random bits

Three random observations, probably not terribly original or accurate, just to get them out of my head and to get corrections if they are wrong. Please imagine them prefixed with the mandatory "in my opinion":

1. Media

The media mostly overreacts/overestimates natural events (volcanos, earthquakes etc.) and mostly underreacts/underestimates human crowd events (riots, revolutions, wars etc.).

In case of the former, the media always starts with the worst-case scenario. In hindsight the effects usually turn out to be shorter-lasting and less far-reaching than anticipated. In case of the latter the events often spiral out of control in ways unforseen in the beginning of the narration. I'd love to be disproved, this is a half-baked hypothesis.

If there is some grain of truth in it, the cause could be that human events have many feedback loops, where coverage helps escalate the event, whereas natural phenomena couldn't care less about our news coverage. If anything, the media attention motivates people to stand stronger against the adversity, which further diminishes negative effects.

2. Language

A common dialogue goes like this:

Alice: The world would be so much better if we would all speak the same language.
Bob: No, it would be a much worse place, because ....

What Alice means is that if we would all speak the same language, we could get our points across more easily and without less chance for misunderstanding. Also there would be less chance for discriminating people (at least based on the language they speak, people were always creative in finding other reasons).

I am trying to articulate Bob's point here, to which I subscribe. There is the sentimental value/accumulated wisdom argument, namely that languages carry lots of both and are worth preserving for that reason only. I'm not talking about any of that, even though they are important. There is the biodiversity argument, which says that like biological diversity, linguistic diversity has (at least) three functions:

- hereditary: today's languages are the only living witnesses of societies long gone. Through their study we can infer things about history, as well as about the development of languages, just as by studying rare species we infer things about evolution and evolutionary history. Once they are gone, the opportunity is lost.
- functional: robustness through redundancy
- indicatory: the level of civility and harmoniousness of a society or any group of people can be well characterized by the diversity of cultures, customs, languages tolerated within it and the sustainability of preserving this diversity (just as biological diversity of an ecosystem is an indicator of its "health". Contrast rainforests with monoculture crop fields). In the remarkable words from the "dark" middle ages: "a country using only one language and having only one custom is weak and frail."

While I agree with all this, I'd like to put forward another argument. If languages are only the medium for transmitting ideas and if thought exists in our brains without language, "in the void", I'd agree that we don't need more than one language any more than we need multiple competing standards for network communication. A total nuisance.

However, if language is intertwined with thought in our minds, if we can think only using language and if learning a language has some effect on the way we think and on the way our brain wires itself as we grow up, furthermore if languages are different and no language is as expressive as the sum of all languages, and if languages are tradeoffs and what one language can more easily express, the other will do more clumsily and vice versa (a lot of IFs, I know), then a reduction in number of languages spoken worldwide will lead to a reduction in the range of original ideas that people can come up with. We will communicate more easily but we will have less interesting things to say to each other.

If all of this is true, then being native speaker of one language instead of the other could give you a small advantage even when thinking about something as abstract as a math problem. There could be 99% overlap between languages, but if a different language gives someone even a 1% edge on that problem, that diversity is still worth cultivating.

In this second world-view languages (as they help us form thoughts) are similar to painting techniques: you could paint in oil, watercolor, draw with pencil, charcoal, etc. but the choice of technique has some effect on what you can represent. If everyone agreed to use the same technique, the range of artistic expression in painting would be reduced.


3. Naming

"democratic republic of ..."
"people's republic of ..."(insert favorite non-democratic, authoritarian dictatorship here)
the orwellian "ministry of truth",
we all know the worst offenders. Some have even claimed that if something has an adjective in its name, than it is almost always the opposite.
But what about less obvious examples, like "center of excellence". Is the name given for past accomplishments or does it give premature credit for future results? By forcing others to call us with this name, aren't we asking too much? Wouldn't it be cynical to brand a shoe as "Good Shoe", and have people call it that way even if it broke or if it was of bad quality?

Anyway, examples like these abound. What I try to say is just that even saying the name of something is not nearly as neutral as we often assume. We could be tricked into endorsing something that we don't want to by those who picked the name. Or as the ancient Chinese said (?) :"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names."