simplicio comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: katydee 02 January 2013 05:23PM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 03 January 2013 08:49:14AM *  34 points [-]

In Japan, it is widely believed that you don't have direct knowledge of what other people are really thinking (and it's very presumptuous to assume otherwise), and so it is uncommon to describe other people's thoughts directly, such as "He likes ice cream" or "She's angry". Instead, it's far more common to see things like "I heard that he likes ice cream" or "It seems like/It appears to be the case that she is angry" or "She is showing signs of wanting to go to the park."

-- 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.

Comment author: simplicio 03 January 2013 03:44:34PM 13 points [-]

Interesting; is this true?

Comment author: beoShaffer 04 January 2013 05:59:36AM *  13 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Vaniver 05 January 2013 08:13:00PM 2 points [-]

Yes, my Japanese was very insistent about it

I think you're missing a word here :P

Comment author: beoShaffer 05 January 2013 08:23:57PM 1 point [-]

Fixed.

Comment author: Toddling 04 January 2013 06:06:42AM 2 points [-]

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?

Comment author: Desrtopa 07 January 2013 03:55:44PM 11 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Toddling 08 January 2013 03:15:57AM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: ChristianKl 07 January 2013 05:08:34PM 3 points [-]

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.

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