Everybody is Smarter Than You Think

This is the third in a series of posts derived from old Facebook Notes. The original was posted on Nov. 7, 2010.

1. I am imperfect at translating my thoughts into speech that can be unambiguously parsed by an arbitrary second discourse participant.
2. Due to (1), I have frequently witnessed people respond to things I say in a manner that makes it obvious that they did not reconstruct the thought that I started with properly (i.e., they didn't understand what I was trying to say).
3. This probably makes me seem less intelligent than I actually am, especially when the misunderstood versions of my thoughts are, in fact, wrong. Either factually wrong, or indicative of an immature point of view.
4. I put a lot more thought into what I say in order to ensure accurate communication than most other people. (Although this is probably tempered by the fact that I am not neurologically typical, so I kinda have to.)
5. Due to (4), most other people are probably at least as likely as I am to have the same experience with being misunderstood. The less intelligent they actually are, the more likely this is to be their own fault; the more intelligent they are, the more likely it is to be because the other discourse participants are simply incapable of formulating the correct thought (but, of course, high general intelligence does not imply high social intelligence, so it could still easily be your own fault, insofar as not knowing your audience is your own fault).
6. Ergo, most people you talk to will seem, at least until you get to know them very, very well, much less intelligent than they actually are, because what you think is going on in their brains is a very degraded version of what they're actually thinking.

In short, language is a noisy, imperfect channel for thoughts. So give people the benefit of the doubt.

Why I Know So Much

This is the first in a series of posts adapted from old Facebook notes, in the hopes that reworking old material will get me back into the groove of writing and perhaps I will start putting out more new material. The original was published on November 8th, 2010.


Back when meeting new people was actually a thing that happened from time to time (i.e., when I was still in school), I would frequently experience people asking me "how do you know that?" or "how do you know so much?" or some variation on that theme. Usually I would give a short answer like "I read a lot", but I've decided to go into the issue a little deeper. Why do other people perceive me as knowing an unusually large quantity of stuff?

Part of it is that I know stuff about lots of widely differing fields. People often have often had misconceptions of what my degrees were in based on whatever topic I may have expounded on in their presence first, and when they encounter me then discoursing intelligently on something wildly different (like when someone who knows I'm good at physics first hears me get excited about linguistics), they are surprised. Why should they be surprised? I think it's because most people only have expertise in a very few fields, and it doesn't elicit surprise when someone reveals how much they know about Their Field. There's something surprising and impressive about having depth in more than one area. Especially since we are all so used to the fallacy of people who are experts in one area proclaiming bullcrap about other domains.

So, answering the question "how do I know so much?" at a deeper level means answering the question "how did I become knowledgeable about so many different things?" Or, "why am I not stuck on a small range of topics?" I won't tackle that directly, because I don't think I can really come up with a better answer than just "I'm interested in it all." It's a fundamental feature of my brain and my personality. And then because I'm interested in it, I go looking for it. And once you go looking for knowledge, especially when you go looking for knowledge in apparently wildly divergent directions, you get compound interest. The more you know, the easier it is to understand even more things, and the more your rate of learning will increase. Richard Hamming once said

Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate.

So if I spend even a few more minutes every day acquiring new knowledge than some other person of equivalent ability, over a year, or a few years, or 30 years, I'll end up far, far ahead. And I try not to let time go by when my brain is idle. If I can read something, I'll read it. If I can talk to someone who knows more than I do, I'll try to get them to answer my questions. If I can't read anything, and I can't talk to anybody, I'll philosophize, and try to solve problems I already know about, or try to come up with new problems that are easier to solve. Note that bit about "someone who knows more than I do": if you maintain a good, accurate understanding not only of what you have learned, but also what you know that you don't know yet, that can greatly increase your efficiency at learning new things. Now, all that philosophizing time helps make new connections, and the more stuff you have to connect, the more connections you can make. You still get compound interest if you're just studying one subject, but the exponent gets even bigger when you find that you can start making correlations between highly divergent domains. So, not only is it true that the more you know, the faster you'll know more, but also, the more different kinds of things you know, the faster you'll learn even more different kinds of things. And pretty soon, you realize that most of what you know cannot be easily put into nice neat boxes like "Math" and "English" and "Biology". Did you know that natural language processing and protein folding simulation have a lot of overlap in the types of algorithms used to run them? I know that because I happened to have lunch with a guy working on natural language processing, and a guy working on protein folding in bioinformatics. And then I went and got a degree in computational linguistics so I'd know what those algorithms were!

So, start taking a few minutes every day to think about things you don't know much about yet. Wikipedia is a great help for getting started with that. Keep it up, and pretty soon, you'll know a lot of stuff, too.

Language & Storytelling

Or, Why Authors Should Care About Conlangs

"Show, don't tell."

This is possibly the most oft repeated, best known bit of writing advice ever uttered. But what does it actually mean? Aside from the occasional illustration or diagram, writing is not a primarily visual medium. You are very restricted in what you can actually show. Typically, it breaks down into a metaphor for things like "give good description" and "let the reader make their own inferences"; i.e. "don't be straightforward and boring".

But there is one thing that you actually can literally show in writing, without resorting to illustrations or diagrams--one thing which nevertheless is fairly consistently ignored by most proponents of the "show, don't tell" mantra: The language itself. The language you are writing in, and the language your characters speak.

