Hi mikbp! Thank you for bringing this up. I think this is a really cool idea/concept.
To answer why EAs aren’t currently interested in Matsés, I think the real answer is that most/almost all EAs, myself included, just haven’t heard of it! I think people from outside our movement vastly overestimate the size of the EA movement and amount of knowledge we have access to. The world is big, and there is much more knowledge “out there” than within our community.
In particular, I think it’s fairly likely that zero EAs have done academic or advanced amateur studies into linguistics of South American native languages, for example.
I would certainly be interested/excited to see more people investigate the Matsés language further to see if there are practical things we can learn from them.
That said, my personal view (as a novice/amateur to linguistics) is that I’m generally skeptical of claims on the rough contours of “high-level language study/use being an important bottleneck in understanding/communication of concepts.”
Evidence vaguely gesturing at this skepticism:
Strong Sapir Whorf/linguistic determinism is a linguistic hypothesis that language determines our thoughts and constricts our ability to think of concepts that we don’t have the vocabulary, etc for. This view seemed intuitively plausible but is soundly rejected in empirical data
My impression is that a weaker version, that language “influences” thought, has some empirical backing.
It was ex ante plausible that different languages can convey information at very different rates. This also seems empirically untrue, across very different language families and surface features like syllables uttered/minute.
So at a high-level, I’m moderately pessimistic that there are “technology”-like advances of natural spoken language that speakers/designers of other languages can learn from, rather than understanding natural language development as a combination of random factors + “fit to context/purpose.”
Inside views aside, I’d still be excited to see somebody dive for 5 − 40 hours into Matsés + brainstorm ways EAs can learn from the ways they speak.
I though the point would be that right now English and other “western” languages are not very fit for purse of the EA community in terms of conveying the certainty of our statements -it can be done but it sounds artificial and, therefore, it is now quite tiring to always point to how sure you are about what you say. So we may learn something.
Ah, and I’ve read that these people put a lot of importance on giving true statements. So I guess this is one reason why this feature evolved (although it might be the other way around, as it is easy to be accurate, they give more importance to it).
Hi mikbp! Thank you for bringing this up. I think this is a really cool idea/concept.
To answer why EAs aren’t currently interested in Matsés, I think the real answer is that most/almost all EAs, myself included, just haven’t heard of it! I think people from outside our movement vastly overestimate the size of the EA movement and amount of knowledge we have access to. The world is big, and there is much more knowledge “out there” than within our community.
In particular, I think it’s fairly likely that zero EAs have done academic or advanced amateur studies into linguistics of South American native languages, for example.
I would certainly be interested/excited to see more people investigate the Matsés language further to see if there are practical things we can learn from them.
That said, my personal view (as a novice/amateur to linguistics) is that I’m generally skeptical of claims on the rough contours of “high-level language study/use being an important bottleneck in understanding/communication of concepts.”
Evidence vaguely gesturing at this skepticism:
Strong Sapir Whorf/linguistic determinism is a linguistic hypothesis that language determines our thoughts and constricts our ability to think of concepts that we don’t have the vocabulary, etc for. This view seemed intuitively plausible but is soundly rejected in empirical data
My impression is that a weaker version, that language “influences” thought, has some empirical backing.
It was ex ante plausible that different languages can convey information at very different rates. This also seems empirically untrue, across very different language families and surface features like syllables uttered/minute.
So at a high-level, I’m moderately pessimistic that there are “technology”-like advances of natural spoken language that speakers/designers of other languages can learn from, rather than understanding natural language development as a combination of random factors + “fit to context/purpose.”
Inside views aside, I’d still be excited to see somebody dive for 5 − 40 hours into Matsés + brainstorm ways EAs can learn from the ways they speak.
I though the point would be that right now English and other “western” languages are not very fit for purse of the EA community in terms of conveying the certainty of our statements -it can be done but it sounds artificial and, therefore, it is now quite tiring to always point to how sure you are about what you say. So we may learn something.
But you know much more about this than me! :-)
Probably not by much! :) I’m certainly not an expert in linguistics, and I would not consider myself a talented amateur here either.
Ah, and I’ve read that these people put a lot of importance on giving true statements. So I guess this is one reason why this feature evolved (although it might be the other way around, as it is easy to be accurate, they give more importance to it).
All else equal, this does seem like a very useful trait to emulate.