Almost all research on the mind is in English
wired.co.uk
wired.co.uk
Think of it:
If you're from non-english speaking country, then you'll be spending like 14 years at school learning english.
Additionally you'll have to put a lot of effort outside the classes and you'll still be at probably good / very good, but not native level.
So, in order to compete with engineers, scientists, etc from english-first countries you not only have to be as good as they are, but all of that while paying this "english-learning tax"
It is like a few thousands of hours of effort required to get decent results and now think about it how many other things you could spend that time on.
It is actually crazy when you think about this. Almost every person in majority of countries needs to pay that huge penalty that's required to enter science, business, international world.
Coming from a Scandinavian country, we started learning English around the age of 8, and at the age of 15 my English was good enough that I was reading the Harry Potter books in English as they were published, rather than wait six months for the translation. Then I was also learning a third language from age 13 to 19.
And it's well documented that learning new languages, similar to playing sports or doing crafts or other stuff, is very beneficial for brain development in children and young adults.
If your hypothesis made sense, the United Kingdom should have a huge advantage over other European countries within science and other fields where English is predominantly used. But it does not. You can e.g. look at metrics like "number of scientific publications per capita", where the UK is only number 20 in the world, and the US is number 33.
Public education in many countries is trash.
In third world you probably have bad public education and you have to work.
In say Poland if you speak good English it means you learned it on private lessons or on your own.
Or, in the case of a Polish programmer friend of mine, from Leisure Suit Larry games.
Really? I looked them up, and it says Polish students typically learn one or two foreign languages, and 67.9% do English. Unsurprisingly, German came next at 33.3%, and the rest on the list summed to another 33%, which also implies how many do two.
Of course, "good" is subjective; I did French at school (in the UK) from 11-16, got a GCSE grade D, and had to be corrected IRL by a native speaker after saying "Je ne parle français"…
From what I've been told, the older generation around these parts (east Berlin) would've been forced to learn Russian at school as their second language, and then been completely unable to practice it with anyone as all of the native speakers were soldiers from the USSR who would've been banned from fraternising with the locals.
"Learn"
If actually this many people manage to learn deutsch language, then why only tiny tiny tiny % of people take it on final exams after high school?
5000 people taking it vs 180 000 taking english on "advanced" exams (which are optional, just for scores)
Why is the metric of focus the number of papers and not their quality?
I know Austrian universities also obsess with number of papers published to look good in statistics, even though many researchers I know admit that what they publish is pointless, they just do it to have published papers under their belt and to inflate the numbers to make the university look good.
Maybe the US and UK are not leading by sheer number of papers, but they do lead certain fields such AI/ML research, drugs/medical, etc. So your focus on numbers seems pointless.
But keep in mind that different cultures face significantly different difficulties when it comes to pick up a foreign language. I'm based in Brazil and I can tell you with reasonable confidence: the average person in Latin America struggles A LOT to get past Harry Potter books and achieve full work proficiency. This can be due to significantly different grammatical structures, word roots, phonemes, and whatnot, or---most importantly---due to the fact that most of us can't afford quality language courses at affordable prices. In reality, good and affordable schools in our own native language is considered a privilege to many.
So either due to structural differences between languages (especially those that don't share the same Germanic roots as English), or due to economical and social issues, some non-English speakers have to spend hours of deliberate practice to be on the same ground as people from a few other countries, in academia or in a multi-cultural IT team. I myself can't count the number of hours of pronunciation practice I amassed throughout the years for being too afraid of sounding dumb in my daily scrums. This is something I'm pretty sure a native speaker doesn't have to mind with when starting at a new job.
That said, I don't see how the "UK vs. rest of Europe in numbers of papers" could support the claim that a head start doesn't exist. There are a number of infinitely more relevant variables that could explain scientific throughput by country.
> If you're from non-english speaking country, then you'll be spending like 14 years at school learning english.
It's not that you get N hours free per week if you don't need to learn English, isn't it? English-speakers probably fill those "English as a second language hours" at school with something else. So, all in all, more or less kids in western countries spend the same time in school.
