Codswallop and hogwash
September 15, 2017 10:57 PM Subscribe
The study of languages has long been prone to nonsense. Why is linguistics such a magnet for dilettantes and crackpots?
Because it is the only field where amateurs dictate to experts?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:01 PM on September 15, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:01 PM on September 15, 2017 [2 favorites]
Why is linguistics such a magnet for dilettantes and crackpots?
languagehat usually seems to make a lot of sense. (Plus, he's got hats.)
posted by LeLiLo at 11:24 PM on September 15, 2017 [9 favorites]
languagehat usually seems to make a lot of sense. (Plus, he's got hats.)
posted by LeLiLo at 11:24 PM on September 15, 2017 [9 favorites]
To answer the question, I'd say 1) people care about languages, more than most specialities; and 2) so much data is easily accessible, in the form of a dictionary. Few other fields make the cherries so easy to pick.
posted by zompist at 11:46 PM on September 15, 2017 [6 favorites]
posted by zompist at 11:46 PM on September 15, 2017 [6 favorites]
And sure enough, it has inherited French’s status as the allegedly superior language. How rich in vocabulary it is, how suitable for song and science, how clear, concise and, in a word, cool. And how this makes me – as a non-English speaker – chuckle.
Is this a narrative any native English speakers commonly assert? Not a rhetorical question; I had so many teachers say things like "its the hardest language to learn" and the "spelling doesn't make sense" and "the plurals aren't logical" and so on that at least 30 years ago I'd say the status was the opposite of "clear, concise and cool." The supposed witticisms illustrating this (like "you see a pair of oxen but never a pair of boxen" or "ghoti is pronounced fish!") were so overused as to be tired by the time I was in middle school.
Have things changed? Was my experience an outlier? Or maybe this is just something ESL people assert to advertise their own worth (in which case fine, but why are you chuckling at the native speakers?)
posted by mark k at 12:19 AM on September 16, 2017 [5 favorites]
Is this a narrative any native English speakers commonly assert? Not a rhetorical question; I had so many teachers say things like "its the hardest language to learn" and the "spelling doesn't make sense" and "the plurals aren't logical" and so on that at least 30 years ago I'd say the status was the opposite of "clear, concise and cool." The supposed witticisms illustrating this (like "you see a pair of oxen but never a pair of boxen" or "ghoti is pronounced fish!") were so overused as to be tired by the time I was in middle school.
Have things changed? Was my experience an outlier? Or maybe this is just something ESL people assert to advertise their own worth (in which case fine, but why are you chuckling at the native speakers?)
posted by mark k at 12:19 AM on September 16, 2017 [5 favorites]
Random internet journey: Reading this article, I saw on one of the charts that a fellow named Edo Nyland had declared Basque to be the Ursprache sometime in the last century. (I had not yet read to the end of the article and learned more about Nyland.)
Nyland sounded familiar and I was curious, so I googled for more information (rather than reading to the end of the article which is what I would have done if I had an attention span.) I found the Nyland book on goodreads, and found that it had one enthusiastic reviewer who bought its ideas wholesale, who said it changed the way he looked at history.
Something about the guy's credulity and avatar made me suspicious about him, and I clicked through to his user page and googled him up, and discovered that he's a full-on white nationalist doomsday prepper looking forward to a post-societal-collapse future of balkanized North American ethnostates.
Nothing about this surprises me.
posted by edheil at 12:36 AM on September 16, 2017 [21 favorites]
Nyland sounded familiar and I was curious, so I googled for more information (rather than reading to the end of the article which is what I would have done if I had an attention span.) I found the Nyland book on goodreads, and found that it had one enthusiastic reviewer who bought its ideas wholesale, who said it changed the way he looked at history.
Something about the guy's credulity and avatar made me suspicious about him, and I clicked through to his user page and googled him up, and discovered that he's a full-on white nationalist doomsday prepper looking forward to a post-societal-collapse future of balkanized North American ethnostates.
Nothing about this surprises me.
posted by edheil at 12:36 AM on September 16, 2017 [21 favorites]
Good but abbreviated essay.
I've thought that a primary reason that non-experts imagine expertise in linguistics is because every person is an expert in at least one language. Except by "expert", I mean as someone who uses language, not someone who understands how languages work and all related.
It appeals to naive intuition that each one of us is so intimately familiar with our native language, we are adequately equipped to understand it as an object of study. But of course that's not the case. We each have a human body, does that make us anatomists and physicians and biologists?
I guess, then, that the fact that language is so intimately available to every person is inadequate as an explanation for this phenomenon.
Explicit in this article is the other piece of the puzzle. It's that people are strongly motivated for ulterior reasons to make arguments about language and which are therefore linguistic claims without any actual understanding of linguistics. The motivation arises from the fact that language is central to ideas of ethnicity and culture (not necessarily universally, but usually). So it comes with enormous baggage and a corresponding appeal for many kinds of misuse.
This isn't only true in the large senses that the article discusses, but also in more personal domains such as defending cultural capital. Sociolinguistics has a lot to say about this, but because language usage is a marker of social status, people are individually and collectively motivated to argue that prestige dialects represent inherent worth and so on. Otherwise reasonable people who would never argue that, say, their preference in clothing indicates their inherent worth will argue the equivalent about language usage, marshalling whatever poorly-understood or imaginary linguistics in support.
Then there's engineer disease in the larger sense. Of the social sciences, linguistics attracts a greater portion of experts in other fields who believe this makes them competent in linguistics -- not just lacking any training, but sometimes proudly so.
Also, there is still quite a bit of institutionalized, credentialed linguistic chauvinism all over the world that provides some implicit authoritative support for the claims of the less informed.
Finally, there's the simple fact that hardly anyone is aware that the study of language qua language is a scientific discipline. And if they do have some notion of this, they mistakenly believe that it's essentially something like being a polyglot and translator.
All of this works together to make linguistics a topic that disproportionately attracts armchair-experts, cranks, the engineer-diseased, chauvinists and bigots and demagogues, and petty, uninformed snobbery.
To be honest, I find that this is so to be a very interesting topic in itself.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:49 AM on September 16, 2017 [17 favorites]
I've thought that a primary reason that non-experts imagine expertise in linguistics is because every person is an expert in at least one language. Except by "expert", I mean as someone who uses language, not someone who understands how languages work and all related.
It appeals to naive intuition that each one of us is so intimately familiar with our native language, we are adequately equipped to understand it as an object of study. But of course that's not the case. We each have a human body, does that make us anatomists and physicians and biologists?
I guess, then, that the fact that language is so intimately available to every person is inadequate as an explanation for this phenomenon.
Explicit in this article is the other piece of the puzzle. It's that people are strongly motivated for ulterior reasons to make arguments about language and which are therefore linguistic claims without any actual understanding of linguistics. The motivation arises from the fact that language is central to ideas of ethnicity and culture (not necessarily universally, but usually). So it comes with enormous baggage and a corresponding appeal for many kinds of misuse.
This isn't only true in the large senses that the article discusses, but also in more personal domains such as defending cultural capital. Sociolinguistics has a lot to say about this, but because language usage is a marker of social status, people are individually and collectively motivated to argue that prestige dialects represent inherent worth and so on. Otherwise reasonable people who would never argue that, say, their preference in clothing indicates their inherent worth will argue the equivalent about language usage, marshalling whatever poorly-understood or imaginary linguistics in support.
Then there's engineer disease in the larger sense. Of the social sciences, linguistics attracts a greater portion of experts in other fields who believe this makes them competent in linguistics -- not just lacking any training, but sometimes proudly so.
Also, there is still quite a bit of institutionalized, credentialed linguistic chauvinism all over the world that provides some implicit authoritative support for the claims of the less informed.
Finally, there's the simple fact that hardly anyone is aware that the study of language qua language is a scientific discipline. And if they do have some notion of this, they mistakenly believe that it's essentially something like being a polyglot and translator.
All of this works together to make linguistics a topic that disproportionately attracts armchair-experts, cranks, the engineer-diseased, chauvinists and bigots and demagogues, and petty, uninformed snobbery.
To be honest, I find that this is so to be a very interesting topic in itself.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:49 AM on September 16, 2017 [17 favorites]
Why is linguistics such a magnet for dilettantes and crackpots?
What's to know about linguistics? I talk much everyday and are pretty good at it.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 12:57 AM on September 16, 2017 [16 favorites]
What's to know about linguistics? I talk much everyday and are pretty good at it.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 12:57 AM on September 16, 2017 [16 favorites]
So you cross Neal Stephenson and sovereign citizens, right? You get this idea that the world is for the taking if only you know the proper way to ask. The idea that description is equivalent to understanding, and so the only thing standing between you effing the ineffable (ha ha) is proper linguistic firepower, so people dive in head first looking for meaning in the medium.
posted by Literaryhero at 1:30 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by Literaryhero at 1:30 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
> I've thought that a primary reason that non-experts imagine expertise in linguistics is because every person is an expert in at least one language. Except by "expert", I mean as someone who uses language, not someone who understands how languages work and all related.
