I think EAs should all be polyglots (minimum 3 languages).
Long time lurker first time poster here. I want to make this a bigger post, but also am not sure if I will be a good fit in this environment, so instead of sitting down and getting all my citations in a row, I’ll just do this to test the waters.
Health reasons why:
Knowing 3 languages can stave off dementia, if you want to live longer and have a more useful healthspan it’s a relatively easy intervention that is also just generally good for you.
A lot of the things you can do to learn a new language (joining a club, moving to a new country, etc) are probably good for you anyway.
It creates redundancy networks. This one I don’t actually have a lot of evidence for yet, but I suffer from debilitating migraines and at one point I got one so bad that I went literally non-verbal. My ability to communicate in English was shot. My ability to communicate in Spanish and French was not. While I haven’t tracked down the research, I also know that polyglots supposedly have better outcomes when they receive, say, traumatic head injuries.
Learning a new language, and practicing learning new vocabulary generally, is a good way to strengthen your ability to code-switch, which is important both in general social terms and in terms of becoming comfortable with terminology when specializing in an area of study.
Intellectual reasons why:
A lot of philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, focuses on what ends up being linguistic analysis with extra steps. I have a degree in philosophy, and I have found that it is very frequently illuminating, when taking apart an argument, to just translate it into another language.
Similarly, while the sapir-worf hypothesis is certainly true in the weak form and certainly kind of useless in the strong form, language can create modes of thought. I find, for example, due to the way I was raised, that I can “activate” a more conservative set of gut instincts by thinking in Spanish. The answer is not necessarily that Spanish is a “more conservative” language, but that when I learned Spanish and I built up intuitions about the world in Spanish, I was surrounded by more conservative people. I think this is actually a super useful thing, and am trying to do it “on purpose” by learning additional languages specifically to read a certain type of literature / research, in order to shape specific intuitions about that in that language. Being able to turn on and off gut-level intuitions by changing the language you operate in seems to me to be an invaluable skillset, both to be able to properly understand arguments and to be able to communicate with different audiences even when you’re operating on the same language.
Reading things in the original language is very nice, and a lot of translations to English suck the soul out of things.
Being able to read rarer works, works that are untranslated, older works, etc. is a good thing generally for anyone who wants to broaden their intellectual horizons.
Ideological reasons why:
A lot of EA stuff feels very attached to English and english-language modes of thinking. When I see the growing amount of EA things in Spanish, one thing I notice is the visceral disdain and disinterest with which I experience it, in contrast to the English versions where it feels more “normal” and less “annoying” to me. I think that in general, a lot of the way that EAs approach the world is very atomized, structured, etc, and that’s probably a good thing. It’s not, however, super persuasive to most people who don’t already think in that way. Understanding the different gut-level reactions and being better able to communicate ideas inside a non-English-speaking context is important and will be more important in the future.
EAs are very WEIRD in the “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic” sense.
If
EAs care about the welfare of humanity in general, and care about preference-satisfaction, quality of life, etc.
AND
most of people for most of history have not had the features that EAs have, had different priorities, think in different terms, etc.
THEN
I think it’s kind of obvious that EAs have to have some massive blind spots, perhaps ones I share and am therefore not able to properly articulate, in the same way that if Buddhist monks or Pagans or some other relatively small population that shares a lot of traits within itself but not a lot of traits with the human population at large, would have some pretty massive blind spots.
And since EAs are trying to put themselves in positions to make decisions that could alter the course of humanity and could affect billions of people far into the future, having some sort of check on those blind spots in the form of learning a language and culture that is not WEIRD would be a good thing.
I’ll edit this into a bigger post with citations or something if anyone actually cares / thinks this is worth engaging with.
Re: specific languages, I think there’s a few ways to think about it.
In terms of “best for your brain” re:dementia, traumatic brain injury, etc:
I think the more different the better. So if your first language is synthetic, you should go with an analytic language and vice versa. In that same vein of thought, any language that has another alphabet and/or an entirely alternative writing system would be better too. Honourable mention also for sign languages, which combine additional motor skill practice on top of the linguistic and visual processing brain workout, and also everyone should know a bit of sign language anyway, because sometimes places are really loud or your throat is sore and it’s hard to talk.
