I apologize for poor conversational form.
Let me try again, hopefully more nicely: You made a very strong claim with very weak evidence.
You claimed our thoughts were fundamentally affected by our language, and that someone can control how people think by tweaking the language. Your evidence was your own sense (not a paper, not even a survey) that people think differently when writing in a different programming language.
If you have more evidence, I would really like to see it, I am not just saying that to score points or to make you angry.
Your evidence was your own sense (not a paper, not even a survey) that people think differently when writing in a different programming language.
I refer not to my own sense so much as what is more or less universally acknowledged by influential thinkers in that field. That doesn't preclude the culture being wrong, but I do put Paul Graham on approximately the same level as Pinker, for example.
While Pinker is an extremely good populariser and writes some engaging accounts that are based off real science, I've actually been bitten by taking his word on fa...
This is our monthly thread for collecting these little gems and pearls of wisdom, rationality-related quotes you've seen recently, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages, and which might be handy to link to in one of our discussions.