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Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science

21 pointsby amar-lakshover 2 years ago

3 comments

tgvover 2 years ago
What an unsubstantiated article.<p>First, it oozes Sapir-Whorf: &quot;Critically, the language one speaks or signs can have downstream effects on ostensibly nonlinguistic cognitive domains, ranging from memory, to social cognition, perception, decision-making, and more.&quot; Where is the bloody proof of that?<p>Second, nobody will deny that testing (young) students at predominantly English speaking schools will lead to biased results, results that don&#x27;t generalize across all languages and cultures, but that&#x27;s got nothing to do with the peculiarities of the language. Every language has its own idiosyncracies. But, there&#x27;s enough research in other languages, and the basics seem to match.<p>Third: language is a small part of cognition. There&#x27;s memory, attention, visual recognition, planning, learning, etc., and no reason to think that that&#x27;s heavily influenced by language.<p>Fourth: progress in cognitive science is not hindered by lack of language, nor the subjects, it&#x27;s the theory. We have no idea how cognition works, and adding yet another Stroop task but this time in some even smaller language isn&#x27;t going to advance it an iota (Stroop task experiments have already been run in the Indo-European languages, Basque, Chinese, Japanese, bilingual Arabic-Hebrew, etc.).<p>Fifth: I would definitely discourage people from running experiments in languages they don&#x27;t understand deeply. I&#x27;ve seen researchers run experiments in my native tongue with glaring agreement errors, and that just throws your subjects off.
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ccbccccbbcccbbover 2 years ago
So yeah, instead of learning one de-facto lingua franca of the world and more or less successfully communicating regardless of geographic origin, let&#x27;s totally focus on learning, let me cite the article out of context,<p>&gt; the current 7000 or so languages<p>, all meaningful international interop be damned!<p>The gist of the article is basically the hackneyed &quot;diversity is good&quot;, but no solutions are given as to how would people understand each other should this pesky English domination be gone. Should all the world become over-reliant on google translate instead? That would mean business for google, for sure.<p>A Russian-speaking guy who doesn&#x27;t feel over-reliant on English a tiny bit here (and also notices the morbid tendency to separate the humankind and encamp it back into the isolated national states of the yesteryear).
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taericover 2 years ago
I always have some trepidation on claims that things could be better in a field if we only did it differently. I am open to &quot;what got you here may not get you further,&quot; but I get the strong feeling that the metrics we think are valuable, are ignoring many other metrics and ideas that are doing some heavy lifting.