> So, in order to compete with engineers, scientists, etc from english-first countries you not only have to be as good as they are, but all of that while paying this "english-learning tax"
Depends as well. At least in Europe nobody really cares how good your English is past a certain level (ofc, if people can hardly understand you, then yeah you're in trouble). And, among Europeans, the most difficult accent to understand is the British one :)
> It is actually crazy when you think about this. Almost every person in majority of countries needs to pay that huge penalty that's required to enter science, business, international world.
At least based on my experience and on the experience of others (e.g., family, friends), it is not a huge penalty I would say. You either are good at it (for whatever reason) and then you have no trouble working as an engineer/scientist speaking English, or you are not good at it and you actually don't work as engineer/scientist (edit: in international environments). Cannot comment about other fields.
The difference is, in my opinion that you don't have to care about other languages as hard as you have to care about english.
So yea, other kids can have french language lessons, but their life isn't kinda dependent on it right? unless they pick specific career
Meanwhile: tutorials, books (tutorials), research, discussions on the internet - almost all of it is english-driven,
business is english-driven, international communities around topics e.g programming, gym, etc, etc are mostly about english
then it is pretty close to being necessary
I consider an advantage for me not to be from a monolingual country, even if I have a hard time following some speakers because my English isn't native.
It used to be seen as a cognitive drag mostly because language development is near inevitably delayed.
But by the time you're getting into your teens bilinguals pretty outperform monolinguals nearly everywhere.
The mistake people make is try and assess cognition in non-native language. But you can't do that because nearly all tests are standardised to the first language (and actually English usually).
No doubt being bilingual L1 English L2 Chinese is likely powerful and much better than being Swahili/Laotian in terms of opportunities
What do you mean by "insulted" and who is who here?
AFAIK, English native speakers needs about 2 years to properly read and write in English at average, which is high barrier to entry.
Group dynamic suggests that average education level will be higher in first case, while education level of elite will be higher in second case.
I think it's more like, a few people get the (dubious) bonus of speaking the lingua franca as their mother tongue. (The downside being they almost inevitably only speak the one language).
Calling it an advantage is more correct, as, if US/UK folks disappeared over night, it would still make sense for everyone to learn a shared language for commerce/science/whatever.
And that's a good thing. All you have to do is learn English (easier said than done, but completely realistic and feasible for most), and you can talk to almost every nerd in the world about anything.
I'm saying "no it's good"
Unless you're studying the difference in people's minds given language differences, it makes more sense to study a common language, otherwise language differences will color the results, making comparisons difficult or impossible.
In continental Europe, they often use English as a handshaking language. I once saw a German talkshow host interview a Norwegian singer, and they spoke in English until he could ascertain that she knew enough German to conduct the interview in German.
Guru, avatar, loot, orange, safari, schadenfreude, karaoke, cookie, entrepreneur…
One day the lingua franca will be somewhere else.
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Tabling that (in the American sense rather than the British), every technical field uses language slightly differently; as a software dev I found it very weird when first witnessing scientists pluralise their source code as "codes".
My native English speaking colleagues or those from Europe, India, Africa, South America, pluralize code as code.
I didn’t like, do a study on it or anything this is just a pattern I’ve noticed, so your mileage may vary.
My native language (and almost every other language) just sounds really awkward when doing the same.
English, being so flexible and easily adaptable, is set to keep winning for a long time.
Meh. It depends. I don't think I would say "Se rompio el vaso" ("The glass broke itself") if I saw that Sofia broke it (I would say instead "Sofia rompio el vaso", just like in English). But if I don't know who broke the glass, then yeah I probably would say "Se rompio el vaso" (or just "The glass is broken", "El vaso está roto").
Edit: But, if I don't really want to point at Sofia while still saying that the glass is now broken, then I may use the "se" to lighten the matter. But I guess in English one can do the same thing ("Things get broken, people. Nothing to see here")
In a supermarket where I dropped a jar of pasta sauce, I said "the jar broke". Me breaking it was not important, since I wasn't going to pay for it.
