Although your post uses plenty of sophisticated words, the only part of it that I thought was mostly there to signal sophistication was the part where you said that the reason why people use sophisticated words is mostly to signal sophistication.
A perfectly sufficient explanation for a lot of use of sophisticated words, it seems to me, is the obvious naive one. Sometimes a fancier word expresses a useful idea clearly and concisely, and the alternative would be circumlocution; perhaps, as you suggest, just talking faster could make up for that, but (1) I am not convinced and (2) that might make a smaller language function OK, but no one is choosing between a smaller language spoken faster and a larger one spoken slower, they are choosing what to say on a given occasion and they will speak at about the same rate whether they’re using fancy words or not. And sometimes a fancier word has a sound that’s better for your purposes for some reason; for an extreme case, consider poetry, where poets will sometimes use quite obscure words because they need a particular metre or rhyme or other sonic effect. Of course some poets sometimes may be signalling sophistication too.
I do not agree. MIKKw used 3rd and 4th Ten Hundred words all over their writing. In many cases a 2nd Ten Hundred pick would do.
Note that I’m suggesting using 2nd Ten Hundred as the cut off, because “Thousand” is not one of the top ten hundred words. And many of the other words I use all the time aren’t either.
I also do not agree with MIKKw. Sets of words, especially written ones, need big words in order to send big ideas in a short enough set of words to be understood. Human brains can only hold about 5 things in them at a time, so if one idea with fixed meaning needs 5 words just to say, it becomes not possible to hold a relationship between two ideas with fixed meaning in mind at the same time.
One time this happened is writing this set of words. As hard as it was, I could not have done it without grouping sets of words into ideas with fixed meaning. If there wasn’t already a big word for that idea with fixed meaning, I would want to make one. And, once I made it, I would share it, so others could be helped to think big thoughts too. And now we’ve found the start of why there are so many words.
I’m not sure what your first paragraph is disagreeing with me about. Specifically, when you say “In many cases a 2nd Ten Hundred pick would do”, do you mean to imply that the reason for MikkW’s choice was signalling? I don’t see any particular reason to believe that. For any particular word choice, the actual explanation may simply be something like “well, there are five different words that would do and I picked one more or less at random”, but of course that doesn’t do much to explain how the language grows.
Your third paragraph appears to me to be making much the same point as I was: fancy words are useful for communication because clarity and conciseness matter.
One thing you make more explicit than I did, which may be worth making more explicit still: language isn’t just for communication with other people, but also for thinking with, and thinking may be easier with a richer vocabulary. This is of course exactly the claim contradicted by MikkW’s title, but I don’t think the article does much to justify that contradiction: MikkW first claims that “cadence of information is constant”, but supports it with one example comparison, where the difference is in phonology not vocabulary, and where the “poorer” language is in fact still slower—which doesn’t seem to me to offer much reassurance—and then assumes that the same goes for thinking as for communication, which also seems entirely unjustified to me: I can speed up my speaking if my language is “naively” less dense, but I don’t think at the same speed as I speak, and it’s not at all obvious that the same speedup opportunities are available there.
[EDITED to fix miscapitalization of “MikkW”, which I carelessly copied from the parent comment without checking.]
Yes, we’re on the same page here in general. I was specifically objecting to your first paragraph, and noting that mikkw was using larger than necessary words throughout. Possibly unconsciously, though.
I still don’t understand what in my first paragraph you were objecting to. (Sorry to belabour the point, but it seems like I’m missing something and I would prefer to avoid miscommunication if possible.) It seems like you think I was saying that MikkW was not using words fancier than strictly necessary throughout, but I wasn’t: I was saying the opposite, which is the same thing you were saying.
The only other claims in that first paragraph were (1) that most of MikkW’s usage of fancy words (and indeed most of MikkW’s OP) was not primarily signalling and (2) that his explanation of vocabulary in terms of signalling was primarily signalling. Those are both disputable, but I don’t think you said anything to dispute them.
So I’m still confused about what, specifically, you were objecting to in what I wrote. What am I missing?
A perfectly sufficient explanation for a lot of use of sophisticated words, it seems to me, is the obvious naive one. Sometimes a fancier word expresses a useful idea clearly and concisely, and the alternative would be circumlocution
The entire point I was trying to make with this post is that the “obvious naïve” explanation isn’t perfectly sufficient. Yes, a more sophisticated word can communicate more bits, more information than a more common word. But since the cadence of information is constant, which is a direct consequence of the fact that the computer that is the human brain is capable of processing up to X bits of speech per second [1], but no more, when you increase the number of bits per word, you must compensate by speaking more slowly- you are right that nobody conciously asks “do I want to say many low-information words quickly, or a few high-information words slowly”, but our brains will instinctively make this tradeoff, as I illustrated with Hawaiian and Mandarin in the post. If you look only at conscious processes, you will miss many, many of the most interesting things we homo sapiens do.
Once we realize that you can’t actually communicate more information by using more nuanced words, the “obvious naïve” explanation doesn’t actually explain anything at all- it just posits that you will put in extra effort to acheive the exact same results, which never happens in biology.
If you haven’t read Simler and Hanson’s The Elephant in the Brain, I would recommend reading it, it makes you think in a completely new way about how human cognition works.
[1] Based on my rough calculation in the first footnote of this post, X is roughly 60 bits / second. More important than the exact value is that there does exist some X.
As I just mentioned in a reply to someone else, I don’t find your argument about the “cadence of information” convincing.
