RSA ANIMATE: Language as a Window into Human Nature

What people said

Strong rec vanderZwan · 2015-06 · Hacker News · on “Taarof”

It sounds like the ambiguity of it all is a feature, which makes me think of this wonderful RSA Animate of Steve Pinker's discussion of how we use language: [this video] I have a feeling a lot of the insights of this talk also hint at why something ta'arof can be useful to a human society.

Recommends dbuxton · 2011-08 · Hacker News · on “Randi Zuckerberg Runs in the Wrong Direction on Pseudonymity Online”

I was talking about something similar earlier today with a friend from high school. We were talking about how it was totally un-cool to disagree with the "consensus" about which girls were hot and which were not. We were imagining what it might have been like if we'd felt able to speak our minds. I'm not a huge believer in the whole "social media toppled authoritarian regimes" stories that have been going around after Tunisia/Egypt but I do think that to the extent real anonymity is possible it has the potential to help people living in places where dissent is both stigmatised and punished by allowing them to realise that others feel the same way. This Steven Pinker talk [this video] (I think; I

Recommends vanderZwan · 2016-05 · Hacker News · on “Can Multilingualism Survive?: How cities preserve and abandon languages”

You make a very reasonable but demonstrably false assumption about language: that it is all about A trying to communicate an idea to B, as clearly and as efficiently as possible, and all involved are cooperative. Reality is often much more complicated. Take the simple example of A talking to B with listener C. There's the scenario where a A wants to talk to B but without being understood by C. Or the reverse where A wants C to understand something but not B, whilst talking to B. And we can go on like this - see for example, this[0] RSA Animate by Steve Pinker about why we don't just say things explicitly most of the time. As a result of all this we get stuff like jargon, coded slang, read-be

Recommends vanderZwan · 2017-08 · Hacker News · on “The Kolmogorov option”

> the vast majority of people might actually wish for rebellion, but none of them actually acts out on that wish. You're talking about Mutual Knowledge[0]. Basically, the Emperor's New Clothes scenario: I know the emperor is naked, but does everyone else know and do I want to risk myself finding out? This short Stephen Pinker video[1] explains it really well: [0] [LINK] [1] [this video]

Cites Joakal · 2011-06 · Hacker News · on “Behavioral reprogramming (overcoming social anxiety)”

OP's condition said it was social anxiety than social awkwardness to which my post was asking for a more overall solution to social issues. To answer your question, I think his sessions were pretty beneficial but I think missed one thing that I believe therapists should be aware, some socially awkward people are oblivious. There's body language [0], there's ways of talking about or asking for things (don't do it directly sometimes) [1], etc. Some people can't magically overcome that when meeting people but I believe they can learn (at risk of exacerbating their self-consciousness). [0] How Do You Use Body Language to Read Minds?; [LINK] (It's said to be inaccurate, I'm not sure either) [1] R

Cites jimworm · 2013-06 · Hacker News · on “Obama: No warrantless wiretaps if you elect me (2008)”

If the sole effect of voting is to choose a winner, then you're probably right. But I think that's not the only effect that comes out of counting the votes. It's the one place where voters actually lay their cards on the table, or rather cast their votes in the ballot box. Votes are not a limitless resource to voters, unlike words or even opinion polls, and it is an important form of communication to other voters in the next election. This is where gaming the voting system hurts democracy. Simply voting for the biggest bloc that is not your vision of pure evil is short-sighted, and causes the voters lose their independence - important for a voting system to arrive at an optimum result [1], a

Cites pdkl95 · 2015-09 · Hacker News · on “'Dissent,' a New Type of Security Tool, Could Improve Online Anonymity”

No, anonymity by itself won't save you, though can sharply decreases the odds of getting caught if you are careful. What anonymity does instead is probably the most important part of starting any movement that is mutually exclusive with "acceptable" political views. When a political situation starts to work against the interested of the common person, most people tend to notice, at least in some small way. If nothing else, they notice some of the harmful effects that are starting to affect them. As they (greatly) outnumber the people "in charge", they only need to use their strength in numbers (either politely with the vote/etc or violently with the pitchfork and molotov. Unfortunately, this

Cites vanderZwan · 2018-03 · Hacker News · on “Review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now”

> As I read Pinker, I sometimes imagined a book published in 1923 about the astonishing improvements in the condition of Europe’s Jews following their emancipation. Such a book might argue: look, obviously past results don’t guarantee future returns; all this progress could be wiped out by some freak future event. But for that to happen, an insane number of things would need to go wrong simultaneously: not just one European country but pretty much all of them would need to be taken over by antisemitic lunatics who were somehow also hyper-competent, and who wouldn’t just harass a few Jews here and there until the lunatics lost power, but would systematically hunt down and exterminate all of t

Cites vanderZwan · 2019-03 · Hacker News · on “What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance”

> It discounts without comment the possibility that the pre-internet style of governance had substantive problems which the working class didn't like (e.g. globalization leading to a race to the bottom in manufacturing wages). It's there between the lines: the author mentions the power of the big companies in the 20th century to shape the narrative through mass media and a lack of proper information among the public, and how that power is now crumbling and how the narrative is being democratized. Basically, it boils down to mutual knowledge, and large shifts in that causes power-shifts in society. [0] [this video]

Cites chewbacha · 2019-08 · Hacker News · on “Censorship in China Allows Govt Criticism but Silences Collective Expression [pdf]”

This is why the first amendment of the US constitution had the notion freedom of assembly. Collective or mutual knowledge is important for a social body to protect itself from tyranny. Stephen Pinker [1] gave a talk and related this to the story of the emperors new cloths. The gist is that independently, everyone knew that the emperor was naked, but it wasn’t until it was publicly exclaimed by a child that the independent knowledge became mutual, thus making it socially OK for the population at large to say what they already knew. Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes understand this and remove the ability to congregate openly on how the system works. They disappear dissidents and control