There is, however, another bit of advice which seems to preclude showing off the manipulation of language itself as a literary device in prose: that being that the language should be invisible. Ideally, the reader forgets that they are reading, becoming immersed in the story. And it turns out that things like accurately transcribed, realistic dialog, accurate phonetic representations of dialectal speech, and similar uses of showing language are super annoying and hard to read! But that does not mean that you can never show language at all--it just means that you have to be careful. When appropriate, doing so can be very powerful.

Showing and even calling attention to features of language itself is powerful because language is intimately tied up with personal and group identity. At the simplest level, this is why good characters have distinct voices; personal identity comes through in the sometime tiny idiolectal differences in how people use their language, making them identifiable even when you can't hear their literal voice. Being able to write distinct voices, different the authors own natural voice, such that the reader can tell who is speaking without the need of dialog tags is a relatively rare but extremely valuable skill, and it is all about literally showing rather than telling.

But, the significance of language to identity goes much deeper than that. Beyond individual voice, peoples' choice of style, dialect, and even what language to speak in often hinges on establishing, or refuting, membership in a group. This is a large part of the function of slang--using it to show that you're part of the "cool" crowd, watching who doesn't use it, or who uses it incorrectly to identify outsiders to your peer group, or even refusing to use it to distance yourself from that group.

One of the best examples I know of of using language to establish identity comes from the film Dances With Wolves. At one point our protagonist, John Dunbar, has been taken prisoner by the army he used to be a part of, and is being interrogated--in English, of course. Now, John is a native speaker of English, and he is clearly capable of answering in English. He could simply refuse to speak. He could say "I refuse to answer your questions", or any number of other things. But what he actually says is:

"Šuŋgmánitu-Tȟáŋka ób wačhí miyé yeló. Nitákunipi šni yeló. Wičha-oíye (wičhóiye) iníčhipipi šni yeló."

Through subtitles, the audience knows that he is telling his captors "My name is Dances with Wolves. I will not talk to you anymore. You are not worth talking to." (Although I am told a more accurate translation is "I’m Dances With Wolves. You are nothing. You are not worth words.")

Now, imagine if he simply said that, in English. Would it have nearly the same emotional impact for the viewer? Would it have the same effect on the other characters? No, of course not! By his choice of language, John is communicating his changed sense of identity--that he now considers himself not an American soldier, but a Lakota.

In films and TV shows, if you are going to portray linguistic diversity at all, you basically have no choice but to, well, actually portray it. I.e., have the actors actually speak a different language! (Even in Star Trek, with the conceit of the universal translator in effect, they at least have the alien characters speak gibberish in those rare instances when the translator breaks.) The complexity of ensuring the audience remains engaged, and the extra costs involved, more often than not result in simply avoiding or ignoring issues of linguistic diversity, but if you're going to do it, you have to do it. And when the details of the story make it implausible or politically unwise to use a real human language, you get someone to make a conlang--hence Klingon, Na'v, Dothraki, etc.

Writers, on the other hand, have a cheat. You can always just write, "My name is Dances with Wolves," he said in Lakota, and never have to learn or invent a single word of another language, or figure out how to keep the reader engaged. The language remains invisible. But you have then committed the grave error of telling when you could have shown! Indeed, of telling in the one singular situation where literal showing is actually possible!

"But," you say, "then the reader won't understand what's going on!"

Well, for one thing, maybe that's the point. Sometimes, the narrator or viewpoint character won't understand what's being said, and the reader doesn't need to understand it either. There may be legitimate disagreement on this one, but consider: is it better to write something like:

She said something I couldn't understand, but seemed to be in distress.

or something like

She said something like "Pomogitye! Moya sobaka gorit!", which of course I didn't understand a word of, but I could tell by her tone she was distressed.

Personally, I'm inclined to go with option 2. And if the reader is supposed to understand what's going on? As a writer, you have it so much easier than the film makers! They have to resort to subtitles, which distract the viewer from the scene. But your readers are already reading! Sticking in a subtitle costs you nothing!

"Sugmanitutanka ob washte..." John said. My name is Dances with Wolves.

And you don't need to be J.R.R. Tolkien to do a good job with a conlang in a story. In fact, while Tolkien was a fantastic conlanger and worldbuilder, and while I may be metaphorically burned at the stake for daring to say this... Tolkien wasn't really the best at integrating different languages into his stories. Dropping in a page of non-English poetry every once in a while, while exciting for language nerds like me, generally results in readers just skimming over that page, even when the reader is a language nerd like me.

So, writers: consider the languages your characters use. Consider actually showing them. And, if appropriate, consider a conlang. If you're not up to conlanging or translating yourself, help is easy to find.

A Technical Religion

Religion and technology are not usually mentioned together. "Religion" as a word has an air of archaism. It is based in the eternal declarations of God to our ancient ancestors, not the newfangled creations of secular men. Yet all knowledge ultimately is inspired by God, including the inspiration for new technology. God works most often through the agency of human servants, and surely He would want His servants to be as capable as possible. The message of true religion does not change, but the media for transmitting it do as God inspires humanity to produce more and better tools to improve the lives of His children. As a side effect, He lets us have Angry Birds.