First, you speak of “the fact that the computer that is the human brain is capable of processing up to X = 60 bits of speech per second, but no more” to which I have to say: [citation needed]. So, objection 1: you haven’t justified the claim that there is a fixed number of bits per second of language processing in the brain, nor have you made it clear what bits per second you are counting (the number of bits to specify what’s being said when how much sophistication in prediction is available?).
Then, you say something with which do I agree: if your language is “denser” then you will tend to speak it slower.
But the argument in the OP goes way further with this than is justified by the evidence it cites. Objection 2: you compare exactly one pair of languages, Mandarin and Hawaiian; as it happens, my guess is that in broad terms the same pattern holds quite generally, but you really need more evidence. Objection 3: the difference you look at between these languages is in phonology, not in vocabulary; it’s not obvious that the same goes for both. (Suppose some potential bottleneck in speech decoding “knows” only about sounds and not meanings; then it will impose a tradeoff between richness of phonology and communication speed, but not between richness of vocabulary and communication speed.) Objection 4: in your comparison, the “richer” language is still faster. Objection 5: you consider only spoken language; there might be similar effects for writing and typing, but it’s not clear that they’re the same. Objection 6: the comparison you offer as evidence is between average data rates, but the likely effect of losing bits of vocabulary is to make particular things harder to express; if communicating simple things becomes faster and communicating complex things becomes slower, this may not show up in such comparisons but could be a big deal. And, most critically, objection 7: all of this is about communication between people rather than thinking within one person’s brain, and it’s very far from clear that the tradeoffs are anything like the same. (When I am thinking in words, the speed at which I think is not at all the same as the speed at which I speak.)
When you learn physics, economics, art history, analytic philosophy, or whatever, a part of your learning consists of specialized words. If you don’t have a word for “momentum”, that doesn’t stop you talking about momentum, but it makes it clumsier, and it makes higher-level thinking about related topics much clumsier. (Consider e.g. the statement “position and momentum are conjugate variables” in classical dynamics or quantum mechanics.) Imagine trying to do mathematics or physics or economics without a word for “derivative”. If I am talking to someone about the behaviour of a system of particles, my use of words like “momentum” and “derivative” is not signalling sophistication, it’s a more or less necessary part of expressing what needs to be said. I’m sure I could somehow get my reasoning across with a greatly impoverished vocabulary, but it would require a lot of mental effort that I don’t normally need.
Most fancy words aren’t technical terms of that sort, of course, and for the avoidance of doubt I am not claiming that if I had to say “much smaller” instead of “greatly impoverished” I’d be handicapped in the same sort of way as if I had to say “mass times velocity” and “change per unit time at infinitely small scales” instead of “momentum” and “derivative”. (… Writing that has brought to my attention another way in which circumlocution may hamper communication and thought. “Momentum” is not always just mass times velocity; e.g., in Hamiltonian dynamics one has “generalized momenta”, of which a familiar special case is “angular momentum”, and using the term “momentum” for all these things is itself a valuable thing. But if you pick an “elementary” circumlocution like “mass times velocity” then it doesn’t apply to the more advanced cases, and if you pick a “sophisticated” one like “variable conjugate to position in Hamiltonian dynamics” then, even leaving aside the fact that “conjugate” and “Hamiltonian” and “dynamics” are themselves fancy words, you get something that will make no sense to people who haven’t studied the more advanced parts of the theory. Having a word we can use for the simpler concepts and generalize for the harder ones is super-valuable.)
Sorry, I interrupted myself. Again, I’m not saying that all fancy vocabulary has the same sort of value that technical terms do. Technical terms are just a particularly clear illustration of how enriching your vocabulary can make a genuine, and large, difference to how effectively you can think and communicate in a particular domain. (Also, I think some things that are not now technical terms entered the language as technical terms; if so, note that this is a mechanism of language growth that is clearly not driven by signalling.)
I do not agree that the “obvious naive explanation” explains nothing, and so far as I can see you’ve offered no argument to support that criticism; rather, you’ve said that it makes a prediction that you know will be false, namely that “you will put in extra effort to achieve the exact same results”. I think that’s all wrong, and I think at least some of it is wrong even if we stipulate that you’re right about constant information cadence and about using circumlocutions being no loss. What extra effort do I put in when I say “momentum” instead of some circumlocution? What extra effort do I put in when I say “communication” instead of some circumlocution? I think that in both cases the “extra effort” is on the side of the circumlocutor.
I haven’t yet read Hanson&Simler, but I have read a fair bit of other Hanson and I am aware that, crudely caricatured, he claims that everything is signalling. Again, I suspect that Hanson’s talk about signalling is not all about signalling, and that he does it in part because it’s an idea that sounds cynically sophisticated and hence high-status. It may be that in TEITB they present compelling evidence and arguments that would change my mind; for the most part, what I’ve read of Hanson (which is mostly blog posts, so may not be trying to be as rigorous as he could be) doesn’t do that, but takes it for granted that if you can posit a kinda-plausible-sounding signalling-based explanation for something then it must be right.
Objection 2: you compare exactly one pair of languages, Mandarin and Hawaiian; as it happens, my guess is that in broad terms the same pattern holds quite generally, but you really need more evidence. Objection 3: the difference you look at between these languages is in phonology, not in vocabulary; it’s not obvious that the same goes for both.