This is also why everybody is an expert about how food tastes and whether something is art. Experiential subjectivity is where nobody can tell you you're wrong, they can only counter-argue using their own experience. Being able to get past that requires the relatively high bar of being literate in the relevant fields and developing the critical skills necessary to communicate them. All of which is usually too much work for people who believe their present intuition is sufficient.
posted by ardgedee at 1:36 AM on September 16, 2017 [7 favorites]
This is also why everybody is an expert about how food tastes and whether something is art. Experiential subjectivity is where nobody can tell you you're wrong, they can only counter-argue using their own experience. Being able to get past that requires the relatively high bar of being literate in the relevant fields and developing the critical skills necessary to communicate them. All of which is usually too much work for people who believe their present intuition is sufficient.
posted by ardgedee at 1:36 AM on September 16, 2017 [7 favorites]
I had so many teachers say things like "its the hardest language to learn" and the "spelling doesn't make sense" and "the plurals aren't logical" and so on
In my experience, between English and German, German is way worse. It has the irregular verbs, the equivalent to phrasal verbs where the verb part has nearly no meaning (see: set out, set on, set off and so on vs. einsetzen/ apply, aussetzen/ suspend, versetzen/ transfer, ersetzen/ replace, besetzen/ occupy, etc), A LOT MORE irregular plurals everywhere and not just for a couple dozen common-ish words like feet, mice, geese and oxen, and besides three genders that don't match my Romance grammatical genders (la mesa. Der Tisch.) and several cases (Akkusativ, Dativ, Genitiv, Ablativ, etc) where every article, noun and adjective has to show concordance. The only plus is that the phonology/ spelling is more straightforward in German, but English speakers tend to overstate the difficulty of their spelling. It's not as if, say, French, didn't also have a quirky spelling.
posted by sukeban at 1:39 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
In my experience, between English and German, German is way worse. It has the irregular verbs, the equivalent to phrasal verbs where the verb part has nearly no meaning (see: set out, set on, set off and so on vs. einsetzen/ apply, aussetzen/ suspend, versetzen/ transfer, ersetzen/ replace, besetzen/ occupy, etc), A LOT MORE irregular plurals everywhere and not just for a couple dozen common-ish words like feet, mice, geese and oxen, and besides three genders that don't match my Romance grammatical genders (la mesa. Der Tisch.) and several cases (Akkusativ, Dativ, Genitiv, Ablativ, etc) where every article, noun and adjective has to show concordance. The only plus is that the phonology/ spelling is more straightforward in German, but English speakers tend to overstate the difficulty of their spelling. It's not as if, say, French, didn't also have a quirky spelling.
posted by sukeban at 1:39 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
...Forget French. Irish has a quirky spelling. And we're still not out of Europe.
posted by sukeban at 1:42 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by sukeban at 1:42 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
“German: the Language with Sixteen Ways to Say ‘The’™”
posted by DoctorFedora at 1:57 AM on September 16, 2017 [8 favorites]
posted by DoctorFedora at 1:57 AM on September 16, 2017 [8 favorites]
Ironically, asking this question has led both the author and us to propose crackpot sociological and psychological theories.
posted by clawsoon at 2:13 AM on September 16, 2017 [13 favorites]
posted by clawsoon at 2:13 AM on September 16, 2017 [13 favorites]
Crackpot, cracked kettle, same diff... :\
posted by lazycomputerkids at 2:17 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by lazycomputerkids at 2:17 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
Why is linguistics such a magnet for dilettantes and crackpots?
What did you call me?
posted by The Tensor at 2:33 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
What did you call me?
posted by The Tensor at 2:33 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
> Ironically, asking this question has led both the author and us to propose crackpot sociological and psychological theories.
It's fun to pitch hypotheses! Finding out why you're wrong is also a good way to learn how things work . It only gets crackpot when you start defending your wild guesses against the scholarship of people within the discipline you're trying to overthrow.
posted by ardgedee at 3:07 AM on September 16, 2017 [13 favorites]
It's fun to pitch hypotheses! Finding out why you're wrong is also a good way to learn how things work . It only gets crackpot when you start defending your wild guesses against the scholarship of people within the discipline you're trying to overthrow.
posted by ardgedee at 3:07 AM on September 16, 2017 [13 favorites]
From Metafilter, I have learned about taxonomy crackpots, economics crackpots, medical crackpots, physics crackpots, history crackpots, and a few cracked pots I'm sure I'm forgetting.
I've also had my own linguistic crackpottery shot down by languagehat, for which I am resentfully grateful.
(I'm tempted to make up a fanciful etymology for "crackpot" just to bring down his wrath again.)
posted by clawsoon at 4:38 AM on September 16, 2017 [6 favorites]
I've also had my own linguistic crackpottery shot down by languagehat, for which I am resentfully grateful.
(I'm tempted to make up a fanciful etymology for "crackpot" just to bring down his wrath again.)
posted by clawsoon at 4:38 AM on September 16, 2017 [6 favorites]
Forget French. Irish has a quirky spelling. And we're still not out of Europe.
Does anyone know how true this is? I mean, I know that Irish orthography is hard to work out for English speakers, but that's also true of Welsh, which is actually very regular in its orthography (and not excessively complex once you get the hang of the rules). The difficulty with English spelling seems to be more its irregularity than its complexity. As far as I can tell from speaking to people with English as an additional language, it's not unusually difficult to learn to speak or read English, but writing is a more of a pain because there are more words that you just have to learn the spelling of, rather than there being an easy way to work it out.
Any Irish speakers able to comment on the actual, rather than perceived, difficulty of Irish spelling? Googling seems to suggest the rules are more regular
than English, but it's hard to assess whether that's right without putting in a lot of effort. Also the impression, from listening to different people pronouncing the same words (e.g. the name "Aisling"), that dialect influences pronunciation, but I wonder if those differences are regular in their relationship to spelling, or whether some dialects are more arbitrary in their pronunciations than others.
posted by howfar at 5:08 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
Does anyone know how true this is? I mean, I know that Irish orthography is hard to work out for English speakers, but that's also true of Welsh, which is actually very regular in its orthography (and not excessively complex once you get the hang of the rules). The difficulty with English spelling seems to be more its irregularity than its complexity. As far as I can tell from speaking to people with English as an additional language, it's not unusually difficult to learn to speak or read English, but writing is a more of a pain because there are more words that you just have to learn the spelling of, rather than there being an easy way to work it out.
Any Irish speakers able to comment on the actual, rather than perceived, difficulty of Irish spelling? Googling seems to suggest the rules are more regular
than English, but it's hard to assess whether that's right without putting in a lot of effort. Also the impression, from listening to different people pronouncing the same words (e.g. the name "Aisling"), that dialect influences pronunciation, but I wonder if those differences are regular in their relationship to spelling, or whether some dialects are more arbitrary in their pronunciations than others.
posted by howfar at 5:08 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
Metafilter: full-on white nationalist doomsday prepper looking forward to a post-societal-collapse future of balkanized North American ethnostates.
posted by sammyo at 5:27 AM on September 16, 2017
posted by sammyo at 5:27 AM on September 16, 2017
Any Irish speakers able to comment on the actual, rather than perceived, difficulty of Irish spelling? Googling seems to suggest the rules are more regular
Yep it's different to English but fairly consistent. One big point of initial confusion is the séimhiú. This is basically an indicator that a consonant sound is to be softened, which can serve a linguistic function (to indicate possession or the past tense etc) or to record that the pronunciation of a word has changed over time. The hard edges have been eroded from many Irish words in the last two thousand years.
The séimhiú used to be indicated by a dot above the letter in question, which I always though was an elegant solution. At some point it changed to being a h after the letter, which makes many words look very bulky despite them sounding soft.
Let's take an example - the name Concobar - some of the letters in this eventually softened so it became Conchobhar and the pronunciation eventually reached the point where the softened letters were completely silent and it was essentially pronounced the same as the modern Conor.
Enter the newly independent Irish government in the 40's, who wanted a single official standard of Irish (the 'Caighdeán') to be taught in schools with features of all the dialects but weighted towards Connacht Irish, and also to simplify spelling. So Conchobhar officially became Conor, i gcómhnaidhe ('always') became i gcónaí etc.
This never happened in Scotland, so in Irish, Irish speaking areas are the Gaeltacht, while in Scotland, Scottish Gaelic speaking areas are the Gàidhealtachd. Manx has a very different orthography - it's like an English/Scots speaker from 200 years ago tried to write down the sounds of Irish as they heard it (so 'Isle of Man' is 'Oileán Mhanann' in Irish - the Mh is a soft v sound - and 'Ellan Vannin' in Manx).
posted by kersplunk at 6:19 AM on September 16, 2017 [21 favorites]
Yep it's different to English but fairly consistent. One big point of initial confusion is the séimhiú. This is basically an indicator that a consonant sound is to be softened, which can serve a linguistic function (to indicate possession or the past tense etc) or to record that the pronunciation of a word has changed over time. The hard edges have been eroded from many Irish words in the last two thousand years.
The séimhiú used to be indicated by a dot above the letter in question, which I always though was an elegant solution. At some point it changed to being a h after the letter, which makes many words look very bulky despite them sounding soft.
Let's take an example - the name Concobar - some of the letters in this eventually softened so it became Conchobhar and the pronunciation eventually reached the point where the softened letters were completely silent and it was essentially pronounced the same as the modern Conor.
Enter the newly independent Irish government in the 40's, who wanted a single official standard of Irish (the 'Caighdeán') to be taught in schools with features of all the dialects but weighted towards Connacht Irish, and also to simplify spelling. So Conchobhar officially became Conor, i gcómhnaidhe ('always') became i gcónaí etc.
