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Amanojack comments on The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You - Less Wrong
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As a child you learned through social cues to immediately put out of your mind any idea that cannot be communicated to others through words. As you grew older, you learned to automatically avoid, discard, and forget any thought avenues that seem too difficult to express in words. This is the cause of most of your problems.
That would explain why the autism spectrum holds so many savants.
That one's been tested... and proven false. (Unless all the evidence against it is a hallucination.)
Actually, while sufficiently strong versions of the Sapir--Whorf hypothesis have been ruled out, sufficiently weak versions have been confirmed. (They tried to teach the Pirahã to count and failed, IIRC.)
That's not a sufficiently weak version. To me this claim looks like the conjunction of:
The strongest formulation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (disproven)
That people have an aversion to thoughts that could lead to things not expressible in words
That this is not an innate property of language use, but is caused by social pressure
The last one seems almost plausible (autistics are more likely to have thoughts they can't express verbally and to ignore social cues-- is it correlated in the general population, or do those just happen to be the result of autism?), but in that case is only true for specific readers.
As far as I know (and the last that I checked), there's only been one study done on trying to teach the Pirahã to count. Have there been others, or was it just a fluke?
You know, at first I just totally rejected any strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but then it got me thinking. It may actually be true to varying extent for many people. Not to such extreme extent perhaps, but to the extent that people don't learn a thought structure beyond that provided by the language.