This example was an intuition pump, to help identify the basic principle at play, not meant as a knockdown proof. But it’s no accident that the first two languages I thought of (which I chose as extremes of the richness vs speed spectrum) illustrate the point I made. If you do the same calculation for Spanish, Japanese, German, or any other language, we should expect to find the same pattern, that the bits per second comes out to the same cadence.
Objection 4: in your comparison, the “richer” language is still faster.
No. If you look again at the calculation of my rough estimate, you will notice that I didn’t use the actual speaking speed of Hawaiian, since I couldn’t find a good number for it, and instead plugged in the cadence of Japanese, which is slightly slower than Hawaiian, so the number I provide is an underestimate of the actual information speed of Hawaiian. Furthermore, even if the number wasn’t an underestimate, it’s not clear to me that the difference between 64.2 bits / second and 59.6 bits / second is statistically significant. (I don’t know the error bars, since my source was a secondary source and didn’t identify the paper where they got their numbers from)
Objection 5: you consider only spoken language; there might be similar effects for writing and typing, but it’s not clear that they’re the same.
I don’t see any reason to assume they’d be different, unless you know of a reason to think they won’t be. My theoretical justification (which I’m aware you aren’t yet sold on, but which generated the test of Hawaiian vs Mandarin that matched the prediction it made) holds just as well for written language as speech
Objection 6: the comparison you offer as evidence is between average data rates, but the likely effect of losing bits of vocabulary is to make particular things harder to express; if communicating simple things becomes faster and communicating complex things becomes slower, this may not show up in such comparisons but could be a big deal.
This doesn’t seem correct to me. For example in Sona ‘momentum’ would be ‘ganru’: “matter” + “movement”, and ‘derivative’ would be ‘nuakiagu’: “change” + “speed” + “trend”, literally “rate of change”. In this case, ‘ganru’ is even shorter than the word it replaces, and ‘nuakiagu’ takes me about as long to say ‘derivative’ when I pronounce them in paces I find natural for each language, maybe even a little less.
In natural languages, simple words tend to be said quite quickly, while more complex words take more time to say—in general because they’re longer, or have more complex sequences of sound, while simple, common words tend to be shorter and easier to say. Similar effects should happen in a polysynthetic language (such as Sona)
If you don’t have a word for “momentum”, that doesn’t stop you talking about momentum, but it makes it clumsier, and it makes higher-level thinking about related topics much clumsier.
Dancers have their own word for momentum: body-flight. ‘body-flight’ serves just as well to enable higher-level thinking about related topics, since once you have gotten familiar with the phrase, the brain treats it as one word, not as “body” + “flight”, except in addition to being able to serve all the same purposes ‘momentum’ serves, its meaning can also be easily inferred by someone who has never heard the word before. If you want to talk about angular momentum, you could just as easily say “angular bodyflight” in a world where physicists used the word ‘bodyflight’.
If I had to say “mass times velocity” and “change per unit time at infinitely small scales” instead of “momentum” and “derivative”
Of course you don’t want to use a definition as the handle you use for a word! But the thing is, you don’t have to do that (as illustrated above by ‘bodyflight’ and ‘momentum’).
I do not agree that the “obvious naive explanation” explains nothing, and so far as I can see you’ve offered no argument to support that criticism;
What? My previous comment was exactly an argument to show that.
What extra effort do I put in when I say “momentum” instead of some circumlocution?
You first had to learn the word ‘momentum’, and second, you had to store this sound and its meaning in the brain. To our concious selves, this doesn’t feel like work, but from a biological perspective, our brains have to do a lot of work to make that happen. In contrast, with ‘bodyflight’, you still have to be exposed to that fixed term before you can use it, but you can get a gist for what it means even if you have never heard it before; and your brain has to store less information to be able to go from the concept of bodyflight to the word ‘bodyflight’, because instead of storing an entire sequence of sounds, it can just point to words that it has already stored.
I haven’t yet read Hanson&Simler, but I have read a fair bit of other Hanson and I am aware that, crudely caricatured, he claims that everything is signalling.
The first part of the book delves into why the brain does stuff (especially, but not exclusively, signalling) subconciously. I will also like to note that as far as the two authors go, I personally hold more esteem for Kevin Simler (who writes at Melting Asphalt) than Robin Hanson, I feel that Kevin’s biological explanations of many human phenomena delve into very interesting dynamics that have changed how I think about the species homo sapiens. I particularly like his blogpost Music in Human Evolution, written 5 years before The Elephant In The Brain was published, as a showcase for the kind of thinking Kevin does.
On objection 2: Your expectation of finding the same pattern whatever two languages you compare is not evidence that in fact it holds. For the avoidance of doubt, I do in fact expect a weak form of the pattern to hold near-universally: languages with, say, fewer bits needed to specify each phoneme will tend to be spoken with those phonemes occurring more rapidly. But you’re making a substantially stronger claim—that this will occur to just the extent required to hold the rate of information transfer constant, and that this will apply when there are vocabulary differences as well as when there are phonological differences—and it seems to me that when making so strong a claim you really ought to provide more evidence. (Or else present it as a conjecture rather than a factual claim.)
On objection 4: ah, so in fact I should have said not that you did the calculation only for one pair of languages, but that in fact you didn’t do the full calculation for any pair of languages!
On objection 6: I’m not sure I understand your objection to my objection :-). If “ganru” and “nuakiagu” actually express the same notions as “momentum” and “derivative” then all that means is that Sona does in fact have those words (I don’t see that the fact that they are constructed from simpler parts is significant), and then I don’t see what a comparison between Sona and English tells us about differences in vocabulary. (Of course it may only “have those words” for Sona speakers who have learned some physics and mathematics, but that’s true of English too: to people without the relevant technical knowledge, “momentum” is the name of a splinter group in a UK political party and “derivative” means “copied from other works” or “one of those weird finance things”.)