This never happened in Scotland, so in Irish, Irish speaking areas are the Gaeltacht, while in Scotland, Scottish Gaelic speaking areas are the Gàidhealtachd. Manx has a very different orthography - it's like an English/Scots speaker from 200 years ago tried to write down the sounds of Irish as they heard it (so 'Isle of Man' is 'Oileán Mhanann' in Irish - the Mh is a soft v sound - and 'Ellan Vannin' in Manx).
posted by kersplunk at 6:19 AM on September 16, 2017 [21 favorites]
Yeah, the "English is the most illogical language" meme seems to be out in front of the "English is the most logical language" meme, but neither has much basis in fact — most of English's real "illogicalities" are in spelling, and there's no way you could convince me English is harder to learn than Chinese, with its many spellings for a given syllable and many characters with ambiguous pronunciations. Or Tibetan, which started out phonemic but is now out of date by over 1000 years' worth of sound changes. Or Thai, which borrowed from Sanskrit as heavily as English borrowed from Norman French, and didn't clean up the spellings any better than we did — and which also has gone through a lot of sound changes since then — with the result that it now has 18 different ways of spelling syllable-final /t/. Or, yeah, Gaelic, which while readable enough if you know the rules requires a lot of memorization to write. Or Arabic (or pre-20th-century Greek, or Italian in some parts of the country), where the standard literary form of the language is so different from the spoken form that literacy requires near-bilingualism before you can even get started.
Languages are fucking weird — and speaking your own native language means following rules you could not possibly articulate, which is a deeply surreal and alienating experience any time you notice yourself doing it. People react to that surreality and alienation in different ways. Some idealize the logicality of a "true, proper, correct" variety of the language that nobody actually speaks. Some revel in the illogicality. Some internalize outside racism and say "Oh, yeah, ours isn't a real language at all! It doesn't even have a grammar!" (…by which they mean "most people who speaks it are too poor to afford school" or "its community of speakers is so oppressed they have to attend school in a different language," since every language has a grammar). Some turn that on its head and say "MY civilized language is perfectly intuitive (because I don't need to think about it) and YOUR barbaric language is incredibly unintuitive (because it requires laborious, conscious rule-following for me)." I dunno. People are weird too.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:20 AM on September 16, 2017 [18 favorites]
Languages are fucking weird — and speaking your own native language means following rules you could not possibly articulate, which is a deeply surreal and alienating experience any time you notice yourself doing it. People react to that surreality and alienation in different ways. Some idealize the logicality of a "true, proper, correct" variety of the language that nobody actually speaks. Some revel in the illogicality. Some internalize outside racism and say "Oh, yeah, ours isn't a real language at all! It doesn't even have a grammar!" (…by which they mean "most people who speaks it are too poor to afford school" or "its community of speakers is so oppressed they have to attend school in a different language," since every language has a grammar). Some turn that on its head and say "MY civilized language is perfectly intuitive (because I don't need to think about it) and YOUR barbaric language is incredibly unintuitive (because it requires laborious, conscious rule-following for me)." I dunno. People are weird too.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:20 AM on September 16, 2017 [18 favorites]
Seriously, the general topic of crank science is fascinating. Crankery isn't just being wrong or ignorant, it's a willful kind of arrogance that is intentionally and systematically dismissive of relevant authority while being almost completely ignorant of what that authority endorses. The last part is arguably essential.
There's a common theme in this continuum of aggressive incompetence.
There's a necessary balancing act between trusting authority but also trusting one's own competence... at any level, really. You have to have the confidence to explore, but also the continually-refined judgement about when to trust authority.
There's a media trope of the eccentric genius who rightly disregards authority. But this has never been true in my experience. Always it's necessary to have at least minimal recognized competence as it's conventionally understood. Then you can productively chart some bold new course. There are probably exceptions here and there, but they're relatively quite few.
To me, while the outre cranks hold some (arguably perverse) fascination, it's more the part of the continuum where engineer's disease happens that is most interesting. For example, if you talk to a physicist, they are going to be very careful about the limits of their competence within physics but outside their specialty. But that very same person might feel competent to speak authoritatively about an entirely distinct discipline. It's perplexing.
I think it's universal to vastly underestimate one's ignorance the more ignorant one is. Everything looks simpler and more comprehensible from the outside, even though it shouldn't.
To get back more specifically on-topic, I think that linguistics attracts more of this sort of thing because even though I think language is self-evidently complex, to most people it nevertheless feels easily accessible -- there may be a lot of stuff there, but if you just take a look, it's pretty obvious. That's what people think. But that's very far from true.
And, perversely, they often don't even bother to look in the first place.
Folk-linguistics is very much a domain of truthiness -- if it sounds plausible, it's probably true and there's no need to actually look. This is how you a get a succession of pundits writing about how a president's frequent personal pronoun use indicates narcissism -- even though, when you actually check the transcripts, it's no more frequent than past presidents. This happened with Bush, then Obama, and I'm sure with Trump. I mean, really, I can't help but think that Trump talks about himself more than usual and this would be reflected in his pronoun use. But I should actually check before I write a nationally syndicated column asserting this.
What is notable to me about linguistics is not that there are so many cranks -- though there are -- but that so many people who should know better, and otherwise do, are aggressively wrong about language.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:32 AM on September 16, 2017 [7 favorites]
There's a common theme in this continuum of aggressive incompetence.
There's a necessary balancing act between trusting authority but also trusting one's own competence... at any level, really. You have to have the confidence to explore, but also the continually-refined judgement about when to trust authority.
There's a media trope of the eccentric genius who rightly disregards authority. But this has never been true in my experience. Always it's necessary to have at least minimal recognized competence as it's conventionally understood. Then you can productively chart some bold new course. There are probably exceptions here and there, but they're relatively quite few.
To me, while the outre cranks hold some (arguably perverse) fascination, it's more the part of the continuum where engineer's disease happens that is most interesting. For example, if you talk to a physicist, they are going to be very careful about the limits of their competence within physics but outside their specialty. But that very same person might feel competent to speak authoritatively about an entirely distinct discipline. It's perplexing.
I think it's universal to vastly underestimate one's ignorance the more ignorant one is. Everything looks simpler and more comprehensible from the outside, even though it shouldn't.
To get back more specifically on-topic, I think that linguistics attracts more of this sort of thing because even though I think language is self-evidently complex, to most people it nevertheless feels easily accessible -- there may be a lot of stuff there, but if you just take a look, it's pretty obvious. That's what people think. But that's very far from true.
And, perversely, they often don't even bother to look in the first place.
Folk-linguistics is very much a domain of truthiness -- if it sounds plausible, it's probably true and there's no need to actually look. This is how you a get a succession of pundits writing about how a president's frequent personal pronoun use indicates narcissism -- even though, when you actually check the transcripts, it's no more frequent than past presidents. This happened with Bush, then Obama, and I'm sure with Trump. I mean, really, I can't help but think that Trump talks about himself more than usual and this would be reflected in his pronoun use. But I should actually check before I write a nationally syndicated column asserting this.
What is notable to me about linguistics is not that there are so many cranks -- though there are -- but that so many people who should know better, and otherwise do, are aggressively wrong about language.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:32 AM on September 16, 2017 [7 favorites]
Ignorance is bliss, but I've spent a good part of my life trying to disprove it.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 6:47 AM on September 16, 2017
posted by lazycomputerkids at 6:47 AM on September 16, 2017
I've never held myself up as any sort of authority but having come to the U.S. originally as a non English speaker (though I'm no longer fluent in my original German tongue), my own experience is that native speakers don't seem as acutely aware of how much they take for granted when it comes to using language and being understood and tend to take a view of their own language use as so natural and obvious, they often don't even notice when they're not really effectively communicating and talking past each other. I also think you get a better more immediate appreciation for how much achieving communication and using language effectively at all depends on implicit, unexplained conventions and norms.
Personally I think we've got a kind of language crisis underway where the connotative meanings of English words aren't as stable as they have been historically and that's fueling a lot of social tension and creating new challenges for mass communication and maintaining social cohesion and avoiding the trap of having every subject of conversation get diverted into linguistic deconstruction that further confounds reaching mutual understanding and having constructive discussions of subtle topics.
Like "dilletant" for example. It's a word that, while never completely without a darker side connotatively, has taken on much harsher economic class related negative connotations in recent years in US English so that now it's practically a purely pejorative term when historically I'd argue it used to even be used admiringly from time to time. As cultural values change, as the ways people encounter new vocabulary change creating different psychological associations for individuals, so do the connotative meanings of words, which can lead to communication disconnects and confusion.
posted by saulgoodman at 6:56 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
Personally I think we've got a kind of language crisis underway where the connotative meanings of English words aren't as stable as they have been historically and that's fueling a lot of social tension and creating new challenges for mass communication and maintaining social cohesion and avoiding the trap of having every subject of conversation get diverted into linguistic deconstruction that further confounds reaching mutual understanding and having constructive discussions of subtle topics.