And there's nothing stopping you from using other languages. Go right ahead.
research and documentation should strive to be the most convenient forms to be accessed and read by others; shifting to outdated romantic languages that tie gender to objects or to region-specialized character heavy ineffecient languages that already rely on english loan words to convey modern ideas doesn't seem like the answer either right? maybe some critique on how outdated other common languages are compared to emerging cultural concepts would provide a better point to how language should evolve instead of becoming frankensteined as a point of cultural prestige?
im down for switching to hangul if it were noted that e.g. conveying ideas and topics we commonly see in scientific research were able to be easier processed and understood, but that's not what the subtle "english bad" tone is trying to convey here
> shifting to outdated romantic languages that tie gender to objects
Gender in linguistics is better referred to as noun classes and should not be conflated with societal notions of gender. And calling a language outdated is deeply ignorant, and borders on xenophobic.
And Hangul is not a language, it’s a writing system.
> Do you speak any languages other than English?
yes
> Gender in linguistics is better referred to as noun classes and should not be conflated with societal notions of gender.
grammatical gender has been referred to as synonymous to noun classes for decades, obviously varies language to language but this isn't a correction but rather your opinion :)
> And calling a language outdated is deeply ignorant, and borders on xenophobic.
what do you mean? im divorcing any notion of region, politics or cultural context to something as broad as a language like the article is doing! i dont REALLY mean anything negative when trying to discuss weaknesses of these classes of languages by making broad statements, im just noting that the field of research would make these choices inappropriate as a comparison to english using the same sterile tone as the article.
> And Hangul is not a language, it’s a writing system.
i meant writing in korean (too implicitly, my mistake), does it change that statement? :)
Easy example for me would be looking at an aquarium. I'm likely to just say it contains a variety of fish. Someone that cares and has studied fish could tell you the accepted names of each. We would both be perceiving different types of fish, though. Such that if you showed me a gold fish and a tiger fish, I'd like describe it as two fish. But if you asked me if each were the same, I'd say no.
Same as if you showed me any of the ridiculously large number of blue crayons in a modern crayola pack. They are all just blue to me. Are they the same blue? Obviously not.
And I see nothing wrong with saying something doesn't make sense. If anything, I find the idea that we shouldn't allow folks to express doubts on things as a terrible path to go down. I am emphatically not claiming that, because it doesn't make sense to me, it must be false.
In my post, do you have a counter to why I would not be able to distinguish two colors that I use the same name for? It is not at all uncommon to where mismatching clothes that are both blue, as it were. If asked to say what color someone's clothes are that are cyan and blue, I fully expect I'd just say "blue." As would the vast majority of people.
If that example bothers you, what color would you say the sky is? Noting that it typically has strong gradients that are clearly visible to people.
You very emphatically did say that it was wrong, and justified it with your dislike and incomprehension of it. Specifically, "I really dislike the idea .. [it] seems distinctly wrong to me. ... it doesn't make sense to me..."
It's strange that you pick this example of the color blue, because that happens to be a well known example of the topic - "if two colors are called by the same name in a language, speakers of that language will judge the two colors to be more similar and will be more likely to confuse them in memory compared with people whose language assigns different names to the two colors." If you were Russian, then you would have to choose between two words that both correspond to the English word "blue". If they were two different blue colors, and you were asked if they were the same color, then statistically you (an English speaker) would say that the clothes are the same color, and the Russian speaker would disagree. If a third item was shown that matched only one of the two, the Russian would be slightly faster and use less cognitive processing to identify the match. When later asked about the clothes, the Russian would probably remember the difference in colors more distinctly than you. None of this means that you can't distinguish the two colors, but they do mean that the linguistic categories you use have influenced your thought.
I'll note that later quotes at least took it in a much softer interpretation. “We can categorize without language, but the speed and the efficiency with which we categorize can be boosted” is far different from the article's, "As a result, they see colors in the world in slightly a different way."