If you were only ever claiming that a language that lacks certain terms can be extended by adding new words that mean the same as those terms do … well, sure, I agree, but I thought you were saying something much stronger than that.
Much the same goes for “body-flight”. If that means (approximately?) the same thing as “momentum” then what that means is that ballet dancers have discovered some of the same ideas as physicists, and like physicists have coined a word for it. Again, the fact that it’s a word made out of smaller meaningful parts doesn’t seem relevant to me. Unless you’re suggesting, here or in the case of Sona, that just from those parts you can work out the full meaning, so that if you use a smaller language then you never need to learn about momentum because you can just slam together “body” + “flight” and get the right concept by magic. But I bet you aren’t suggesting that, because it seems to me very obviously not true.
What? My previous comment was exactly an argument to show that. [that my “obvious naive explanation” explains nothing—gjm]
Well, as I said, I don’t see anything in that comment that looks to me like an argument showing anything of the sort. Of course it’s entirely possible that you did in fact make an argument, perhaps a very strong one, with that conclusion, and I just failed to grasp it. (The way it looks to me is that you made some non sequiturs.) If you want to persuade me, then I think you will need to make your argument clearer and more explicit. (Of course you are in no way obliged to make that effort.)
You first had to learn the word ‘momentum’, and second, you had to store this sound and its meaning in the brain. [this is answering my question of what extra effort I need to expend on account of saying “momentum” rather than using a circumlocution—gjm]
OK, sure. But those are both one-off extra efforts, and (so it seems to me) this effort is amply repaid by the reduced effort every time I need to use the concept thereafter. (Compared, again, to a hypothetical situation in which I don’t have a word for “momentum”. It seems a bit as if you’re now shifting to what seems to me an entirely different claim, namely that we would do better with a different word for “momentum”, one whose origins are more transparent. That might be true but if it has anything to do with what you were originally saying, I don’t see what.)
So it looks to me as if when I learned the word “momentum” I was paying an immediate price for a larger future benefit. This absolutely is a thing human brains do all the time.
Not every instance of learning a new word will end up actually being a benefit on net. (To take another technical example, once upon a time I learned the meaning of “regular” when applied to a topological space. So far as I can recall, I have never once had a need to use that term or the concept it names, and I probably never will again.) But it seems to me that much vocabulary-learning has positive expected net benefit.
Again, it’s possible that the case of technical terminology is misleading; learning the meaning of “luxuriant” isn’t much like learning the meaning of “momentum” and its benefits are different. So, while I think it’s very obvious that “momentum” pays its way, I wouldn’t make nearly so strong a claim for “luxuriant”. But I think that, to put it mildly, it is not obvious that having more words has insufficient non-signalling value to explain the fact that lexicons grow, and I am never impressed by “I am not convinced that X is practically useful, therefore X must really be all about signalling”, which is what it seems to me your argument comes down to: there are just too many guesses and gaps in the chain from “languages with richer phonology tend to be spoken slower”, with which I do agree, to “languages with richer phonology are spoken exactly slower enough to cancel out the difference in information rate” and then to “the same applies to languages with richer vocabulary” and then to “and the same goes for thinking as for communication” and then to “and this doesn’t merely hold on average, it holds for every specific case”—which is the point at which I think you’d have a reasonable basis for claiming that there must be some “non-functional” explanation for large vocabularies, though not necessarily for identifying signalling as the specific best explanation.
I am never impressed by “I am not convinced that X is practically useful, therefore X must really be all about signalling”
I don’t mean to claim it is 100% necessarily about signaling, however I do mean to claim that A) there’s a solid argument to believe that signaling plays a role, and B) that the “naïve obvious” answer has very little to do with it. (Regardless of whether you are convinced, this is the main claim of the post, and I stand by this claim) There could very well be other reasons that I haven’t considered which make a large vocabulary useful that don’t have to do with signaling, I don’t know.
I am aware that I haven’t proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that my claims are true, but I have given both a theoretical justification and actual examples that illustrate something that is interesting (according to me) and counterintuitive, which is more than enough to justify making a post here.
Storing things in memory isn’t a one-off cost, since you need to keep it there, which takes up space, and I believe a non-zero amount of maintenance in the context of the human brain
And sometimes a fancier word has a sound that’s better for your purposes for some reason
In non-poetry uses, I think you’d be hard-pressed to identify a word sounding good over alternatives that doesn’t have to do with subconcious signaling. Sure, I sometimes smile when I listen to lyrical alliteration, but don’t you smile since it signals smarts and sophistication? And OJ’s lawyers put a rhyme to a use most sublime when they said “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit”, but surely it’s a good sign when a potential ally can make their sounds align.
Of course some poets sometimes may be signalling sophistication too.
Since when has poetry (or most art for that matter) been anything but signaling?
I don’t at all deny that felicitous word choices may serve a signalling purpose. But e.g. if OJ’s lawyers correctly guessed that the jury would find their rhyming nonsense persuasive because of the rhyme, then it seems to me that they used those word choices for a non-signalling purpose. Maybe in some sense they used brain mechanisms whose underlying function is signalling-related, but I don’t think that’s relevant here; unless I misunderstood, the point of your argument about signalling was something like “we have all these words only for the sake of signalling; this is a sufficient explanation for their use in our language; so it will do us no harm for non-signalling purposes to throw them out”, and if some use of those words co-opts our signalling machinery for other purposes then the conclusion no longer holds.