Like "dilletant" for example. It's a word that, while never completely without a darker side connotatively, has taken on much harsher economic class related negative connotations in recent years in US English so that now it's practically a purely pejorative term when historically I'd argue it used to even be used admiringly from time to time. As cultural values change, as the ways people encounter new vocabulary change creating different psychological associations for individuals, so do the connotative meanings of words, which can lead to communication disconnects and confusion.
posted by saulgoodman at 6:56 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
It occurs to me that another reason for crankiness in linguistics is that until recently it was not in any real sense an applied science. You weren't going to lose all your money being wrong about it like you can in econ. You weren't going to set yourself on fire or run into a mountain being wrong about it like you can in aviation. You weren't even going to sit there glumly and watch as your perpetual motion machine ran down. You could just… be wrong, for years on end, with no consequences of failure and not even much undeniable evidence that you were failing.
I think it's pretty telling that back in the 90s we had all these crackpot conlangers who are like "My perfectly-logical constructed language will be IDEAL for communicating with computers as soon as they get powerful enough." Back then, failure was cheap, because it was all talk anyway and nobody could prove their plan was better. Now that we've got speech recognition and we know that the key isn't "write a perfectly logical artificial grammar alone in your basement" but "be a massive corporation with access to squillions of megabytes of natural plain-English training data," all the bullshit artists have conveniently found other subfields to dabble in instead.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:02 AM on September 16, 2017 [3 favorites]
I think it's pretty telling that back in the 90s we had all these crackpot conlangers who are like "My perfectly-logical constructed language will be IDEAL for communicating with computers as soon as they get powerful enough." Back then, failure was cheap, because it was all talk anyway and nobody could prove their plan was better. Now that we've got speech recognition and we know that the key isn't "write a perfectly logical artificial grammar alone in your basement" but "be a massive corporation with access to squillions of megabytes of natural plain-English training data," all the bullshit artists have conveniently found other subfields to dabble in instead.
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:02 AM on September 16, 2017 [3 favorites]
Ivan Fyodorovich: There's a media trope of the eccentric genius who rightly disregards authority. But this has never been true in my experience.
I wonder if the trope comes from a time when authority was more respected just for being authority - when "because I said so" was considered an appropriate conversation-ender from a priest or officer or boss or aristocrat. I'm sure we've all had an authority figure use that on us at least once, even if it's no longer in vogue, so the emotional impact of the trope still resonates.
posted by clawsoon at 7:06 AM on September 16, 2017
I wonder if the trope comes from a time when authority was more respected just for being authority - when "because I said so" was considered an appropriate conversation-ender from a priest or officer or boss or aristocrat. I'm sure we've all had an authority figure use that on us at least once, even if it's no longer in vogue, so the emotional impact of the trope still resonates.
posted by clawsoon at 7:06 AM on September 16, 2017
...most of English's real "illogicalities" are in spelling..
Which brings another point to mind: the common conflation of orthography with a language. Even though there are numerous examples where they are independent.
Or even that people think of the written language as the "language" and not the spoken language. (I found myself the other day wanting a rigorous definition of disfluency, ubiquitous in speech.)
Anyway, the discussion about the difficulty of learning a language non-natively is fraught. This difficulty varies given different native languages. Using it as a metric for overall, intrinsic "difficulty" is an error.
Similarly, so are arguments comparing word counts.
Really, all comparative claims about languages by non-linguists should be treated with skepticism.
Another thing that's remarkable to me is that we're so unreliable in reporting our own usage and pronunciation. But this tells us something.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:15 AM on September 16, 2017
Which brings another point to mind: the common conflation of orthography with a language. Even though there are numerous examples where they are independent.
Or even that people think of the written language as the "language" and not the spoken language. (I found myself the other day wanting a rigorous definition of disfluency, ubiquitous in speech.)
Anyway, the discussion about the difficulty of learning a language non-natively is fraught. This difficulty varies given different native languages. Using it as a metric for overall, intrinsic "difficulty" is an error.
Similarly, so are arguments comparing word counts.
Really, all comparative claims about languages by non-linguists should be treated with skepticism.
Another thing that's remarkable to me is that we're so unreliable in reporting our own usage and pronunciation. But this tells us something.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 7:15 AM on September 16, 2017
Oh, no no no.
What happened is that it fell out of style to be aggressively nationalistic at the expense of foreigners. There's a basic human impulse to describe why our tribe is the best and all other tribes are garbage. That instinct isn't extinguished, of course, and shows up even in science (see: all the trivially disprovable statements about animals not being conscious or how humans are great because they can, like, recognize themselves in a mirror).
We just don't do that anymore, and so all that talk (that was always shit-talk) seems goofy. Ah well, cost of living in a world where foreigners (and their bombs) can arrive in minutes.
The other factor is that people actually know how to speak. There's lots of things that take an insane amount of training, language just isn't one of them. Worse, the classical expert models empirically hit a wall well below that of a child, and even our most advanced technology in 2017 is composed of voodoo we only barely understand, and just brute force our way through to ever better comprehension. So the non-crank, non-dilletante stuff in language is perceptably incomplete.
The real joke, of course, is that language isn't invented by experts in any scientific domain. The linguistic theory that cultures intersect (usually violently), one wins, and if the other survives now needs to trade or pay tribute does hold historical water. People make a language for commerce, called a pidgin, super sloppy and rough but it works, and then their kids hear this pidgin as infants and a much more proper tongue arises (called a Creole).
We don't teach the kids to speak as much as they grow up into us speaking it.
posted by effugas at 7:22 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
What happened is that it fell out of style to be aggressively nationalistic at the expense of foreigners. There's a basic human impulse to describe why our tribe is the best and all other tribes are garbage. That instinct isn't extinguished, of course, and shows up even in science (see: all the trivially disprovable statements about animals not being conscious or how humans are great because they can, like, recognize themselves in a mirror).
We just don't do that anymore, and so all that talk (that was always shit-talk) seems goofy. Ah well, cost of living in a world where foreigners (and their bombs) can arrive in minutes.
The other factor is that people actually know how to speak. There's lots of things that take an insane amount of training, language just isn't one of them. Worse, the classical expert models empirically hit a wall well below that of a child, and even our most advanced technology in 2017 is composed of voodoo we only barely understand, and just brute force our way through to ever better comprehension. So the non-crank, non-dilletante stuff in language is perceptably incomplete.
The real joke, of course, is that language isn't invented by experts in any scientific domain. The linguistic theory that cultures intersect (usually violently), one wins, and if the other survives now needs to trade or pay tribute does hold historical water. People make a language for commerce, called a pidgin, super sloppy and rough but it works, and then their kids hear this pidgin as infants and a much more proper tongue arises (called a Creole).
We don't teach the kids to speak as much as they grow up into us speaking it.
posted by effugas at 7:22 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
Ivan,
What an excellent point. I think the emphasis on the written word is a bit of a power grab; if ground truth is written, the few who can write control the narrative rather directly.
posted by effugas at 7:27 AM on September 16, 2017
What an excellent point. I think the emphasis on the written word is a bit of a power grab; if ground truth is written, the few who can write control the narrative rather directly.
posted by effugas at 7:27 AM on September 16, 2017
Who can't write anymore though? I mean, my grandfather couldn't without help, but I haven't met anybody who's functionally illiterate in years. There's not a monopoly on the written word anymore in the least--very much the opposite. People who produce most of the written content we consume post internet don't even get paid most of the time. I don't see any indication the written word is the tool of elite control it might have been in less educated times and historical circumstances. If anything, the written word is cheaper and less powerful than ever.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:50 AM on September 16, 2017
posted by saulgoodman at 7:50 AM on September 16, 2017
"We don't teach the kids to speak as much as they grow up into us speaking it."
I've found that people are very wedded to this notion that languages are designed, that they were figuratively constructed in a lab and are governed by a certifying authority.
Aside from the obvious manifestations of this, there is the more subtle one: that native language is deliberately taught and learned.
I had a friend who was adamant that his native anglophone fluency was largely the product of explicit instruction by his parents and teachers. (Obviously, he didn't have kids.) I was really befuddled that he insisted on this. He had some kind of emotional investment in it, I think -- as if gaining a native language is something like being educated. In that view, you'd have levels of competence dependent upon the quality of the educators and how much effort was put into learning, and therefore it's arguably some kind of measure of virtue or value or something. It's raw cultural capital.
Which is actually true with regard to prestige written language... so partly, I think this arises from that erroneous conflation already discussed.
It seems to me this must therefore be a function of literacy and formal education. Those of us in societies with high literacy rates and a lot of formal education experience a great deal of instruction in prestige written language, not the least because it's closely related to social status. So it's easy for us to think that's where all the competency in our native language can be found, while also being in our interests to assert that this is so to reinforce the relationship between status and this particular skill.
This is historically true about the people who wrote about language -- of course they'd be highly inclined to see the prestige, written forms of their native languages as primary. So we have a huge amount of cultural inertia in thinking about language in this way.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:14 AM on September 16, 2017
I've found that people are very wedded to this notion that languages are designed, that they were figuratively constructed in a lab and are governed by a certifying authority.
Aside from the obvious manifestations of this, there is the more subtle one: that native language is deliberately taught and learned.
I had a friend who was adamant that his native anglophone fluency was largely the product of explicit instruction by his parents and teachers. (Obviously, he didn't have kids.) I was really befuddled that he insisted on this. He had some kind of emotional investment in it, I think -- as if gaining a native language is something like being educated. In that view, you'd have levels of competence dependent upon the quality of the educators and how much effort was put into learning, and therefore it's arguably some kind of measure of virtue or value or something. It's raw cultural capital.
