Here's a weird thought. Human language was invented in an environment where max scale was say a few hundred. Written language, for maybe a few 1000. Yet here we are, using language casually at scales of potentially 7 billion with thousands of tricky translations, and it works.
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Very few human technologies of paleolithic vintage can claim this level of scaling success
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Same with our theory of mind.
Our intuition about other people’s intentions and what they might be thinking evolved in a close setting.
Now we misapply the same theory, worrying about what our twitter and Instagram followers must be thinking.
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Language continues to work because it follows most of the same rules of natural selection as biological evolution. This is well worth contemplating in the Meme Age that we are currently experiencing while creating.
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Human language as an abstract distributed database?
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Wasn't it a necessity too? as people got more intelligent, creative, they had to express it in some way. Just a set of unintelligible "oogs" did not cut it. And, we've not stopped, we still like weird sounding words in pop culture despite having crazy proliferation of words!
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Without us noticing, the machine translation algorithm might follow the universal grammar claimed by Noam Chomsky 😛
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It shouldn’t be that surprising when we consider how consistent perceptual cognition seems to be across individuals of a species (or rather the surprise should be the low variance, at least that we can tell, of perceptual cognition).