I don’t really know how to address a bare unevidenced unargued-for claim that something is “nothing but signalling”, but it seems to me that the arts in general are not pure signalling. The fact that many people listen to music even when they’re doing it through earphones and no one else can tell what they’re listening to is some evidence of that, although of course it’s not conclusive (and I don’t see how anything could be).
“From the inside” it certainly seems that plenty of poetry is moving, plenty of paintings are pleasant to look at in ways that resemble (e.g.) the ways some actual landscapes, people, etc., are pleasant to look at, and so forth. I would say that that’s already enough to show that these arts aren’t only signalling. Depending on exactly what the proposition “X is nothing but signaling” means to you, you may well disagree; if so, and if you can give me an idea of what kind of evidence could possibly convince you otherwise, then I’m willing to argue the case :-).
Although your post uses plenty of sophisticated words, the only part of it that I thought was mostly there to signal sophistication was the part where you said that the reason why people use sophisticated words is mostly to signal sophistication.
A perfectly sufficient explanation for a lot of use of sophisticated words, it seems to me, is the obvious naive one. Sometimes a fancier word expresses a useful idea clearly and concisely, and the alternative would be circumlocution; perhaps, as you suggest, just talking faster could make up for that, but (1) I am not convinced and (2) that might make a smaller language function OK, but no one is choosing between a smaller language spoken faster and a larger one spoken slower, they are choosing what to say on a given occasion and they will speak at about the same rate whether they’re using fancy words or not. And sometimes a fancier word has a sound that’s better for your purposes for some reason; for an extreme case, consider poetry, where poets will sometimes use quite obscure words because they need a particular metre or rhyme or other sonic effect. Of course some poets sometimes may be signalling sophistication too.
I do not agree. MIKKw used 3rd and 4th Ten Hundred words all over their writing. In many cases a 2nd Ten Hundred pick would do.
Note that I’m suggesting using 2nd Ten Hundred as the cut off, because “Thousand” is not one of the top ten hundred words. And many of the other words I use all the time aren’t either.
I also do not agree with MIKKw. Sets of words, especially written ones, need big words in order to send big ideas in a short enough set of words to be understood. Human brains can only hold about 5 things in them at a time, so if one idea with fixed meaning needs 5 words just to say, it becomes not possible to hold a relationship between two ideas with fixed meaning in mind at the same time. One time this happened is writing this set of words. As hard as it was, I could not have done it without grouping sets of words into ideas with fixed meaning. If there wasn’t already a big word for that idea with fixed meaning, I would want to make one. And, once I made it, I would share it, so others could be helped to think big thoughts too. And now we’ve found the start of why there are so many words.
I’m not sure what your first paragraph is disagreeing with me about. Specifically, when you say “In many cases a 2nd Ten Hundred pick would do”, do you mean to imply that the reason for MikkW’s choice was signalling? I don’t see any particular reason to believe that. For any particular word choice, the actual explanation may simply be something like “well, there are five different words that would do and I picked one more or less at random”, but of course that doesn’t do much to explain how the language grows.
Your third paragraph appears to me to be making much the same point as I was: fancy words are useful for communication because clarity and conciseness matter.
One thing you make more explicit than I did, which may be worth making more explicit still: language isn’t just for communication with other people, but also for thinking with, and thinking may be easier with a richer vocabulary. This is of course exactly the claim contradicted by MikkW’s title, but I don’t think the article does much to justify that contradiction: MikkW first claims that “cadence of information is constant”, but supports it with one example comparison, where the difference is in phonology not vocabulary, and where the “poorer” language is in fact still slower—which doesn’t seem to me to offer much reassurance—and then assumes that the same goes for thinking as for communication, which also seems entirely unjustified to me: I can speed up my speaking if my language is “naively” less dense, but I don’t think at the same speed as I speak, and it’s not at all obvious that the same speedup opportunities are available there.
[EDITED to fix miscapitalization of “MikkW”, which I carelessly copied from the parent comment without checking.]
Yes, we’re on the same page here in general. I was specifically objecting to your first paragraph, and noting that mikkw was using larger than necessary words throughout. Possibly unconsciously, though.
I still don’t understand what in my first paragraph you were objecting to. (Sorry to belabour the point, but it seems like I’m missing something and I would prefer to avoid miscommunication if possible.) It seems like you think I was saying that MikkW was not using words fancier than strictly necessary throughout, but I wasn’t: I was saying the opposite, which is the same thing you were saying.
The only other claims in that first paragraph were (1) that most of MikkW’s usage of fancy words (and indeed most of MikkW’s OP) was not primarily signalling and (2) that his explanation of vocabulary in terms of signalling was primarily signalling. Those are both disputable, but I don’t think you said anything to dispute them.
So I’m still confused about what, specifically, you were objecting to in what I wrote. What am I missing?
The entire point I was trying to make with this post is that the “obvious naïve” explanation isn’t perfectly sufficient. Yes, a more sophisticated word can communicate more bits, more information than a more common word. But since the cadence of information is constant, which is a direct consequence of the fact that the computer that is the human brain is capable of processing up to X bits of speech per second [1], but no more, when you increase the number of bits per word, you must compensate by speaking more slowly- you are right that nobody conciously asks “do I want to say many low-information words quickly, or a few high-information words slowly”, but our brains will instinctively make this tradeoff, as I illustrated with Hawaiian and Mandarin in the post. If you look only at conscious processes, you will miss many, many of the most interesting things we homo sapiens do.