Which is actually true with regard to prestige written language... so partly, I think this arises from that erroneous conflation already discussed.
It seems to me this must therefore be a function of literacy and formal education. Those of us in societies with high literacy rates and a lot of formal education experience a great deal of instruction in prestige written language, not the least because it's closely related to social status. So it's easy for us to think that's where all the competency in our native language can be found, while also being in our interests to assert that this is so to reinforce the relationship between status and this particular skill.
This is historically true about the people who wrote about language -- of course they'd be highly inclined to see the prestige, written forms of their native languages as primary. So we have a huge amount of cultural inertia in thinking about language in this way.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:14 AM on September 16, 2017
I've found that the more I studied and practiced as a professional sociolinguist, the less aggressively dogmatic or prescriptivist I became about language, to the point where once I'd published in the field, I'd stopped contributing to online linguistics debates entirely.
In social events, I found myself able to just nod my head noncommittally when completely unschooled/unhinged people made outrageous linguistic assertions, and then change the subject while ordering another beer.
I loved fieldwork. It carries both the benefit and the curse of being inimical to the concept that your own sociocultural constructs have any firm, objective validity. You kind of know that going into the game, but hundreds of informant interviews later, it becomes poignantly unavoidable.
I will still call for orthography reform, though. And can we make some progress on that whole punctuation outside of the quotation marks thing? I'm not asking for much, really...just that it become an acceptable, if nonstandard, variation.
Notwithstanding the above, you may have my Oxford comma when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
posted by darkstar at 8:20 AM on September 16, 2017 [14 favorites]
In social events, I found myself able to just nod my head noncommittally when completely unschooled/unhinged people made outrageous linguistic assertions, and then change the subject while ordering another beer.
I loved fieldwork. It carries both the benefit and the curse of being inimical to the concept that your own sociocultural constructs have any firm, objective validity. You kind of know that going into the game, but hundreds of informant interviews later, it becomes poignantly unavoidable.
I will still call for orthography reform, though. And can we make some progress on that whole punctuation outside of the quotation marks thing? I'm not asking for much, really...just that it become an acceptable, if nonstandard, variation.
Notwithstanding the above, you may have my Oxford comma when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
posted by darkstar at 8:20 AM on September 16, 2017 [14 favorites]
Hmm. What is "prestige written language"? You mean like a standard mass English counterpart to "Hochdeutsch"--the Queen's English as it might have once been called? Does that exist as a thing in American English anymore or are we still going through motions reflexively that don't really fit the current cultural and historical reality? I'm honestly not sure communication and understanding is possible without some basic common conventions and norms that transcend subculture wherever and however they originate and regardless of how they're transmitted and inculcated.
posted by saulgoodman at 8:23 AM on September 16, 2017
posted by saulgoodman at 8:23 AM on September 16, 2017
Are crackpots more common in linguistics than in other sciences though? The article cites several modern examples, but crackpot linguistics seems to have been largely a 17-19th century phenomenon, part of a general crackpottery movement, when countless people, from actual scientists to "litterary madmen" (fous littéraires), wrote volumes after volumes filled with pseudo-scientific theories about absolutely anything. Here are some other examples of "literary madmen" obsessed with linguistics:
- Claude-Charles Pierquin de Gembloux (1798 – 1863), a doctor, published about 160 books covering a wide range of subjects, including one where he described the ur-language shared by man and animals, with an accompanying "marmoset glossary" (OCOCO: Deep terror).
- Natalis Flaugergues (1823 - 1893), a former military officer, wrote books claiming that the southern French city of Rodez was the centre of the world and that Rouergat, a sub-dialect of Occitan was the true and unique ur-language.
- Jean-Pierre Brisset (1837 – 1919), a stationmaster, wrote extensively about his theory "that Man's origins were in the water, and He was descended from Frogs. He supported his contention by comparing the French and frog languages (like "logement"= dwelling, comes from "l'eau" = water). "
- Jean Prat (1868 - 1952), a missionary, wrote a book "proving" that bantu languages were derived from Latin.
- Paul Tisseyre (1873 - 1931), a colonial soldier, thought that the French language was derived from the sounds made by prehistoric animals.
- Charles Callet, a "paleolinguist", claimed in 1926 to have found the "language of the Hominid" and that this language had 4 primitive phonemes: the M-moo, the F/S-sibilance, the K-grunt and the R-grunt.
...that whole punctuation outside of the quotation marks thing?
omg, I thought I was the only "one".
posted by lazycomputerkids at 8:30 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
omg, I thought I was the only "one".
posted by lazycomputerkids at 8:30 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
"Hmm. What is 'prestige written language'?"
Well, I was just trying to be precise in narrowing it to the intersection of prestige dialect and written language, in the various ways that works out.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:43 AM on September 16, 2017
Well, I was just trying to be precise in narrowing it to the intersection of prestige dialect and written language, in the various ways that works out.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:43 AM on September 16, 2017
I'm honestly not sure communication and understanding is possible without some basic common conventions and norms that transcend subculture wherever and however they originate and regardless of how they're transmitted and inculcated.
Sure! It's just that those norms are either
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:44 AM on September 16, 2017 [3 favorites]
Sure! It's just that those norms are either
- Norms of conversational speech that kids pick up whether they're explicitly taught or not
- Rules of spelling and punctuation that constitute basic literacy (and, I mean, the bare minimum necessary to turn a sequence of words into a sequence of graphemes and back with a tolerable error rate, not fancy in-group stuff like the Oxford comma or chapter headings or bylines)
- Special writing-only social norms that help us get over the limitations of the medium — things like using emoticons and uh,,, you know, internet punctuation? to convey tone in comments and text messages, or using paragraph, section, and chapter breaks to convey pacing and discourse structure in nonfiction books — which, again, experienced enough readers can and often do pick up without needing them explicitly taught, and which can vary a lot without spoiling clarity
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:44 AM on September 16, 2017 [3 favorites]
> To answer the question, I'd say 1) people care about languages, more than most specialities; and 2) so much data is easily accessible, in the form of a dictionary. Few other fields make the cherries so easy to pick.
I agree with the estimable zompist.
> What did you call me?
Hey, update your goddamn blog and I'll stop calling you names!
posted by languagehat at 8:45 AM on September 16, 2017 [9 favorites]
I agree with the estimable zompist.
> What did you call me?
Hey, update your goddamn blog and I'll stop calling you names!
posted by languagehat at 8:45 AM on September 16, 2017 [9 favorites]
howfar: As far as I can tell from speaking to people with English as an additional language, it's not unusually difficult to learn to speak or read English, but writing is a more of a pain because there are more words that you just have to learn the spelling of, rather than there being an easy way to work it out.
My experience as ESL is that you spell things *by eye* because you learn them from a book at school while people with English as their first language try to spell things *by ear* because they learn them before learning to write. This means I have a hell of an accent when I speak, but it's the EFLs who mix up they're/there/their and your/you're. We Spaniards do that with halla/ haya/ allá and ahí/ hay/ ay!
OTOH David Crystal's Spell It Out gets to English spelling from an etymological perspective and it's not as irregular as it seems since 70% of it is because of the Great Vowel Shift and the remainder is either loans from other languages or 17th C grammarians deciding that English should be spelled like Latin (like "debt" or "island" instead of "dett" or "iland" because they have to look sort of like debitum and insula). That book and The Stories of English are good reads.
posted by sukeban at 8:48 AM on September 16, 2017 [8 favorites]
My experience as ESL is that you spell things *by eye* because you learn them from a book at school while people with English as their first language try to spell things *by ear* because they learn them before learning to write. This means I have a hell of an accent when I speak, but it's the EFLs who mix up they're/there/their and your/you're. We Spaniards do that with halla/ haya/ allá and ahí/ hay/ ay!
OTOH David Crystal's Spell It Out gets to English spelling from an etymological perspective and it's not as irregular as it seems since 70% of it is because of the Great Vowel Shift and the remainder is either loans from other languages or 17th C grammarians deciding that English should be spelled like Latin (like "debt" or "island" instead of "dett" or "iland" because they have to look sort of like debitum and insula). That book and The Stories of English are good reads.
posted by sukeban at 8:48 AM on September 16, 2017 [8 favorites]
"My perfectly-logical constructed language will be IDEAL for communicating with computers as soon as they get powerful enough."
As the Loglan/Lojban projects have demonstrated, having a perfectly logical and unambiguous language just moves the work to outside of the language. Ambiguity of statements in the language is replaced by an absence of such statements and arguments in another language about how to correctly state something in the language.
posted by acb at 8:48 AM on September 16, 2017 [5 favorites]
As the Loglan/Lojban projects have demonstrated, having a perfectly logical and unambiguous language just moves the work to outside of the language. Ambiguity of statements in the language is replaced by an absence of such statements and arguments in another language about how to correctly state something in the language.
posted by acb at 8:48 AM on September 16, 2017 [5 favorites]
"Are crackpots more common in linguistics than in other sciences though?"
There are still lots of examples of the sort of things you describe today. Claims about Proto-Indo-European are ubiquitous. There's a lot of historical linguistic crankery, really.
Or another example is the huge amount of what amounts to linguistic analysis in jurisprudence... without reference to, you know, linguistics. This is revealing: why do judges and legal academics fail to even consult an entire scientific body of work and, instead, think they can reason it out from first principles?
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:13 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
There are still lots of examples of the sort of things you describe today. Claims about Proto-Indo-European are ubiquitous. There's a lot of historical linguistic crankery, really.
Or another example is the huge amount of what amounts to linguistic analysis in jurisprudence... without reference to, you know, linguistics. This is revealing: why do judges and legal academics fail to even consult an entire scientific body of work and, instead, think they can reason it out from first principles?
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:13 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
My impression was, physics is crackpot king
posted by thelonius at 9:21 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by thelonius at 9:21 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
Yeah, that may be so. Or math.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:26 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:26 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
I don't know, there are a lot of people invested in cold fusion, perpetual moving machines or proving Einstein Was Wrong.
posted by sukeban at 9:27 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by sukeban at 9:27 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
(I'm assuming you meant with regard to attracting crankery.)
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:27 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:27 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
Chemistry is right up there, too. Especially medicinal chemistry / pharmacology.
Alkaline water, stabilized hydronium, copper therapy, colloidal silver, hydrogen peroxide therapy, homeopathy, herbalist anecdata, etc., etc.
I encounter these issues on a weekly basis, and shudder to think what it must be like as a physician or nurse dealing daily with patients convinced of the efficacy of some new quack remedy. Medicine is perhaps the ur-field for crankery.
posted by darkstar at 9:30 AM on September 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
Alkaline water, stabilized hydronium, copper therapy, colloidal silver, hydrogen peroxide therapy, homeopathy, herbalist anecdata, etc., etc.
I encounter these issues on a weekly basis, and shudder to think what it must be like as a physician or nurse dealing daily with patients convinced of the efficacy of some new quack remedy. Medicine is perhaps the ur-field for crankery.
posted by darkstar at 9:30 AM on September 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
Alkaline water, stabilized hydronium, copper therapy, colloidal silver, hydrogen peroxide therapy, homeopathy, herbalist anecdata, etc., etc.
That's the thin line between crackpot theories and snake oil.
Let's not forget Linus Pauling and vitamin C, either.
posted by sukeban at 9:32 AM on September 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
That's the thin line between crackpot theories and snake oil.
Let's not forget Linus Pauling and vitamin C, either.
posted by sukeban at 9:32 AM on September 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
Any Irish speakers able to comment on the actual, rather than perceived, difficulty of Irish spelling? Googling seems to suggest the rules are more regular.
Enter the newly independent Irish government in the 40's, who wanted a single official standard of Irish (the 'Caighdeán') to be taught in schools with features of all the dialects but weighted towards Connacht Irish, and also to simplify spelling. So Conchobhar officially became Conor, i gcómhnaidhe ('always') became i gcónaí etc.
Irish is regular in some ways, but it does have a number of dialects. And areas where older people can speak Irish and not write it for various reasons. Going by personal experience in childhood: I moved into an Ulster Irish speaking area relatively young, but I'd had proper Irish spelling beaten into me in another area. Most of those around me had learned it orally and they suffered terribly in school because the emphasis then was on teaching regular, official Irish and its spelling which didn't seem to match up to actual experience. That's a personal, regional experience though, and we are the dialect with most interaction with Scottish Gaelic, so there's that as well.
More on topic: Linguistics has always been the stomping ground for madness. There is nothing better than reading Varro, a Roman author, coming up with mad etymologies in his On the Latin Language.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 9:36 AM on September 16, 2017 [5 favorites]
Enter the newly independent Irish government in the 40's, who wanted a single official standard of Irish (the 'Caighdeán') to be taught in schools with features of all the dialects but weighted towards Connacht Irish, and also to simplify spelling. So Conchobhar officially became Conor, i gcómhnaidhe ('always') became i gcónaí etc.
Irish is regular in some ways, but it does have a number of dialects. And areas where older people can speak Irish and not write it for various reasons. Going by personal experience in childhood: I moved into an Ulster Irish speaking area relatively young, but I'd had proper Irish spelling beaten into me in another area. Most of those around me had learned it orally and they suffered terribly in school because the emphasis then was on teaching regular, official Irish and its spelling which didn't seem to match up to actual experience. That's a personal, regional experience though, and we are the dialect with most interaction with Scottish Gaelic, so there's that as well.
More on topic: Linguistics has always been the stomping ground for madness. There is nothing better than reading Varro, a Roman author, coming up with mad etymologies in his On the Latin Language.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 9:36 AM on September 16, 2017 [5 favorites]
Einstein Was Wrong : Physics :: Cantor Was Wrong : Math.
There's a, um, set of things that are so counter-intuitive to a certain sort that it drives them to a frenzy of rebuttal.
Not that anyone really cares, but I can't overstate how fascinating this to me in various respects, both from the direction of the notion of intuition and truth, and from the direction of human psychology.
It's the reason for my almost three-decade interest in the Monty Hall Problem -- to this day I routinely correspond with people who tend to be pretty rude when they write me about it.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:47 AM on September 16, 2017 [5 favorites]
There's a, um, set of things that are so counter-intuitive to a certain sort that it drives them to a frenzy of rebuttal.
Not that anyone really cares, but I can't overstate how fascinating this to me in various respects, both from the direction of the notion of intuition and truth, and from the direction of human psychology.
It's the reason for my almost three-decade interest in the Monty Hall Problem -- to this day I routinely correspond with people who tend to be pretty rude when they write me about it.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:47 AM on September 16, 2017 [5 favorites]
The boundaries between respectable intellectual work and crackpot term is much more porous and amorphous than these sorts of abstract discussions sometimes allow. Newton for example was both a giant innovator in the sciences and a secret crackpot alchemist; Freud likewise made huge foundational contributions to his field but was also at least half misogynistic charlatan... But that's an aside.
posted by saulgoodman at 9:51 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by saulgoodman at 9:51 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
Newton was freakin' lit. He had theories about comets replenishing the spiritual Substance of the planets, all kinds of stuff.
There's a, um, set of things that are so counter-intuitive to a certain sort that it drives them to a frenzy of rebuttal.
I wonder if there is a correlation between Cantor-deniers, and people enraged by the idea that .9999999..... = 1
posted by thelonius at 10:01 AM on September 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
There's a, um, set of things that are so counter-intuitive to a certain sort that it drives them to a frenzy of rebuttal.
I wonder if there is a correlation between Cantor-deniers, and people enraged by the idea that .9999999..... = 1
posted by thelonius at 10:01 AM on September 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
Newton brings up an interesting question about crackpottery: Are you a crackpot if everybody is wrong about something, and you are merely one of the people who's wrong? It's not like any of Newton's contemporaries knew what comets were made of, or understood chemistry. He wasn't rejecting the ideas of deeply knowledgeable experts, which seems (?) like it's an essential part of being a crackpot.
posted by clawsoon at 10:12 AM on September 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by clawsoon at 10:12 AM on September 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
There are still lots of examples of the sort of things you describe today. Claims about Proto-Indo-European are ubiquitous. There's a lot of historical linguistic crankery, really.
And there are large grey areas between settled fact and crackpot theories. For example, there's a theory that Japanese is related to the Altaic family of languages (like Turkish and Mongolian). It was mostly advanced by linguists in the USSR (where there are a lot of Altaic languages, and thus many linguists specialising in them), though made little headway in the west; whether this is due to its lack of merit, Cold War geopolitics (i.e., the view that it is a stalking horse for a potential Soviet claim on Japan) or both is disputable. To this day, the theory isn't (AFAIK) either accepted or debunked, and the furthest established ancestor of Japanese known is a now-extinct language spoken on the Korean peninsula around the 4th century BC.
posted by acb at 10:21 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
And there are large grey areas between settled fact and crackpot theories. For example, there's a theory that Japanese is related to the Altaic family of languages (like Turkish and Mongolian). It was mostly advanced by linguists in the USSR (where there are a lot of Altaic languages, and thus many linguists specialising in them), though made little headway in the west; whether this is due to its lack of merit, Cold War geopolitics (i.e., the view that it is a stalking horse for a potential Soviet claim on Japan) or both is disputable. To this day, the theory isn't (AFAIK) either accepted or debunked, and the furthest established ancestor of Japanese known is a now-extinct language spoken on the Korean peninsula around the 4th century BC.
posted by acb at 10:21 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
enraged by the idea that .9999999.... = 1
I occasionally get a student that is vehemently resistant to the concept of significant figures as it reflects precision and uncertainty in scientific measurement and calculation.
When I give them a jarring example like 150 + 2 = 150 there are always one or two that, I can tell, think I've made some kind of obscene insult to the math gods.
posted by darkstar at 10:26 AM on September 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
I occasionally get a student that is vehemently resistant to the concept of significant figures as it reflects precision and uncertainty in scientific measurement and calculation.