That is, it seems far easier to accept that they categorize the world in a different way. But just because I said there are some birds in the yard, doesn't mean that I can't see the difference between jays, woodpeckers, and my chickens. Heck, just because I don't know the breed names of my chickens doesn't mean that I can't tell I have several breeds. If I say I have a collection of fowl, that doesn't mean I don't understand I have ducks and chickens. (Similarly, if I have some ducks, that doesn't mean I don't know the difference between drakes and ducks.)
Your last paragraph really takes this to the much softer "we remember based on our vocabulary." And, that doesn't seem nearly as controversial. Again, though, the article had "they see colors in the world in slightly a different way." Which, yeah, I still feel is very wrong. Your memory is not necessarily how you experience and see things. It is more how you encoded them into your memory.
There is already known to be more senses that five:
* sense of heat and cold
* sense of pain
* sense of balance
* sense of body awareness (touch your nose while your eyes are closed)
Anyway, this is exactly the same mistake psychology made and how we got the acronym WEIRD. Stupid that we don't learn from history even within science.
[0] https://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca1/dukk...
We know how it goes: all generalizations are abusive, but they are so appealing, which is all the more true for this current one.
This adds to an interesting conversation, sharing nuances, inside jokes etc.
I always thought she'd make a good 'Tanuki'. ;)
The concept, and examples, of "base rate" are pretty intuitive, IMO. And yet, somehow, considering how INCREDIBLY CRUCIAL even the most basic understanding of "base rate" is to "critical thinking", they seem completely neglected in the vast majority of education.
I'd argue, now, that we'd be far better off skipping crap like "integral rules for the cotangent function" (or whatever the current equivalent is) than skipping serious discussion and repeated allusions to the ubiquitous theme of "base rates" (and even "probability" and "statistics" in general - just having SOME feel for these) in interpreting, well, just about any ... putative "information".
Further, I suspect that if we introduced kids to this kind of stuff when they were even 5, or 6, they'd pick it up far more easily than most adults, who have to wedge this often "unwelcome news" into their already rather rigid / solidified worldviews ... possibly confronting how 'wrong' of a perspective they've brought to many chains of reasoning etc... leading, often enough, to rejection of the unwelcome news / much more difficulty understanding it at all (often enough probably driven just by the 'subconscious' interfering with quite "getting it" ... but not in a way almost anyone can realize ... [i.e., why the hell they can't "get it" ... why some concept that seems simple enough is actually so slippery and like 'quicksand' in their minds ... something that might look clear enough 'on paper']).
There are two "classic" issues in these sorts of cases, in terms of statistics. One is the "base rate" I mentioned before, the other is "conditional probabilities". I.e., Bayes' rule (or theorem) etc. These are intimately intertwined, generally.
The issue is: if you're trying to make a (statistical) inference, it, much like sentences in writing (among other things), needs to be appropriately "contextualized".
So, for example, you might be able to "find something" ... "interesting" ... (or infer / "say" something) in the XKCD example mentioned by another commenter, if you were looking at ratios - for example, (number of "Martha Stewart Living" subscribers) / (number of people). Then, at least, you have something other than just a sample straight from the "base heatmap" (population).
Now, if you want to look at those subscribers, and consumers of "furry porn" (or whatever - just following the XKCD set up, here), then, you want to look at things like P(a | b) where a = "subscriber to Martha Stewart Living" and b = "consumer of furry porn" (and, P(a | b) means "the usual" - probability of "subscriber to Martha Stewart Living" GIVEN "consumer of furry porn"). Bayes' rule, and other "transformations" available (i.e., that are valid - that are "Theorems"), help you to find ways to compute such statistics (importantly, under CERTAIN assumptions [specified in the statements of the theorems, underlying propositions, etc. - and generally explained in stats textbooks]).
Finally, and this probably prompted returning to write this comment more even than what I just wrote - you don't HAVE to be "formally trained" at all to 'get' this kind of stuff, of course (though most people end up with some kind of 'muddle' / fuzzy thinking without). One of my favorite examples of someone more clever than me (IMO - who seems to have gotten it without "formal" training / consideration / exploration / ...) is Bill Burr:
:shrug: