The language you speak changes your perception of time
popsci.com
popsci.com
When talking about the passing of time we'd usually go for the holidays instead (Carnaval, Lent/Easter, St John's/St Peter's, Christmas) and when we were in school we'd count it based on school quarters.
The school year not starting and ending in the same year was also very surprising.
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Months-of-the-Ye...
- To prove to be false or erroneous; overthrow by argument or proof. "refute testimony."
- To deny the accuracy or truth of. "refuted the results of the poll."
- To repudiate.
Oh, the irony (and also in the summary of the book).
I wonder how Westerners would react to a new word being invented that directly references this phenomenon, and I also wonder whether doing that would have zero effect on people's cognition (which is essentially what is being claimed impossible), especially if they were reminded of its existence every time the common habit of speaking ambiguously/meaninglessly arose.
Such a word would have to sustain substantial memetic attack though, cultural "truths" are usually defended passionately. I think the most that could be achieved in this culture and era is adoption in the counterculture scene.
As for whether he doesn't "prove" it false: which of the many conflicting meanings of the word "prove" (or "doesn't" for that matter) would we be using, and would it even be possible to achieve a demonstration of it, that people who despise taking the meanings of words seriously could agree on?
In Britain, very commonly, refute = deny.
As with most ambiguous words, the intention is usually clear from context anyway.
What "is" in a geographical area is a function of human cognition as it is in that area. When actual values are not available (like now), the mind supplies simulated values, and no notification that it has done that.
Some cultures have some insight into these matters/phenomena, some do not. Western countries tend to be in the second group, they consider (to the degree that they do, technically) such topics "woo woo". Consequently, they make the same error, over and over, and have no clue.
> As with most ambiguous words, the intention is usually clear from context anyway.
I agree that any given human agrees with their own personal opinion (what is "clear" to them).
Like, entire languages of read vs read - as in "He reads that" or "He read that" , context is part of a words definition
You seem to me to be taking the meanings of words so seriously that you've lost the value those words provide.
Do you believe this to be free of both error and irony? I don't intend this in a rude way, but as a purely intellectual undertaking - this is, after all, Hacker News, where intellectual curiosity is a thing, reputedly anyways.
We just pretend we all actually are operating with the Merriam-Webster definitions bc it's easier.
Words are just to convey ideas - if you can pickup what someone means contextually but you choose to ignore that and focus on incorrect word use, you've missed the point of communication
I suggest you reread my comment, taking into consideration whether that is logically even possible in this case with the breadth of meanings attributes to this particular symbol.
>if you can pickup what someone means contextually
and
> you've missed the point of communication
If you missed the mark, would you necessarily be able to know?
If they really want to claim that the “language you speak” changes your perception of time, then they should have avoided the confounding variable of translation discrepancies in experiment instruction.
For example, design some simple UI which does not need to be explained.
There are better works that describe the different cultural roots of “obvious” concepts, reflected or not reflected in language. “Time” can consist of point of «now» with axes to “past” and “future”. Or it can start at “now” and flow to the “past”. Or “now” can be a process instead of point, with both ends disappearing in the fog, so that tomorrow's “now” is also “now”, and the day after tomorrow, and so on. Time can be circular, with events kicking the needle out of the groove, or it can be linear. The “events” can be self-contained points in time, “facts”, or they can be processes, flows, in which you're either in or not. Even the distinction between “work time” (“doing something”) and “leisure time” (“doing nothing”, though not synonymous with lack of activity) depends on habit and technical ability to track time. All this defines how people leave their lives and reason about them.
In fact, time perceived as volumetric rather than as a length is the specific example he uses and includes the actual research. There are extremely specific cases like this where it does in fact hold up but the effect is extremely minute, to the point that it's difficult to even measure properly. In most cases it doesn't hold up at all. But these very tiny barely measurable cases are often used as evidence for frankly nonsense claims so it's important not to extrapolate this to "Japanese blue and green are the same word so Japanese people must be colourblind", which is where people often take this.
Like, yes, my language has a ton of words for all possible familial relationships, for example different words for maternal and paternal uncle, but that’s because familial relationships are important in my culture and that’s reflected in the language.
Language is the reflection of culture, not the other way around
Even if 100% of humans spoke English as their primary language, we would still have words like Dharma, samsara, nirvana etc.
English will eventually take from every culture every word of significance without a direct translation - these words will be understood by their English definitions to the majority of the global population.
We will still call that amalgamation of global languages English
I don't get how this kind of skepticism can exist under this current "arguably alive" LLM hype. They're machine-executable form of strong Sapir-Worf hypothesis, literally things that think* and speak solely by use of English language and English language alone(they sound quite like machine translation in other languages).
Below is just cherry-picked search results, selected largely by whether last few lines in the abstracts support my narrative, but I mean, it's a problem obvious enough that the rest of the world just knows.
0: "Not All Languages Are Created Equal in LLMs: Improving Multilingual Capability by Cross-Lingual-Thought Prompting": https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07004
1: "Better to Ask in English: Cross-Lingual Evaluation of Large Language Models for Healthcare Queries", https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13132
2: "Do Moral Judgment and Reasoning Capability of LLMs Change with Language? A Study using the Multilingual Defining Issues Test": https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02135
3: "Should We Respect LLMs? A Cross-Lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performance": https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14531
4: "Exploring Multilingual Human Value Concepts in Large Language Models: Is Value Alignment Consistent, Transferable and Controllable across Languages?": https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18120
5: "How do Large Language Models Handle Multilingualism?": https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18815
I think a better way to think of them is as an n-dimensional "meaning space" where words/phrases are n-vectors, n is a very large number, and each dimension has semantic meaning. It may be the case that this meaning space is pretty much the same between all natural languages, which would be evidence that Sapir-Whorf is false, that differences between natural languages are largely cosmetic
As one possible counter example, I've seen one of 7B models insist in using a Chinese verb in a Japanese sentence, and while it's fascinating in itself, it's not necessarily in line with that "difference in languages are cosmetic and we just don't realize" narrative.
How are LLM's trained?
How are humans trained?
I've noticed that a surprising amount of idioms are the same between Spanish and Greek, to the point where I will translate a Greek idiom to Spanish and it will usually be intelligible to a Spanish speaker.
The same doesn't happen with English, where most things are different.
Italian and Spanish also share lots of idioms, too.
It goes beyond English/Swedish vs Spanish. In Chinese you go down and up in time, like afternoon would be under noon.
So is Japanese …
I find the concept fascinating. It makes sense: what’s in front of you can be directly seen, much like you can remember and “see” the past. But the future is unknown, like something behind you that you can’t see.
IIRC, the main character knew her future daughter would get sick and pass - and the conundrum was, does she tell her husband before the daughter is born (to potentially prevent pregnancy but doesn’t) … which after the daughter was born, the dad/husband learned she knew the future fate - led to their divorce. Was the book different?
Really beautiful and entertaining story, definitely worth the ~hour of reading.
(Also, this isn't much of a spoiler, the daughter's death is mentioned very early in the story's non-linear narrative)
> Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who’ve read the Book of Ages never admit to it.
So just to spell it out more than the sibling comment - the story doesn't ask "do I decide to have a child, even knowing that they die".
Instead, the focus is on her literally knowing, that morning, that her daughter was heading out to a place where she would die. One word of warning could've prevented the death. Of course, that "isn't possible" from their point of view, but from "our" point of view it seems like it is possible, so she effectively let her daughter die.
Very different emphasis. Both the movie and the Chiang story are great.
I think that's kind of the challenge the story poses. From our point of view, she knows what will happen and "chooses" not to change it, from her/their point of view, it's all already happened, she can't change it.
You're right that she compares it to that, but my reading of it is that that is the whole disconnect/point - she does it view that way, but also doesn't change it in a way that is incomprehensible to the way we view it but that is the only way it could go from their perspective.
