This is a really cool link and topic area. I was getting ready to post a note on intelligence amplification (IA), and was going to post it up top on the outer layer of LW, based on language.
I recall many years ago, there was some brief talk of replacing the QWERTY keyboard with a design that was statistically more efficient in terms of human hand ergonomics in executing movements for the most frequently seen combinations of letters (probably was limited to English, given American parochialism of those days, but still, some language has to be chosen.)
Because of the entrenched base of QWERTY typists, the idea didn’t get off the ground. (THus, we are penalizing countless more billions of new and future keyboard users, because of legacy habits of a comparatively small percentage of total [current and future] keyboard users.
It got me to thinking at the time, though, about whether a suitably designed human language would “open up” more of the brains inherent capacity for communication. Maybe a larger alphabet, a different set of noun primitives, even modified grammar.
With respect to IA, might we get a freebie just out of redesigning—designing from scratch—a language that was more powerful, communicated on average what, say, english or french communicates, yet with fewer phenomes per concept?
Might we get an average of 5 or 10 point equivalent IQ boost, by designing a language that is both physically faster (less “wait states” while we are listening to a speaker) and which has larger conceptual bandwidth?
We could also consider augmenting spoken speech with signing of some sort, to multiply the alphabet. A problem occurs here for unwitnessed speech, where we would have to revert to the new language on its own (still gaining the postulated dividend from that.)
However, already, for certain kinds of communication, we all know that nonverbal communication accounts for a large share of total communicated meaning and information. We already have to “drop back” in bandwidth every time we communicate like this (print, exclusively.) In scientific and philosophical writing, it doesn’t make much difference, fortunately, but still, a new language might be helpful.
This one, like many things that evolve on their own, is a bunch of add-ons (like the biological evolution of organisms), and the result is not necessarily the best that could be done.
This is a really cool link and topic area. I was getting ready to post a note on intelligence amplification (IA), and was going to post it up top on the outer layer of LW, based on language.
I recall many years ago, there was some brief talk of replacing the QWERTY keyboard with a design that was statistically more efficient in terms of human hand ergonomics in executing movements for the most frequently seen combinations of letters (probably was limited to English, given American parochialism of those days, but still, some language has to be chosen.)
Because of the entrenched base of QWERTY typists, the idea didn’t get off the ground. (THus, we are penalizing countless more billions of new and future keyboard users, because of legacy habits of a comparatively small percentage of total [current and future] keyboard users.
It got me to thinking at the time, though, about whether a suitably designed human language would “open up” more of the brains inherent capacity for communication. Maybe a larger alphabet, a different set of noun primitives, even modified grammar.
With respect to IA, might we get a freebie just out of redesigning—designing from scratch—a language that was more powerful, communicated on average what, say, english or french communicates, yet with fewer phenomes per concept?
Might we get an average of 5 or 10 point equivalent IQ boost, by designing a language that is both physically faster (less “wait states” while we are listening to a speaker) and which has larger conceptual bandwidth?
We could also consider augmenting spoken speech with signing of some sort, to multiply the alphabet. A problem occurs here for unwitnessed speech, where we would have to revert to the new language on its own (still gaining the postulated dividend from that.)
However, already, for certain kinds of communication, we all know that nonverbal communication accounts for a large share of total communicated meaning and information. We already have to “drop back” in bandwidth every time we communicate like this (print, exclusively.) In scientific and philosophical writing, it doesn’t make much difference, fortunately, but still, a new language might be helpful.
This one, like many things that evolve on their own, is a bunch of add-ons (like the biological evolution of organisms), and the result is not necessarily the best that could be done.