The Relevance of Advanced Vocabulary to Rationality

obstropolous

So, obstreperous is an actual word, that means something very similar.

So do you have an argument for or against the need for an advanced or specialised vocabulary to be rational?

Have you read the A Human's Guide to Words sequence? A lot of irrationality in arguments centers around misunderstanding what words are and how they work, but I don't think size of vocabulary has a huge impact on that understanding (once you've corrected for IQ).

For example, I would think that a general practitioner would have trouble within his field if he did not hold the language to be able to specify what, in particular, was wrong with a patient, even if he knew what it was. Or could he not even be able to understand, say, that a patient was having a heart attack if he did not have the words for it?

The second idea is called strong Sapir Worpf hypothesis. It doesn't seem to be true.

Take a word like aunt. It includes the sister of your mother but it also includes the wife of her brother. Obviously you can separate the two mentally even if you don't have separate words. http://conlangery.com/2013/07/29/conlangery-92-the-sapir-worf-hypothesis/ is a nice podcast that describes it's state.

When you talk about rationality it's still highly useful to distinguish between aliefs and beliefs. There are probably plenty of people out there who don't make that mental distinction. Having different words makes it easier to learn to make the mental distinction.

It also makes it easier to remember thoughts about the mental distinction. Both natural remembering and constructed remembering via Anki.

I think that having words for things is very useful - both for communicating about things and thinking about them. I do think that having a larger and more specialized vocabulary about a topic actually makes you better at thinking about a topic.

For an example of the benefits of verbal labels spilling over into non-verbal domains, check out this experiment, which showed that giving verbal labels to things facilitates learning and raises peak performance on a visual discrimination task. Original paper.

Even taking into account purely personal experience, I feel extremely confident of this opinion. I am actually rather surprised at the number of users who believe that possessing a large vocabulary isn't extremely important for learning and thinking and general purpose / domain specific intelligence...for my part, I think it's actually one of the most important things, even more important than quantitative skills.

I think that in general people have a tendency to create too much notation rather than too little ("advanced vocabulary" is really just a type of notation). The LessWrong community seems particularly susceptible to this: we often create new words when existing concepts already exist, or when it wouldn't be that hard to explain what we mean in the first place. This is problematic because it makes idea transfer with outsiders far more difficult: not just because they are less willing to engage, but because one now needs to translate between notations, which is often much harder than it would naievely seem. So I would actually be in favor of less vocabulary, more effort to tie existing concepts to concepts that exist in other communities, and more effort on simple explanations of ideas that don't require someone to have read the Sequences.

Great post. Right now, I think that you do need an advanced vocabulary to understand what's on LessWrong. In general, most people that have been involved with LW-style explicit rationality as it exists today are unusually intelligent and this are likely to use such terms.

However, I think that that is a flaw with our own methods rather than a flaw with rationality-in-general. A more accessible form of rationality would be very useful.

One post that you might want to read is lukeprog's "Explicit and tacit rationality."

Off-topic:

I'm not talking about a basic vocabulary, but a vocabulary beyond that of the average, white, English-as-a-first-language adult.

Why white?

Would Magnus Carlsen be unable to play chess if he had no words for it? This old post suggests some people don't have mental imagery at all. If that's true, these people would probably make some interesting claims about thinking.

Or could he not even be able to understand, say, that a patient was having a heart attack if he did not have the words for it?

I can visualize a "heart attack" in my mind with all the relevant steps involved, no words needed. People (and animals) understand other kinds of phenomenoms they don't have words for, so I would deduce that it applies to this situation also. Symbols are needed for understanding phenomenoms you're not directly experiencing, but they don't have to be words.

So do you have an argument for or against the need for an advanced or specialised vocabulary to be rational? Is it a question that's too vague, or with too variable an answer?

Specialized vocabulary usually makes thinking and communication more effective by allowing shorthand for complex concepts. This applies to many kinds of thinking, most of it not necessarily rational. You'd probably find correlation, but good luck with the causation part.

I think a doctor would do just fine inventing her own word for heart attack, if she didn't have any colleagues to communicate with. A rationalist would only get extra value out of using "real" words for concepts rather than ones they made up if they could speak with other people who knew of the same concepts.