Once we realize that you can’t actually communicate more information by using more nuanced words, the “obvious naïve” explanation doesn’t actually explain anything at all- it just posits that you will put in extra effort to acheive the exact same results, which never happens in biology.
If you haven’t read Simler and Hanson’s The Elephant in the Brain, I would recommend reading it, it makes you think in a completely new way about how human cognition works.
[1] Based on my rough calculation in the first footnote of this post, X is roughly 60 bits / second. More important than the exact value is that there does exist some X.
As I just mentioned in a reply to someone else, I don’t find your argument about the “cadence of information” convincing.
First, you speak of “the fact that the computer that is the human brain is capable of processing up to X = 60 bits of speech per second, but no more” to which I have to say: [citation needed]. So, objection 1: you haven’t justified the claim that there is a fixed number of bits per second of language processing in the brain, nor have you made it clear what bits per second you are counting (the number of bits to specify what’s being said when how much sophistication in prediction is available?).
Then, you say something with which do I agree: if your language is “denser” then you will tend to speak it slower.
But the argument in the OP goes way further with this than is justified by the evidence it cites. Objection 2: you compare exactly one pair of languages, Mandarin and Hawaiian; as it happens, my guess is that in broad terms the same pattern holds quite generally, but you really need more evidence. Objection 3: the difference you look at between these languages is in phonology, not in vocabulary; it’s not obvious that the same goes for both. (Suppose some potential bottleneck in speech decoding “knows” only about sounds and not meanings; then it will impose a tradeoff between richness of phonology and communication speed, but not between richness of vocabulary and communication speed.) Objection 4: in your comparison, the “richer” language is still faster. Objection 5: you consider only spoken language; there might be similar effects for writing and typing, but it’s not clear that they’re the same. Objection 6: the comparison you offer as evidence is between average data rates, but the likely effect of losing bits of vocabulary is to make particular things harder to express; if communicating simple things becomes faster and communicating complex things becomes slower, this may not show up in such comparisons but could be a big deal. And, most critically, objection 7: all of this is about communication between people rather than thinking within one person’s brain, and it’s very far from clear that the tradeoffs are anything like the same. (When I am thinking in words, the speed at which I think is not at all the same as the speed at which I speak.)
When you learn physics, economics, art history, analytic philosophy, or whatever, a part of your learning consists of specialized words. If you don’t have a word for “momentum”, that doesn’t stop you talking about momentum, but it makes it clumsier, and it makes higher-level thinking about related topics much clumsier. (Consider e.g. the statement “position and momentum are conjugate variables” in classical dynamics or quantum mechanics.) Imagine trying to do mathematics or physics or economics without a word for “derivative”. If I am talking to someone about the behaviour of a system of particles, my use of words like “momentum” and “derivative” is not signalling sophistication, it’s a more or less necessary part of expressing what needs to be said. I’m sure I could somehow get my reasoning across with a greatly impoverished vocabulary, but it would require a lot of mental effort that I don’t normally need.
Most fancy words aren’t technical terms of that sort, of course, and for the avoidance of doubt I am not claiming that if I had to say “much smaller” instead of “greatly impoverished” I’d be handicapped in the same sort of way as if I had to say “mass times velocity” and “change per unit time at infinitely small scales” instead of “momentum” and “derivative”. (… Writing that has brought to my attention another way in which circumlocution may hamper communication and thought. “Momentum” is not always just mass times velocity; e.g., in Hamiltonian dynamics one has “generalized momenta”, of which a familiar special case is “angular momentum”, and using the term “momentum” for all these things is itself a valuable thing. But if you pick an “elementary” circumlocution like “mass times velocity” then it doesn’t apply to the more advanced cases, and if you pick a “sophisticated” one like “variable conjugate to position in Hamiltonian dynamics” then, even leaving aside the fact that “conjugate” and “Hamiltonian” and “dynamics” are themselves fancy words, you get something that will make no sense to people who haven’t studied the more advanced parts of the theory. Having a word we can use for the simpler concepts and generalize for the harder ones is super-valuable.)
Sorry, I interrupted myself. Again, I’m not saying that all fancy vocabulary has the same sort of value that technical terms do. Technical terms are just a particularly clear illustration of how enriching your vocabulary can make a genuine, and large, difference to how effectively you can think and communicate in a particular domain. (Also, I think some things that are not now technical terms entered the language as technical terms; if so, note that this is a mechanism of language growth that is clearly not driven by signalling.)
I do not agree that the “obvious naive explanation” explains nothing, and so far as I can see you’ve offered no argument to support that criticism; rather, you’ve said that it makes a prediction that you know will be false, namely that “you will put in extra effort to achieve the exact same results”. I think that’s all wrong, and I think at least some of it is wrong even if we stipulate that you’re right about constant information cadence and about using circumlocutions being no loss. What extra effort do I put in when I say “momentum” instead of some circumlocution? What extra effort do I put in when I say “communication” instead of some circumlocution? I think that in both cases the “extra effort” is on the side of the circumlocutor.
