoughts in understanding this book.  Keep it simple.

One of the participants read from the first page of the novel. Every paragraph not only introduced the themes and subplots, but pointed to exactly what was central about them.  So go back and read the first page again. Pay attention to names.  The protagonist was named Thomas More and was one of his descendants. I just took it as a generic historic religious figure, telegraphing that there were going to be religious topics and themes.  No. It was important that it was Thomas More.  The town in Louisiana was named Paradise.  I thought that was merely ironic. There was lots more where this came from.

Some others picked up that this was about the lack of integration between parts of the personality, as well as between parts of society, and parts of the Church.  As the kaleidoscope keeps turning, it finally comes to some stable picture at the very end.  Strange, but recognisable and looking healthy rather than pathological. If you know that going in, and remember the title and pay attention to the names, the book may reward a reading.

The Assistant Village Idiot is supposed to make his contribution by paying attention to the obvious things that everyone else has overlooked.  I got that backwards, failing about as spectacularly as possible. 

Tuckerman

 I've never skied Tuckerman Ravine on Mount Washington myself. Never seriously considered it.  I have friends who have, one in particular who grew up in Gorham and skied it often. He still skis at 72, just finishing a vacation at Gore Mountain in the Adirondacks where he skied 15 straight days, opening to closing. This is where they just had the gondola breakdown two weeks ago, which he just missed.  His was the last gondola that could be exited before it ground to a halt, stranding over 5 dozen skiers aloft. 

So he is still having adventures.  He skied for the US Army in Germany in the 70s and works for some unexplainable Minotaur AI defense intelligence company in Virginia now. His eye is on retirement to get back to the Adirondacks. I don't quite know how I got distracted into this.  I was talking about Tuckerman's.

I can see why you would want to ski it in the summer, when it is the only place in the East with snow year-round. I don't get choosing a workout like this in February, when you could get in more skiing anywhere with a lift. Wildcat is right across the highway. I'm grateful there are GoPro cameras that can give me a vague idea of the experience.

 

Links from 2014

 Generic Novel Tim Sample with a classic old Mainer's joke

Metaphor for Memory - Computer analogy or video?  Application to Borderline Personality Disorder. 

California Dreamin' with the Hullabaloo Dancers.  Fairly disquieting 

Fraidy Cats  I am still hearing that it is conservatives who are afraid of change.  I am even more convinced now that this is backwards.

Pete Seeger had just died.  James's link in the comments to a First Things essay at the time still works

 

Fish on Fridays

We are having fish tonight, which always reminds me of this joke when it happens on a Friday. 

Maureen O'Rourke went to the priest to complain about her family and ask what she should do with them.  "I make fish every Friday like my mother and grandmother before me, as a good Catholic woman should, and they whine about it the whole dinner."

"Don't they like fish?" Father asked

"They love fish.  They just don't like being old fashioned, so now that the rules have softened they want to be all Vatican II about it."

"Do they complain about it when you serve fish on other nights?"

Mother O'Rourke paused, eyes darting from side to side. Then one side of her mouth turned up in a grin. "Thank you for your help, Father.  They're going to get fish every blessed Wednesday for the rest of their lives." 

Land Line

 I haven't gotten rid of my land line yet.  I need it to find my cell phone.

Winning 20 the Hard Way

Mickey Lolich of the Detroit Tigers died several days ago at 85. He was known as a solid high-innings, high-strikeout pitcher with a bit of an attitude. Mickey was not a 20-game winner until his 30s but had some spectacular seasons late in his career.

He was overshadowed during the 1968 regular season by Denny McLain's 31 victories, an extreme statistical outlier even at the time. Lolich was even sent to the bullpen for a couple of weeks for ineffectiveness.  But he managed to win 17 games anyway, earning 3 starts in the World Series. This time it was McLain who disappointed, losing games 1 and 4. Lolich won twenty games the hard way, with three complete-game victories, including Game Seven on two-days rest. Key to that win was picking off Lou Brock* and Curt Flood in one inning. 

 

McLain's career disappeared, embroiled in bookmaking scandals. Mickey went on to have his best seasons. 

*The replay shows that Brock was actually safe, but players argued with umpires less about that then.