The Sapir Whorf hypothesis (language defines what we can perceive and think) is mostly wrong for natural language, but true for programming. Computer languages don't differ in what they can do but in how they let us think.
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Replying to @Plinz
Cole Hudson Retweeted ☞Cassidy #BlackLivesMatter
Are you familiar with the series of papers on the Piraha? It was a whole thing:https://twitter.com/shapkaa/status/982023915319906304?s=19 …
Cole Hudson added,
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Replying to @colejhudson
Yes! After being very puzzled, I mostly chalked them up as outliers: they have only a couple hundred speakers, so the group might have become stuck in a local minimum.
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Replying to @Plinz
Interesting thought: How would one be able to tell if their own language had become stuck in such a minimum or saddle-point? Just in the same way the Piraha can't discover Einstein's relativity, are there things we can't discover because of language boundaries? How would we know?
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Replying to @colejhudson
The Piraha could apparently not even learn how to count to ten with 8 months training. Perhaps they have a mutation that affects numerosity or other things? They must have been heavily inbreeding in a tiny population.
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Replying to @Plinz
I'm not sure an inability to count past 2 actually displays a lack of numerosity. This paper, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.4141.pdf …, in the course of talking about Hilbert's first problem, demonstrates the effective equivalence of their counting system with ours:pic.twitter.com/ZKzoWh705y
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Replying to @colejhudson @Plinz
Albeit, the original paper by Peter Gordon, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c6af/60ea50ac17fd8a879daca57fe333e999d816.pdf …, seems to indicate that they don't actually have concepts for representing the direct quantities 1 or 2, which was reinforced by the later paper here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrea_Bender2/publication/5662451_The_Limits_of_Counting_Numerical_Cognition_Between_Evolution_and_Culture/links/53fdb1620cf2364ccc08ee4f/The-Limits-of-Counting-Numerical-Cognition-Between-Evolution-and-Culture.pdf …
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Replying to @colejhudson @Plinz
As for inbreeding, the only mention I could find of it was in the New Yorker article on Gordon and Everett:pic.twitter.com/uotzyXou80
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Replying to @colejhudson @Plinz
This (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrea_Bender2/publication/5662451_The_Limits_of_Counting_Numerical_Cognition_Between_Evolution_and_Culture/links/53fdb1620cf2364ccc08ee4f/The-Limits-of-Counting-Numerical-Cognition-Between-Evolution-and-Culture.pdf …) seems to indicate that antiquated counting systems tend to be object-specific. More so, that each culture develops a system for counting individually in response to cultural needs.
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The Piraha have been trading with outsiders for quite some time, and they specifically asked to be trained in arithmetic so they won't be cheated so much. They have cultural needs but why does their language not adapt to them?
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