Now that I think about it, some of my friends have done something sort of like inventing words when we needed to refer to concepts that didn't have an existing label. One of my programmer friends tends to take a common word that's sorta close and write it like a PHP variable ($protect, etc.). I use "ouroboros" to mean a being that can't exist without hurting itself, and I'll tell people that I use the word that way if the concept comes up in discussion so that I can refer to it later without having to re-explain.

You seem to differentiate between words and concepts. And with words you mean words with a specific interpretation in a specific context. Not words everyone 'knows'.

Take e.g. 'correlation' (the first candidate from your post). The laymans reading is roughly 'some kind of relationship'. Being used in a LW context you may assume that the reader knows about the mathematical definition and its application to everyday use. Now as long as you use 'correlation' as in your post and do not attach weight on the consequences of that use there is no risk. But once you want to use consequences of that definition to support or weaken a point then you must consider what concepts your reader really knows.

As the other commenters noted the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis is mostly wrong. You can have concepts without words. But words clearly help.

The question also is: When do you really have a 'word' for a concept. 'correlation' alone is no concept. There are stochasitic correlation between stochastic variables or correlations between signals. Those that are discrete or continuous or multi dimensional. Pick your meaning. And arguing that the 'concept' is pure; the abstraction or generalization of these specific instances doesn't really work because nobody really knows what the pure concept is. Thus you cannot communicate it but only appeal to it by reference to particular cases.

Stripping a word of its context (who and when and where it is uttered, onto which other words it is applied) leaves not a pure concept but only a sequence of letters.

Words give the hearer an indication of your indicated meaning but they are not the meaning. That is what EY means with

How words [...] are secretly a disguised form of Bayesian inference.

Words make a certain reading more plausible and (hopefully) let your mental representaticonverge locally toward that of the speaker (your brain will update its structures mostly bayesian, but it may fail given noise).

A large vocabulary then is a large set of 'signals' for which both the speaker and the heaer know the concepts signalled.

Because words are also used internally by conscious thought they can also be used to signal to yourself and thus a large vocabulary can be conducive to efficient reasoning.

Because private and public use of the vocabulary are often mixed one should reflect on what the other really knows.

For more on this see http://lesswrong.com/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/ and http://lesswrong.com/lw/kg/expecting_short_inferential_distances/ .

It's not particularly useful to have a big vocabulary - it's actually often counterproductive for getting your point understood. That said, it's sometimes useful to substitute words to prevent using a single word for multiple distinct meanings.

Your vocabulary literally changes the universe.

''Perhaps the most different counting system from that of modern Western civilisation is the “one-two-many” system used by the Pirahã people. In this system, quantities larger than two are referred to simply as “many”. In larger quantities, “one” can also mean a small amount and “many” a larger amount. Research was conducted in the Pirahã culture using various matching tasks. These are non-linguistic tasks that were analyzed to see if their counting system or more importantly their language affected their cognitive abilities. The results showed that they perform quite differently from, for example, an English speaking person who has a language with words for numbers more than two. For example, they were able to represent numbers 1 and 2 accurately using their fingers but as the quantities grew larger (up to 10), their accuracy diminished. This phenomenon is also called the “analog estimation”, as numbers get bigger the estimation grows [1] Their declined performance is an example of how a language can affect thought and great evidence to support the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

Orientation

Language also seems to shape how people from different cultures orient themselves in space. For instance, people from an Aboriginal community called Pormpuraaw define space relative to the observer. Instead of referring to location in terms like “left”, “right”, “back” and “forward”, most Aboriginal groups, such as the Kuuk Thaayorre, use cardinal-direction terms – north, south, east and west. For example, speakers from such cultures would say “There is a spider on your northeast leg” or “Pass the ball to the south southwest”. In fact, instead of “hello”, the greeting in such cultures is “Where are you going?” and sometimes even “Where are you coming from?” Such greeting would be followed by a directional answer “To the northeast in the middle distance”. The consequence of using such language is that the speakers need to be constantly oriented in space, or they would not be able to express themselves properly, or even get past a greeting. Speakers of such languages that rely on absolute reference frames have a much greater navigational ability and spatial knowledge compared to speakers of languages that use relative reference frames (such as English). In comparison with English users, speakers of languages such as Kuuk Thaayorre are also much better at staying oriented even in unfamiliar spaces – and it is in fact their language that enables them to do this.[2]''