I don't think we're disagreeing, just viewing the same actions from a different lens.
I find the idea of "variational principle" in physics interesting.
https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Reading/Ch...
Some people don't have good detection for bad logic and rhetoric, and yet are easily convinced they understand things they haven't fully understood. See: crypto, politics, economists, law, etc.
> It feels as though this book were written in a weekend, one man's simmering grudge against his own imagination of pop-culture's neo-Whorfian enthusiasms.
> It was very frustrating for me to get through the book as I had very high expectations for it. I had some problems with the tone (his use of rhetoric detracting from actual credible claims), but mostly with the lack of evidence to support his claims. He evokes intuition, but that made the argument very unscientific and uncredible. In the end, McWhorter's argument did not conflict with many proponents of the idea of linguistic relativity, and his actual argument against the strict interpretation of Sapir-Whorf is essentially a straw man.
> He trots out a bunch of thought experiments to support his arguments, but these are always things he's made up and have no empirical backing beyond that they feel right -- and in many cases they feel right because the alternative would undermine certain assumptions that are the basis for modern liberal societies. For instance, Chinese is less grammatically complex than many other languages, therefore the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would indicate that their cultural world-view is also less complex. [! wtf?]
> Saw McWhorter give a talk, and thought this would be interesting. It isn’t. He’s an embarrassingly poor thinker, and this is a useless contribution to the language question.
> In short, the guy is kind of a poor thinker, and the book is an embarrassing example of the worst kind of academic sophistry. Two stars only because it might provoke some discussion.
> A dismally argued little book.
> This author raises belaboring a point to an art form that I don't think I'd ever imagined.
> Do you love horses? If so then I recommend avoiding this book, in which the author beats a dead one for 100+ pages.
Etc.
Again, all the people in this thread asserting that 'Sapir Whorf is debunked' are referring to this one book, by this one author, who plainly has misinterpreted the essence of the hypothesis and seems to have some kind of grudge about it for whatever reason.
Clever
It is so fascinating how Normative Westerners describe "reality".
So it turns out the answer is, it depends. I studied linguistics a bit in college and Sapir-Whorf was then derided (late 90s), though we never got into it. Wiki explains the popularization of linguistic relativism was more due to Whorf (than Sapir), and that perhaps he was a poor scientist.
https://stevenpinker.com/publications/stuff-thought-language...
The methodology of this study is highly suspect, for the other Americans without a sense of another vernacular language than English, the truth is that translation is an art with large margins of imprecision & artistic license surrounding it to accurately convey nuanced meanings between languages even of the same family or subfamily. Due to the way words and concepts associate with the other in both languages, a direct translation at best strips out the nuanced meanings of the text/speech being translated rather rudely and comes off dry and at times as gibberish. Determining such a nuance as that of "relativism" in perception of time would take some real masters of translation which no automated process, and likely no one involved in this captain obvious stunt, could ever hope to be.
Of course language shapes our perception of time, remember Karl Marx came up with the notion of historical materialism (his only worthy contribution) which says that our perception of reality is shaped by our material culture. It is hardly much extrapolation to extend that to appreciate that the way we interpret that material culture is shaped by the conceptual wrappers we use to describe it using whatever variant of monkey vocalizations we use to communicate with each other. This is also discussed in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (1200 years before Marx, why Indian philosophy gets no credit is beyond me but I appreciate it immensely thus credit it whenever I can), as is the next step that will take some other harebrained virtue signalling in the form of experiment to "prove" to the rest of society. That next step is that the word and the mental generalization (the world of forms the ancient Greeks obsessed absurdly about) are not reality, merely a flawed tool we use to address that reality and the object we intend and our own mind perceiving of that object and describing it in words exist independently of the word itself.
As for time, remember what the Romans wrote even on the walls of Pompeii, "Eat, drink and be merry! For tomorrow we dine in Hades!" Indeed, see you there.