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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong
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-- TVTropes
Edit (1/7): I have no particular reason to believe that this is literally true, but either way I think it holds an interesting rationality lesson. Feel free to substitute 'Zorblaxia' for 'Japan' above.
Interesting; is this true?
Yes, my Japanese teacher was very insistent about it, and IIRC would even take points off for talking about someones mental state with out the proper qualifiers.
I think you're missing a word here :P
Fixed.
This is good to know, and makes me wonder whether there's a way to encourage this kind of thinking in other populations. My only thought so far has been "get yourself involved with the production of the most widely-used primary school language textbooks in your area."
Thoughts?
It's not necessarily an advantageous habit. If a person tells you they like ice cream, and you've seen them eating ice cream regularly with every sign of enjoyment, you have as much evidence that they like ice cream as you have about countless other things that nobody bothers hanging qualifiers on even in Japanese. The sciences are full of things we can't experience directly but can still establish with high confidence.
Rather than teaching people to privilege other people's mental states as an unknowable quality, I think it makes more sense to encourage people to be aware of their degrees of certainty.
Increased awareness of degrees of certainty is more or less what I was thinking of encouraging. It hadn't occurred to me to look for a deeper motive and try to address it directly. This was helpful, thank you.
You can look at this way of thinking as a social convention. Japanese people often care about signaling respect with language. Someone who direct speaks about the mental state of another can be seen as presumtious.
High status people in any social circle can influence it's social customs. If people get put down for guessing other other's mental states wrong without using qualifiers they are likely to use qualifiers the next time.
If you actually want to do this, E-Prime is an interesting. E-Prime calls for tabooing to be.
I meet a few people in NLP circles that valued to communicate in E-Prime.
Specific source: Useful Notes: Japanese Language on TV Tropes
TV Tropes is unreliable on Japanese culture. While it's fond of Japanese media, connection demographics show that Japanese editors are disproportionately rare (even after taking the language barrier into account); almost all the contributors to a page like that are likely to be language students or English-speaking Japanophiles, few of whom have any substantial experience with the language or culture in the wild. This introduces quite a bit of noise; for example, the site's had problems in the past with people reading meanings into Japanese words that don't exist or that are much more specific than they are in the wild.
I don't know myself whether the ancestor is accurate, but it'd be wise to take it with a grain of salt.
I have to say that's fairly stupid (I'm talking about the claim which the quote is making and generalizing over a whole population; I am not doing argumentum ad hominem here).
I've seen many sorts of (fascinated) mythical claims on how the Japanese think/communicate/have sex/you name it differently and they're all ... well, purely mythical. Even if I, for the purposes of this argument, assume that beoShaffer is right about his/her Japanese teacher (and not just imagining or bending traits into supporting his/her pre-defined belief), it's meaningless and does not validate the above claim. Just for the sake of illustration, the simplest explanation for such usages is some linguistic convention (which actually makes sense, since the page from which the quote is sourced is substantially talking about the Japanese Language).
Unless someone has some solid proof that it's actually related to thinking rather than some other social/linguistic convention, this is meaningless (and stupid).
Agreed. Pop-whorfianism is usually silly.
I'm not familiar with this term and your link did not clarify as much as I had hoped. Could you give a clearer definition?
Just-so stories about the relationships between language and culture. (The worst thing is that, while just-so stories about evolutionary psychology are generally immediately identified as sexist/classist/*ist drivel, just-so stories about language tend to be taken seriously no matter how ludicrous they are.)
Well, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea that language shapes thought and/or culture, and Whorfianism is any school of thought based on this hypothesis. I assume pop-Whorfianism is just Whorfian speculation by people who aren't qualified in the field (and who tend to assume that the language/culture relationship is far more deterministic than it actually is).
Thanks.
I don't care whether it's actually true or not; either way it still holds an interesting rationality lesson and that's why I posted it.
With all respect that I'm generically required to give, I don't care whether you care or not. The argument I made was handling what you posted/quoted, neither you as a person nor your motives to posting.
Have you considered replacing it with "[country]" or similar, then noting at the bottom what page it came from?
I added a link, but I would prefer to suggest a fake name over a generic name.