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bbleeker comments on Rationality Quotes February 2013 - Less Wrong
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Three things, in no particular order:
I seem to recall that, in some obscure language, each noun has an agency level and in a sentence the most agenty noun is the subject by default, unless the verb is specially inflected to show otherwise: for example, “[dog] [bite] [man]” would mean ‘a man bit a dog’, regardless of word order, because the noun “[man]” has higher agency than “[dog]”.
Would you sooner see a tiger chasing a man, or a man running away from a tiger? If the former, it's not just the fact that butterflies are not human, it's the fact that the butterflies are small.
I think that, at least in the case of the lion, it would also depend on whether the two of them are moving towards the left side or the right side of my visual field. I heard that in The Great Wave off Kanagawa the boats are intended to look more agenty than the wave, but for Western people it will typically look like the other way round (due to Western languages being written from left to right), and for a Westerner to get the right effect they'd have to look at the picture in a mirror. (It works for me, at least.)
Huh, I just tried that, and it works for me too. When you mirror it, it looks like they're going into the wave instead of fleeing from it. The effect is really strong; I wondered if it would still work when I knew about it, but it does.
BTW, does anyone get different effects from the emoticons :-/ and :-\ or it's just me?
V erpragyl qvfpbirerq gung, juvyr gurl fhccbfrq gb or flabalzbhf (ba Snprobbx gurl eraqre gb gur fnzr cvp), gb zr gur sbezre srryf zber yvxr “crecyrkvgl, pbashfvba” (naq gung'f ubj V trarenyyl hfr vg), jurernf gur ynggre srryf zber yvxr “qvfnccebiny” (naq V bayl fnj gung orpnhfr zl cubar unf :-\ ohg abg :-/ nzbat gur cer-pbzcbfrq rzbgvpbaf, fb V cvpxrq gur sbezre ohg vg qvqa'g ybbx evtug gb zr).
[Edited to move the question to the front and rot-13 the rest as per Nesov's suggestion.]
You shouldn't prime the audience before asking a question like that.
Good point. Fixed.
For me, the default orientation of the picture makes it seem like the boats are moving into it, while the flipped version makes it seem like the wave is agent-ly 'attacking' the boats. The difference in agentiness is more pronounced in the flipped version, though. (I'm Asian-American.)
Did you grow up in America? Would this be consistent with a genetic basis, or have you been exposed to RTL language previously?
Born and raised in the US, so English is my primary language. I had some long-term exposure to Chinese growing up as a kid (generally written up-to-down then right-to-left in our workbooks). Speaking and understanding (rudimentary) Chinese has stuck with me; the writing and reading of, has not.
Interesting. In the normal version, it looks to me like the waves are lifting the boats, and mirror-reversed it looks like the boats are driving against it.
Actually, my normal way to look at it is to focus on the wave, then the mountain, and scarcely notice the boats.
On my first look at the mirror version, the wave looked like a giant claw attacking the mountain.
Yeah, I spent a while looking for the boats in the image... I thought one of them was a beach. I think the question of which is more "agenty" was contaminated for me, though, since I read the comments before following the link to look at the image. I can make myself see either the wave as 'chasing' the boats, or the boats as fleeing the wave, or the boats sailing into the wave...