So, Hindi, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, Arabic, Greek, Russian, Javanese, ASL, etc.
-
In terms of trying to intellectually “weaponize” languages:
Any language that can be very easily and comfortably associated with a specific mode of thought. E.g. If you were very interested in reading a lot of communist philosophy in the original Russian, and wanted to create a “communist “mode in your brain, or if you were very interested in learning to think more about theology and metaphysics (I personally think a lot of old metaphysics philosophical takes are going to start becoming much more useful in the near future with the rise of AI and hyperglobalization) and wanted to read a lot of Jewish philosophy in Hebrew, or old Catholic philosophy in Latin, Islamic philosophy in Arabic, etc.
The priority there is a language that has a very rich “backlog” of the thing you want to work with intellectually.
So that would be things like Latin, Arabic, Mandarin, Hebrew, Russian, German, Sanskrit, Spanish, French, etc.
One interesting note about the “mode” thing is that this is the one place where a language being dead might actually be a plus. But studying a dead language has its own drawbacks and is usually more demanding.
-
In terms of trying to avoid being WEIRD / blinded by your own WEIRD-ness:
Native/Indigenous languages. Most languages considered “native”, and most languages that are predominantly spoken by populations that did not have a lot of industrialization 50 years ago generally, will still have a lot of the affectations, vocabulary, and other interesting features of their recent history, and will have a lot of stories, sayings, and associated modes of thought that are non-WEIRD.
So, Navajo, Cherokee, Igbo, Cree, Quechua, Maori, etc.
A lot of them are simply going to be missing the words for a lot of things, which means that in the process of translating something, you’ll have to reverse-engineer what the thing in question is and what you should call it, which I think is generally really good for intellectual rigour.
I think EAs should all be polyglots (minimum 3 languages).
Long time lurker first time poster here. I want to make this a bigger post, but also am not sure if I will be a good fit in this environment, so instead of sitting down and getting all my citations in a row, I’ll just do this to test the waters.
Health reasons why:
Knowing 3 languages can stave off dementia, if you want to live longer and have a more useful healthspan it’s a relatively easy intervention that is also just generally good for you.
A lot of the things you can do to learn a new language (joining a club, moving to a new country, etc) are probably good for you anyway.
It creates redundancy networks. This one I don’t actually have a lot of evidence for yet, but I suffer from debilitating migraines and at one point I got one so bad that I went literally non-verbal. My ability to communicate in English was shot. My ability to communicate in Spanish and French was not. While I haven’t tracked down the research, I also know that polyglots supposedly have better outcomes when they receive, say, traumatic head injuries.
Learning a new language, and practicing learning new vocabulary generally, is a good way to strengthen your ability to code-switch, which is important both in general social terms and in terms of becoming comfortable with terminology when specializing in an area of study.
Intellectual reasons why:
A lot of philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, focuses on what ends up being linguistic analysis with extra steps. I have a degree in philosophy, and I have found that it is very frequently illuminating, when taking apart an argument, to just translate it into another language.
Similarly, while the sapir-worf hypothesis is certainly true in the weak form and certainly kind of useless in the strong form, language can create modes of thought. I find, for example, due to the way I was raised, that I can “activate” a more conservative set of gut instincts by thinking in Spanish. The answer is not necessarily that Spanish is a “more conservative” language, but that when I learned Spanish and I built up intuitions about the world in Spanish, I was surrounded by more conservative people. I think this is actually a super useful thing, and am trying to do it “on purpose” by learning additional languages specifically to read a certain type of literature / research, in order to shape specific intuitions about that in that language. Being able to turn on and off gut-level intuitions by changing the language you operate in seems to me to be an invaluable skillset, both to be able to properly understand arguments and to be able to communicate with different audiences even when you’re operating on the same language.
Reading things in the original language is very nice, and a lot of translations to English suck the soul out of things.