When I give them a jarring example like 150 + 2 = 150 there are always one or two that, I can tell, think I've made some kind of obscene insult to the math gods.
posted by darkstar at 10:26 AM on September 16, 2017 [4 favorites]
You make noises with the big air hole in the middle of your face, and people understand them! You can't explain that.
posted by thelonius at 10:57 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by thelonius at 10:57 AM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
It's like the tides.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:53 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:53 AM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
Calling out forensic linguistics as an example of real science is charming. Or it would be if the field hasn't caused so much needless harm.
posted by eotvos at 12:02 PM on September 16, 2017
posted by eotvos at 12:02 PM on September 16, 2017
"...Forensic linguists help to solve crimes, clinical linguists treat people with language impairments, historical linguists shed light on language change and even on prehistoric culture and migration"
This is why cartoon criminals talk through their teeth; they don't want to overheard by waskily wabbits.
posted by clavdivs at 12:55 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
This is why cartoon criminals talk through their teeth; they don't want to overheard by waskily wabbits.
posted by clavdivs at 12:55 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
Newton was way out there even by contemporary standards:
(He) believed there were important meanings attached to the numbers found (in the Bible). In one theological treatise, Newton argues that the Pope is the anti-Christ based in part on the appearance in Scripture of the number of the name of the beast, 666. In another, he expounds on the meaning of the number 7, which figures prominently in the numbers of trumpets, vials and thunders found in Revelation.posted by jamjam at 12:58 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
So Newton was a theological crank - he didn't respect hundreds of years of refinement of Biblical interpretation within a Christian context - but was he a comet crank, given that there were no comet experts?
posted by clawsoon at 1:10 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by clawsoon at 1:10 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
every article, noun and adjective has to show concordance.
Mark Twain is on record as quoting a student who said he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 1:12 PM on September 16, 2017 [5 favorites]
Mark Twain is on record as quoting a student who said he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 1:12 PM on September 16, 2017 [5 favorites]
Again, there's been massive cultural shifts over the last few hundred years. Believing in the Bible wasn't at all being a crank; believing that the momentary will of God was not the arbiter of reality, that instead we lived in a universe of amoral mathematics for which the good and evil of Man was not just a but the fundamental force, the Theory of Everything is Right or Wrong So Be Good For Goodness Sake -- that was heresy.
Writing theological treatises in such an environment may have been self-preservation, or may have just been responding to the available data of the time, not all of which was refined to 2017 standards. Progress means the past was different.
posted by effugas at 2:21 PM on September 16, 2017
Writing theological treatises in such an environment may have been self-preservation, or may have just been responding to the available data of the time, not all of which was refined to 2017 standards. Progress means the past was different.
posted by effugas at 2:21 PM on September 16, 2017
Oh, yeah, Newton invented the idea of “indigo” as a color of the spectrum so sunlight (which obviously comes from heaven) would not be composed of six main colors (the number of the devil) but instead seven (the color of holiness). You can be brilliant and also a total crank.
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:09 PM on September 16, 2017
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:09 PM on September 16, 2017
One of the reasons it's still necessary and important to separate the quality of ideas, conceptually, from personality and personal identity even while never forgotting the potential for overlap and bias.
posted by saulgoodman at 3:23 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by saulgoodman at 3:23 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
Somehow this discussion about Newton's crack-pottiness reminds me of the Beautiful Mind guy who was asked why he, such an intelligent person, believed in the non-rational things he believed in what he was having the hallucinations. His answer was something like "Why wouldn't I? They came from the same place my Math discoveries came from."
posted by aleph at 4:00 PM on September 16, 2017 [6 favorites]
posted by aleph at 4:00 PM on September 16, 2017 [6 favorites]
Exactly; Newton wasn't great in spite of the crack pottery, a vulnerability to it was an essential part of his greatness.
posted by jamjam at 4:57 PM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by jamjam at 4:57 PM on September 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
The funny thing is there really are kind of seven colors -- cyan is at least as different from blue as red is from green. But hue, being a continuous domain, is often quantized slightly different from culture to culture.
7+-2 of course keeps showing up in human discretizations because ultimately all the senses are merged and melded in the Lateral Genticulate Nucleus. It's why the McGurk effect exists (the same acoustic stimulation sounds significantly different based on observed lip motion) and it's *probably* why western musical systems quantize to seven notes (A,B,C,D,E,F,G). You could say we see across a single octave, and there's a number of people whose experience of sound has a visually colorful component.
However, as you say DoctorFedora, there were cultural forces that both strongly preferred 7, and funded the arts. And there's absolutely other musical systems in other cultures that sound notably different. So I'm less confident of this.
posted by effugas at 7:21 PM on September 16, 2017
7+-2 of course keeps showing up in human discretizations because ultimately all the senses are merged and melded in the Lateral Genticulate Nucleus. It's why the McGurk effect exists (the same acoustic stimulation sounds significantly different based on observed lip motion) and it's *probably* why western musical systems quantize to seven notes (A,B,C,D,E,F,G). You could say we see across a single octave, and there's a number of people whose experience of sound has a visually colorful component.
However, as you say DoctorFedora, there were cultural forces that both strongly preferred 7, and funded the arts. And there's absolutely other musical systems in other cultures that sound notably different. So I'm less confident of this.
posted by effugas at 7:21 PM on September 16, 2017
But... but... but 7 8 9!
posted by oneswellfoop at 7:26 PM on September 16, 2017
posted by oneswellfoop at 7:26 PM on September 16, 2017
What's the 150+2=150 story?
posted by effugas at 9:48 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by effugas at 9:48 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
acb, your info is probably newer than my twenty year old college research and is thus more likely to be accurate. BUT, at that time Korean was definitely an Altaic language, almost completely unrelated to Chinese. Also at that time Finnish was the closest language to Korean. Japanese was not an Altaic language except for loan words from Korean. I've never even heard of Japanese coming from some 4th century BCE extinct Korean language. By gum, this really has something to do with this post. How dare I stay on topic?
posted by Purposeful Grimace at 10:27 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Purposeful Grimace at 10:27 PM on September 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
What's the 150+2=150 story?
When you do arithmetic with measurements, you must always respect the accuracy of the measurements....like if I told you it was about 100 miles to town, knowing that it's exactly .8 miles from the highway exit to your motel does not mean you know it's 100.8 miles to the motel, because your first measurement was so vague. This idea, and probably more stuff, is encoded in the rules for "significant digits".
So if 150 has an error of 10 cm, you don't know if what you measured as 150 is not really 147, or 154.....and adding an accurate measurement of 2 cm to that doesn't mean you know they add up to 152. The uncertainty dominates the addition, I guess you could say.
posted by thelonius at 2:08 AM on September 17, 2017 [5 favorites]
When you do arithmetic with measurements, you must always respect the accuracy of the measurements....like if I told you it was about 100 miles to town, knowing that it's exactly .8 miles from the highway exit to your motel does not mean you know it's 100.8 miles to the motel, because your first measurement was so vague. This idea, and probably more stuff, is encoded in the rules for "significant digits".
So if 150 has an error of 10 cm, you don't know if what you measured as 150 is not really 147, or 154.....and adding an accurate measurement of 2 cm to that doesn't mean you know they add up to 152. The uncertainty dominates the addition, I guess you could say.
posted by thelonius at 2:08 AM on September 17, 2017 [5 favorites]
I'm actually doing things right now that require me to understand this stuff, despite it being way deep in the weeds, so maybe you can debug my thinking?
Your units bounce around, so let me specify a scenario. Somebody has about $150, plus or minus $10. So they have a range between $140 and $160. They receive $2. How much do you think they have?
Well, now I know the range of funds they have is between $142 and $162. They received money, they didn't lose any. It wasn't a +-1, it's a +2. I should guess they have the mean amount of money between their altered interval/range, which is, in fact, $152.
And in fact, if there were ten thousand people with between $140 and $160, who all received $2, and I guessed the total amount of money people had was around $152000, that would be the most accurate possible guess.
Again, not challenging you -- but is there a flaw in my reasoning somewhere?
posted by effugas at 2:54 AM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
Your units bounce around, so let me specify a scenario. Somebody has about $150, plus or minus $10. So they have a range between $140 and $160. They receive $2. How much do you think they have?
Well, now I know the range of funds they have is between $142 and $162. They received money, they didn't lose any. It wasn't a +-1, it's a +2. I should guess they have the mean amount of money between their altered interval/range, which is, in fact, $152.
And in fact, if there were ten thousand people with between $140 and $160, who all received $2, and I guessed the total amount of money people had was around $152000, that would be the most accurate possible guess.
Again, not challenging you -- but is there a flaw in my reasoning somewhere?
posted by effugas at 2:54 AM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
The 150 + 2 thing also bothers me. If I understand correctly, in this system, "150" represents the range 140-160, and "2" represents the range 1-3. Adding the ranges, "150" + "2" is the range 141-163.
This range is not "150": 140-160 is different from 141-163. It's not even contained in "150". The smallest enclosing ranges you can write down using this notation are "100" (0-200) and "200" (100-300). I think if you're being totally honest with the notation, the only equations that really make sense are 150 + 2 = 200 or 150 + 2 = 100.
posted by panic at 3:42 AM on September 17, 2017
This range is not "150": 140-160 is different from 141-163. It's not even contained in "150". The smallest enclosing ranges you can write down using this notation are "100" (0-200) and "200" (100-300). I think if you're being totally honest with the notation, the only equations that really make sense are 150 + 2 = 200 or 150 + 2 = 100.
posted by panic at 3:42 AM on September 17, 2017
Continuous vs. Discrete rules everything around me
posted by effugas at 4:16 AM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by effugas at 4:16 AM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
panic: This range is not "150": 140-160 is different from 141-163. It's not even contained in "150". The smallest enclosing ranges you can write down using this notation are "100" (0-200) and "200" (100-300). I think if you're being totally honest with the notation, the only equations that really make sense are 150 + 2 = 200 or 150 + 2 = 100.
