Unfortunately, even living in a very student-dense city and deliberately targeting locales near universities doesn’t seem to have quite the effect I was hoping for. Things are not helped by the fact that French, the main language of 2⁄3 of the population here, distinctly lacks key words and concepts that seem necessary for bayesianism. The word “evidence”, for example, has no French equivalents to my knowledge—even the French wikipedia page on Bayes’ Theorem struggles with this.
As I’ve said, I’m most likely doing a lot of things wrong, because even going to places near university campus(es) (which I’d go to anyway, since they’re otherwise still the places I’d prefer going to) gives these results. I’m also going with the assumption that the actual odds for people I am meeting there are much higher than 1⁄50 for the intelligence criterion, but calculating flat minimum ratios for an IQ level I’m certain is high enough seemed like a more appropriate conservative figure.
It’s the way it looks and feels from here too—I seem to be a rare exception in considering reason, logic and knowledge to have any value (besides the obvious monetary value of “knowledge” of things related to a business) among native French speakers here.
Campaigns to “preserve language and culture” and keep forcing children to go to only French schools and study only in French make me cringe constantly.
That’s kinda spurious reasoning. By that standard, people who speak languages where evidentiality is considered so relevant it’s marked grammatically (like Turkish, or Apache, or Yukaghir) should on average be much more rational than people who don’t. Appeal to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is usually a quick ticket to confusion.
I did not mean to imply an appeal to Sapir-Whorf concepts. Disregarding every other factor, I do seem to be a rare exception among native French speakers in this culture. Whether I would also be a rare exception, a less rare exception, or an even more rare exception in some other language or some other culture, is a different matter, which is itself worth examining in its own separate right for its own reasons.
Other than that, I agree that what you’ve said does follow, and to the best of my knowledge isn’t currently supported by any public research and only has sporadic anecdotal evidence.
My objection to teaching only French is that it’s a well-known fact that knowing multiple languages helps immensely with various aspects of cognition and intelligence, and learning multiple languages during childhood has been shown to be an overwhelming net positive. It follows that forcing children to learn only one language has a net negative impact. This fact is perceived, agreed, and then waived by appeal to consequence: “If children learn English, they will only speak English [because all regional neighbors do], so less and less people will speak French, so our culture will die!”
Well, you’ve got to consider complicating factors, which makes this hard to measure. Those other countries aren’t very affluent compared to the USA and their educational system is probably worse, plus they don’t have access to the institutional infrastructure of knowledge like we do. Also, measuring rationality seems hard, etc. there’s tons of problems that always pop up when we try to evaluate things like this.
I mean, I think you’d probably be mostly right and that there’s not much difference in rationality between different language users, but for other reasons than the apparent average rationality of certain language-users.
The word “evidence”, for example, has no French equivalents to my knowledge
It has no terribly good Italian equivalent either, but this doesn’t make it hard to talk in a Bayesian way: you just say stuff like “it’s likely that X, given that Y”. (In particular, ISTM that—among the kind of people usually I hang with at least—“folk probability” resembles Bayesianism much more than frequentism, and most people who use frequentist statistics only give lip service to it without being actually convinced it makes all that sense.)
1 in 50 people among the whole population has IQ >= 131; in places such as university towns that fraction is likely to be substantially higher.
Yes, it would seem so.
Unfortunately, even living in a very student-dense city and deliberately targeting locales near universities doesn’t seem to have quite the effect I was hoping for. Things are not helped by the fact that French, the main language of 2⁄3 of the population here, distinctly lacks key words and concepts that seem necessary for bayesianism. The word “evidence”, for example, has no French equivalents to my knowledge—even the French wikipedia page on Bayes’ Theorem struggles with this.
As I’ve said, I’m most likely doing a lot of things wrong, because even going to places near university campus(es) (which I’d go to anyway, since they’re otherwise still the places I’d prefer going to) gives these results. I’m also going with the assumption that the actual odds for people I am meeting there are much higher than 1⁄50 for the intelligence criterion, but calculating flat minimum ratios for an IQ level I’m certain is high enough seemed like a more appropriate conservative figure.
Oh, that explains why Quebecois seem to think and behave in such silly ways :). At least it’s the way it looks from the other end of the country.
It’s the way it looks and feels from here too—I seem to be a rare exception in considering reason, logic and knowledge to have any value (besides the obvious monetary value of “knowledge” of things related to a business) among native French speakers here.
Campaigns to “preserve language and culture” and keep forcing children to go to only French schools and study only in French make me cringe constantly.
That’s kinda spurious reasoning. By that standard, people who speak languages where evidentiality is considered so relevant it’s marked grammatically (like Turkish, or Apache, or Yukaghir) should on average be much more rational than people who don’t. Appeal to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is usually a quick ticket to confusion.
I did not mean to imply an appeal to Sapir-Whorf concepts. Disregarding every other factor, I do seem to be a rare exception among native French speakers in this culture. Whether I would also be a rare exception, a less rare exception, or an even more rare exception in some other language or some other culture, is a different matter, which is itself worth examining in its own separate right for its own reasons.
Other than that, I agree that what you’ve said does follow, and to the best of my knowledge isn’t currently supported by any public research and only has sporadic anecdotal evidence.
My objection to teaching only French is that it’s a well-known fact that knowing multiple languages helps immensely with various aspects of cognition and intelligence, and learning multiple languages during childhood has been shown to be an overwhelming net positive. It follows that forcing children to learn only one language has a net negative impact. This fact is perceived, agreed, and then waived by appeal to consequence: “If children learn English, they will only speak English [because all regional neighbors do], so less and less people will speak French, so our culture will die!”
And that’s what really makes me cringe.
Well, you’ve got to consider complicating factors, which makes this hard to measure. Those other countries aren’t very affluent compared to the USA and their educational system is probably worse, plus they don’t have access to the institutional infrastructure of knowledge like we do. Also, measuring rationality seems hard, etc. there’s tons of problems that always pop up when we try to evaluate things like this.
I mean, I think you’d probably be mostly right and that there’s not much difference in rationality between different language users, but for other reasons than the apparent average rationality of certain language-users.
It has no terribly good Italian equivalent either, but this doesn’t make it hard to talk in a Bayesian way: you just say stuff like “it’s likely that X, given that Y”. (In particular, ISTM that—among the kind of people usually I hang with at least—“folk probability” resembles Bayesianism much more than frequentism, and most people who use frequentist statistics only give lip service to it without being actually convinced it makes all that sense.)