Being able to read rarer works, works that are untranslated, older works, etc. is a good thing generally for anyone who wants to broaden their intellectual horizons.
Ideological reasons why:
A lot of EA stuff feels very attached to English and english-language modes of thinking. When I see the growing amount of EA things in Spanish, one thing I notice is the visceral disdain and disinterest with which I experience it, in contrast to the English versions where it feels more “normal” and less “annoying” to me. I think that in general, a lot of the way that EAs approach the world is very atomized, structured, etc, and that’s probably a good thing. It’s not, however, super persuasive to most people who don’t already think in that way. Understanding the different gut-level reactions and being better able to communicate ideas inside a non-English-speaking context is important and will be more important in the future.
EAs are very WEIRD in the “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic” sense.
If
EAs care about the welfare of humanity in general, and care about preference-satisfaction, quality of life, etc.
AND
most of people for most of history have not had the features that EAs have, had different priorities, think in different terms, etc.
THEN
I think it’s kind of obvious that EAs have to have some massive blind spots, perhaps ones I share and am therefore not able to properly articulate, in the same way that if Buddhist monks or Pagans or some other relatively small population that shares a lot of traits within itself but not a lot of traits with the human population at large, would have some pretty massive blind spots.
And since EAs are trying to put themselves in positions to make decisions that could alter the course of humanity and could affect billions of people far into the future, having some sort of check on those blind spots in the form of learning a language and culture that is not WEIRD would be a good thing.
I’ll edit this into a bigger post with citations or something if anyone actually cares / thinks this is worth engaging with.
I really can’t evaluate all of your claims, but I’d personally like to see more native English-speakers grasping how lucky they are
Personally I have no idea if this is a worthy use of the median EA’s time, but this is exactly the kind of interesting thinking I’d like to see.
Without asking for rigor at this particular time, do you think some languages are better than others for one or more of these outcomes?
Thanks!
Re: specific languages, I think there’s a few ways to think about it.
In terms of “best for your brain” re:dementia, traumatic brain injury, etc:
I think the more different the better. So if your first language is synthetic, you should go with an analytic language and vice versa. In that same vein of thought, any language that has another alphabet and/or an entirely alternative writing system would be better too. Honourable mention also for sign languages, which combine additional motor skill practice on top of the linguistic and visual processing brain workout, and also everyone should know a bit of sign language anyway, because sometimes places are really loud or your throat is sore and it’s hard to talk.
So, Hindi, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, Arabic, Greek, Russian, Javanese, ASL, etc.
-
In terms of trying to intellectually “weaponize” languages:
Any language that can be very easily and comfortably associated with a specific mode of thought. E.g. If you were very interested in reading a lot of communist philosophy in the original Russian, and wanted to create a “communist “mode in your brain, or if you were very interested in learning to think more about theology and metaphysics (I personally think a lot of old metaphysics philosophical takes are going to start becoming much more useful in the near future with the rise of AI and hyperglobalization) and wanted to read a lot of Jewish philosophy in Hebrew, or old Catholic philosophy in Latin, Islamic philosophy in Arabic, etc.
The priority there is a language that has a very rich “backlog” of the thing you want to work with intellectually.
So that would be things like Latin, Arabic, Mandarin, Hebrew, Russian, German, Sanskrit, Spanish, French, etc.
One interesting note about the “mode” thing is that this is the one place where a language being dead might actually be a plus. But studying a dead language has its own drawbacks and is usually more demanding.
-
In terms of trying to avoid being WEIRD / blinded by your own WEIRD-ness:
Native/Indigenous languages. Most languages considered “native”, and most languages that are predominantly spoken by populations that did not have a lot of industrialization 50 years ago generally, will still have a lot of the affectations, vocabulary, and other interesting features of their recent history, and will have a lot of stories, sayings, and associated modes of thought that are non-WEIRD.
So, Navajo, Cherokee, Igbo, Cree, Quechua, Maori, etc.
A lot of them are simply going to be missing the words for a lot of things, which means that in the process of translating something, you’ll have to reverse-engineer what the thing in question is and what you should call it, which I think is generally really good for intellectual rigour.