But when you get to that conclusion, you can see the usefulness of going back to 150. If you know that your measurements are worth about 2 significant digits, 141-163 still rounds to 150.
I think that the significant digits shortcut is lazy physicists saying "close enough". :-) To truly capture what's going on, you'd need to ask a statistician how to add probability distributions, and you'd probably get a very complicated answer involving them telling you that they can't tell you what the number is, but they can give you a probability about what it isn't.
posted by clawsoon at 10:28 AM on September 17, 2017
But when you get to that conclusion, you can see the usefulness of going back to 150. If you know that your measurements are worth about 2 significant digits, 141-163 still rounds to 150.
I think that the significant digits shortcut is lazy physicists saying "close enough". :-) To truly capture what's going on, you'd need to ask a statistician how to add probability distributions, and you'd probably get a very complicated answer involving them telling you that they can't tell you what the number is, but they can give you a probability about what it isn't.
posted by clawsoon at 10:28 AM on September 17, 2017
141-163 doesn't round to 150. 141+163==304. 304/2==152.
The key, I think, is in the measurements only being worth two significant digits. 150 rounds to 15 and 2 rounds to 0. Now 15+0 is still 15. When you renormalize, this makes 150+2 appear to be 150.
The key is whether you think you actually have any signal from a 2. The problem with the concept of significant digits is that it assumes a discrete transition from signal to noise, conveniently at a digit transition. That can exist, but it doesn't usually. It's much more common that as you look closer, things get blurrier, or shall we say, less and less significant. Handling all this is why bandwidth has gone up so tremendously. There's space between all these integers.
posted by effugas at 11:59 AM on September 17, 2017
The key, I think, is in the measurements only being worth two significant digits. 150 rounds to 15 and 2 rounds to 0. Now 15+0 is still 15. When you renormalize, this makes 150+2 appear to be 150.
The key is whether you think you actually have any signal from a 2. The problem with the concept of significant digits is that it assumes a discrete transition from signal to noise, conveniently at a digit transition. That can exist, but it doesn't usually. It's much more common that as you look closer, things get blurrier, or shall we say, less and less significant. Handling all this is why bandwidth has gone up so tremendously. There's space between all these integers.
posted by effugas at 11:59 AM on September 17, 2017
effugas: The key, I think, is in the measurements only being worth two significant digits. 150 rounds to 15 and 2 rounds to 0. Now 15+0 is still 15. When you renormalize, this makes 150+2 appear to be 150.
That's what I was trying to say, but you said it better.
The problem with the concept of significant digits is that it assumes a discrete transition from signal to noise, conveniently at a digit transition.
Aye, and I'm guessing (since I haven't done the math) that using the significant digits method could give different results depending on which number base you use. It's a convenient method, but by no means a robust one. Good enough for physics, though.
posted by clawsoon at 12:13 PM on September 17, 2017
That's what I was trying to say, but you said it better.
The problem with the concept of significant digits is that it assumes a discrete transition from signal to noise, conveniently at a digit transition.
Aye, and I'm guessing (since I haven't done the math) that using the significant digits method could give different results depending on which number base you use. It's a convenient method, but by no means a robust one. Good enough for physics, though.
posted by clawsoon at 12:13 PM on September 17, 2017
I think that the significant digits shortcut is lazy physicists saying "close enough"
Or that a measurement is meaningless if you don't know how accurate it is
posted by thelonius at 12:34 PM on September 17, 2017
Or that a measurement is meaningless if you don't know how accurate it is
posted by thelonius at 12:34 PM on September 17, 2017
Or that a measurement is meaningless if you don't know how accurate it is
But if you're using significant digits, aren't you assuming that you do know approximately how accurate a measurement is?
I'm not using "lazy" as a pejorative, FWIW. A technique gets the job done with less effort is better than one that gets the same job done with more effort.
Well, okay, maybe I am poking a little fun. :-)
posted by clawsoon at 12:50 PM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
But if you're using significant digits, aren't you assuming that you do know approximately how accurate a measurement is?
I'm not using "lazy" as a pejorative, FWIW. A technique gets the job done with less effort is better than one that gets the same job done with more effort.
Well, okay, maybe I am poking a little fun. :-)
posted by clawsoon at 12:50 PM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
Re significant digits: this may come down to whether your high school physics teacher came down hard on you when you tried to use digits that aren't there. Mine did!
If you have two significant digits, then you have no information about the third digit. 150 doesn't mean you have a normal distribution centered on 150. It means you have 15X and you cannot say which digit X is more likely.
Making it more specific may help. Imagine an ordinary ruler marked in mm. Let's grant that you can estimate the tenths of millimeters. You cannot estimate the hundredths. So you can say that you measured something as 2.6 mm; you can't claim you measured 2.57. (And no, you can't measure it 10 times, sum the measurements up, and divide by 10.)
Now let's say you calculate that the thing you measured then moved a further 0.02 mm. Do you now know that the thing is at 2.62 mm? No, you don't, because your original measurement wasn't that precise.
posted by zompist at 2:54 PM on September 17, 2017 [3 favorites]
If you have two significant digits, then you have no information about the third digit. 150 doesn't mean you have a normal distribution centered on 150. It means you have 15X and you cannot say which digit X is more likely.
Making it more specific may help. Imagine an ordinary ruler marked in mm. Let's grant that you can estimate the tenths of millimeters. You cannot estimate the hundredths. So you can say that you measured something as 2.6 mm; you can't claim you measured 2.57. (And no, you can't measure it 10 times, sum the measurements up, and divide by 10.)
Now let's say you calculate that the thing you measured then moved a further 0.02 mm. Do you now know that the thing is at 2.62 mm? No, you don't, because your original measurement wasn't that precise.
posted by zompist at 2:54 PM on September 17, 2017 [3 favorites]
If you have two significant digits, then you have no information about the third digit. 150 doesn't mean you have a normal distribution centered on 150. It means you have 15X and you cannot say which digit X is more likely.
yeah, you are right....I implied that it was +/- some error around 150.
Look at it like this, I guess: you have a ruler marked every 10cm, and you can definitely say that a point is beyond the 15 mark, but before the 16 mark. But you can't measure how far in 1cm units.
posted by thelonius at 3:05 PM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
yeah, you are right....I implied that it was +/- some error around 150.
Look at it like this, I guess: you have a ruler marked every 10cm, and you can definitely say that a point is beyond the 15 mark, but before the 16 mark. But you can't measure how far in 1cm units.
posted by thelonius at 3:05 PM on September 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
This thread took an odd turn.
posted by Chrysostom at 6:53 PM on September 17, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by Chrysostom at 6:53 PM on September 17, 2017 [2 favorites]
But 2 is even...
In all seriousness, what's sometimes considered crankery is really incompatibility between multiple mental models, and the cognitive dissonance expressing. It's not helped by the fact that the "truth" really is a blend of the local experiences of these competing models, and everyone's using overlapping words to mean different things.
OK, yes, there's ignorance going on, because ignorance is the default, and not everyone goes out to actually dig into what's going on in other operational contexts. But there's _always_ other contexts, with very different rules, and they encapsulate eachother. A company is predictable, an individual employee is not, the employee's heartrate is fairly regular, an individual cell in that heart, not.
Language is special because, as was observed upthread, people _are_ experts in it, and don't know the rules they use so exquisitely. Brains are weird and consciousness doesn't come with much of a debugger nor is really much of what the brain does. But we do have a theory module, which conveniently tries to also tell us we're awesome and so is our tribe.
Language is also special because it's hard to disprove things, because it's a black box for the experts *too* (who are both subject to the same biases, and can't take out the box to show people what's really inside). Rapid, visible failure is good at culling out ("training") bad habits away.
But nothing happening here is exclusive to language. Everything has its wonkiness. At least everything I've seen.
posted by effugas at 9:19 PM on September 17, 2017
In all seriousness, what's sometimes considered crankery is really incompatibility between multiple mental models, and the cognitive dissonance expressing. It's not helped by the fact that the "truth" really is a blend of the local experiences of these competing models, and everyone's using overlapping words to mean different things.
OK, yes, there's ignorance going on, because ignorance is the default, and not everyone goes out to actually dig into what's going on in other operational contexts. But there's _always_ other contexts, with very different rules, and they encapsulate eachother. A company is predictable, an individual employee is not, the employee's heartrate is fairly regular, an individual cell in that heart, not.
Language is special because, as was observed upthread, people _are_ experts in it, and don't know the rules they use so exquisitely. Brains are weird and consciousness doesn't come with much of a debugger nor is really much of what the brain does. But we do have a theory module, which conveniently tries to also tell us we're awesome and so is our tribe.
Language is also special because it's hard to disprove things, because it's a black box for the experts *too* (who are both subject to the same biases, and can't take out the box to show people what's really inside). Rapid, visible failure is good at culling out ("training") bad habits away.
But nothing happening here is exclusive to language. Everything has its wonkiness. At least everything I've seen.
posted by effugas at 9:19 PM on September 17, 2017
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posted by lazycomputerkids at 11:01 PM on September 15, 2017 [24 favorites]