I haven’t yet read Hanson&Simler, but I have read a fair bit of other Hanson and I am aware that, crudely caricatured, he claims that everything is signalling. Again, I suspect that Hanson’s talk about signalling is not all about signalling, and that he does it in part because it’s an idea that sounds cynically sophisticated and hence high-status. It may be that in TEITB they present compelling evidence and arguments that would change my mind; for the most part, what I’ve read of Hanson (which is mostly blog posts, so may not be trying to be as rigorous as he could be) doesn’t do that, but takes it for granted that if you can posit a kinda-plausible-sounding signalling-based explanation for something then it must be right.
This example was an intuition pump, to help identify the basic principle at play, not meant as a knockdown proof. But it’s no accident that the first two languages I thought of (which I chose as extremes of the richness vs speed spectrum) illustrate the point I made. If you do the same calculation for Spanish, Japanese, German, or any other language, we should expect to find the same pattern, that the bits per second comes out to the same cadence.
No. If you look again at the calculation of my rough estimate, you will notice that I didn’t use the actual speaking speed of Hawaiian, since I couldn’t find a good number for it, and instead plugged in the cadence of Japanese, which is slightly slower than Hawaiian, so the number I provide is an underestimate of the actual information speed of Hawaiian. Furthermore, even if the number wasn’t an underestimate, it’s not clear to me that the difference between 64.2 bits / second and 59.6 bits / second is statistically significant. (I don’t know the error bars, since my source was a secondary source and didn’t identify the paper where they got their numbers from)
I don’t see any reason to assume they’d be different, unless you know of a reason to think they won’t be. My theoretical justification (which I’m aware you aren’t yet sold on, but which generated the test of Hawaiian vs Mandarin that matched the prediction it made) holds just as well for written language as speech
This doesn’t seem correct to me. For example in Sona ‘momentum’ would be ‘ganru’: “matter” + “movement”, and ‘derivative’ would be ‘nuakiagu’: “change” + “speed” + “trend”, literally “rate of change”. In this case, ‘ganru’ is even shorter than the word it replaces, and ‘nuakiagu’ takes me about as long to say ‘derivative’ when I pronounce them in paces I find natural for each language, maybe even a little less.
In natural languages, simple words tend to be said quite quickly, while more complex words take more time to say—in general because they’re longer, or have more complex sequences of sound, while simple, common words tend to be shorter and easier to say. Similar effects should happen in a polysynthetic language (such as Sona)
Dancers have their own word for momentum: body-flight. ‘body-flight’ serves just as well to enable higher-level thinking about related topics, since once you have gotten familiar with the phrase, the brain treats it as one word, not as “body” + “flight”, except in addition to being able to serve all the same purposes ‘momentum’ serves, its meaning can also be easily inferred by someone who has never heard the word before. If you want to talk about angular momentum, you could just as easily say “angular bodyflight” in a world where physicists used the word ‘bodyflight’.
Of course you don’t want to use a definition as the handle you use for a word! But the thing is, you don’t have to do that (as illustrated above by ‘bodyflight’ and ‘momentum’).
What? My previous comment was exactly an argument to show that.
You first had to learn the word ‘momentum’, and second, you had to store this sound and its meaning in the brain. To our concious selves, this doesn’t feel like work, but from a biological perspective, our brains have to do a lot of work to make that happen. In contrast, with ‘bodyflight’, you still have to be exposed to that fixed term before you can use it, but you can get a gist for what it means even if you have never heard it before; and your brain has to store less information to be able to go from the concept of bodyflight to the word ‘bodyflight’, because instead of storing an entire sequence of sounds, it can just point to words that it has already stored.
The first part of the book delves into why the brain does stuff (especially, but not exclusively, signalling) subconciously. I will also like to note that as far as the two authors go, I personally hold more esteem for Kevin Simler (who writes at Melting Asphalt) than Robin Hanson, I feel that Kevin’s biological explanations of many human phenomena delve into very interesting dynamics that have changed how I think about the species homo sapiens. I particularly like his blogpost Music in Human Evolution, written 5 years before The Elephant In The Brain was published, as a showcase for the kind of thinking Kevin does.
On objection 2: Your expectation of finding the same pattern whatever two languages you compare is not evidence that in fact it holds. For the avoidance of doubt, I do in fact expect a weak form of the pattern to hold near-universally: languages with, say, fewer bits needed to specify each phoneme will tend to be spoken with those phonemes occurring more rapidly. But you’re making a substantially stronger claim—that this will occur to just the extent required to hold the rate of information transfer constant, and that this will apply when there are vocabulary differences as well as when there are phonological differences—and it seems to me that when making so strong a claim you really ought to provide more evidence. (Or else present it as a conjecture rather than a factual claim.)
On objection 4: ah, so in fact I should have said not that you did the calculation only for one pair of languages, but that in fact you didn’t do the full calculation for any pair of languages!
On objection 6: I’m not sure I understand your objection to my objection :-). If “ganru” and “nuakiagu” actually express the same notions as “momentum” and “derivative” then all that means is that Sona does in fact have those words (I don’t see that the fact that they are constructed from simpler parts is significant), and then I don’t see what a comparison between Sona and English tells us about differences in vocabulary. (Of course it may only “have those words” for Sona speakers who have learned some physics and mathematics, but that’s true of English too: to people without the relevant technical knowledge, “momentum” is the name of a splinter group in a UK political party and “derivative” means “copied from other works” or “one of those weird finance things”.)
If you were only ever claiming that a language that lacks certain terms can be extended by adding new words that mean the same as those terms do … well, sure, I agree, but I thought you were saying something much stronger than that.
