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Gabriel comments on The Future of Education - Less Wrong
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Learning 4 other languages is perhaps excessive, but I'd think it would be a good idea for everyone to learn at least one other language well enough to be able to think in it without too much trouble, preferably one that carves concept space up very differently from your native language. Otherwise it's too easy to make mistakes like confusing incidental groupings in your language with natural categories. Of course it could be a language optimized for easy learning instead of a natural language, let alone multiple romance languages.
I'm quite sure that explicitly learning the relevant knowledge about the process of category formation in humans and its implications towards accurate thinking would take a lot less time and be more effective than learning another language. I don't think that learning languages is an optimal method to gain any ability other than actually understanding and speaking them (and even that, in the world of the future, might be better accomplished by buying a good translation program).
That's like arguing that learning anatomy will do more to keep you fit then doing sports.
More like saying that if your goal is muscle mass it's better to hit the gym than to take up figure skating.
More effective than just learning another language chosen at random and never giving the differences much thought, sure. But I'd guess a combination would be considerably more effective than either. Most people don't learn well without examples (and intuitively understood real world examples would be a lot better than abstract theoretical examples), and I don't think most people are good enough at divorcing themselves from their perspective without the extra help of a different point of view.
Maybe I misunderstand you, but if you genuinely believe translations that allow as good an understanding of the original as a close to native level understanding of the language are possible (at similar message length) in all or even most cases you don't understand how much language constrains you.
Well, it seems like a case of clashing intuitions. Learning another language might give some cognitive benefits and it will provide real-world examples of language not being a perfect representation of reality, but I think those benefits will be weak and not worth the effort. And I'm very doubtful of the idea that there are some general insights that can be acquired only through language-learning.
And on the second point: I don't believe that perfect translations are possible. By mentioning the possibility of future translation software, I wanted to point out the fact that the author of quoted article kind of ignores technological progress (well, except that the future will be full of iPads and they shall be rollable!). And perfect translations are unnecessary for the purpose of practical communication anyway (and hey, if I'm speculating about the awesomeness of future AI, I might as well postulate that the translators will be smart enough to alert you whenever a possible linguistic confusion comes up).