Much the same goes for “body-flight”. If that means (approximately?) the same thing as “momentum” then what that means is that ballet dancers have discovered some of the same ideas as physicists, and like physicists have coined a word for it. Again, the fact that it’s a word made out of smaller meaningful parts doesn’t seem relevant to me. Unless you’re suggesting, here or in the case of Sona, that just from those parts you can work out the full meaning, so that if you use a smaller language then you never need to learn about momentum because you can just slam together “body” + “flight” and get the right concept by magic. But I bet you aren’t suggesting that, because it seems to me very obviously not true.
Well, as I said, I don’t see anything in that comment that looks to me like an argument showing anything of the sort. Of course it’s entirely possible that you did in fact make an argument, perhaps a very strong one, with that conclusion, and I just failed to grasp it. (The way it looks to me is that you made some non sequiturs.) If you want to persuade me, then I think you will need to make your argument clearer and more explicit. (Of course you are in no way obliged to make that effort.)
OK, sure. But those are both one-off extra efforts, and (so it seems to me) this effort is amply repaid by the reduced effort every time I need to use the concept thereafter. (Compared, again, to a hypothetical situation in which I don’t have a word for “momentum”. It seems a bit as if you’re now shifting to what seems to me an entirely different claim, namely that we would do better with a different word for “momentum”, one whose origins are more transparent. That might be true but if it has anything to do with what you were originally saying, I don’t see what.)
So it looks to me as if when I learned the word “momentum” I was paying an immediate price for a larger future benefit. This absolutely is a thing human brains do all the time.
Not every instance of learning a new word will end up actually being a benefit on net. (To take another technical example, once upon a time I learned the meaning of “regular” when applied to a topological space. So far as I can recall, I have never once had a need to use that term or the concept it names, and I probably never will again.) But it seems to me that much vocabulary-learning has positive expected net benefit.
Again, it’s possible that the case of technical terminology is misleading; learning the meaning of “luxuriant” isn’t much like learning the meaning of “momentum” and its benefits are different. So, while I think it’s very obvious that “momentum” pays its way, I wouldn’t make nearly so strong a claim for “luxuriant”. But I think that, to put it mildly, it is not obvious that having more words has insufficient non-signalling value to explain the fact that lexicons grow, and I am never impressed by “I am not convinced that X is practically useful, therefore X must really be all about signalling”, which is what it seems to me your argument comes down to: there are just too many guesses and gaps in the chain from “languages with richer phonology tend to be spoken slower”, with which I do agree, to “languages with richer phonology are spoken exactly slower enough to cancel out the difference in information rate” and then to “the same applies to languages with richer vocabulary” and then to “and the same goes for thinking as for communication” and then to “and this doesn’t merely hold on average, it holds for every specific case”—which is the point at which I think you’d have a reasonable basis for claiming that there must be some “non-functional” explanation for large vocabularies, though not necessarily for identifying signalling as the specific best explanation.
I don’t mean to claim it is 100% necessarily about signaling, however I do mean to claim that A) there’s a solid argument to believe that signaling plays a role, and B) that the “naïve obvious” answer has very little to do with it. (Regardless of whether you are convinced, this is the main claim of the post, and I stand by this claim) There could very well be other reasons that I haven’t considered which make a large vocabulary useful that don’t have to do with signaling, I don’t know.
I am aware that I haven’t proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that my claims are true, but I have given both a theoretical justification and actual examples that illustrate something that is interesting (according to me) and counterintuitive, which is more than enough to justify making a post here.
Storing things in memory isn’t a one-off cost, since you need to keep it there, which takes up space, and I believe a non-zero amount of maintenance in the context of the human brain
In non-poetry uses, I think you’d be hard-pressed to identify a word sounding good over alternatives that doesn’t have to do with subconcious signaling. Sure, I sometimes smile when I listen to lyrical alliteration, but don’t you smile since it signals smarts and sophistication? And OJ’s lawyers put a rhyme to a use most sublime when they said “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit”, but surely it’s a good sign when a potential ally can make their sounds align.
Since when has poetry (or most art for that matter) been anything but signaling?
I don’t at all deny that felicitous word choices may serve a signalling purpose. But e.g. if OJ’s lawyers correctly guessed that the jury would find their rhyming nonsense persuasive because of the rhyme, then it seems to me that they used those word choices for a non-signalling purpose. Maybe in some sense they used brain mechanisms whose underlying function is signalling-related, but I don’t think that’s relevant here; unless I misunderstood, the point of your argument about signalling was something like “we have all these words only for the sake of signalling; this is a sufficient explanation for their use in our language; so it will do us no harm for non-signalling purposes to throw them out”, and if some use of those words co-opts our signalling machinery for other purposes then the conclusion no longer holds.
I don’t really know how to address a bare unevidenced unargued-for claim that something is “nothing but signalling”, but it seems to me that the arts in general are not pure signalling. The fact that many people listen to music even when they’re doing it through earphones and no one else can tell what they’re listening to is some evidence of that, although of course it’s not conclusive (and I don’t see how anything could be).
“From the inside” it certainly seems that plenty of poetry is moving, plenty of paintings are pleasant to look at in ways that resemble (e.g.) the ways some actual landscapes, people, etc., are pleasant to look at, and so forth. I would say that that’s already enough to show that these arts aren’t only signalling. Depending on exactly what the proposition “X is nothing but signaling” means to you, you may well disagree; if so, and if you can give me an idea of what kind of evidence could possibly convince you otherwise, then I’m willing to argue the case :-).