It can be too slow to catch up to rapid change, but then in that case one of the things you want is a diversity of cultures for selection to act on.
Is this the problem that you are trying to solve by preserving cultures? Make the human race as a whole more resilient in the face of rapid change?
Is this really the reason why you think culture is important? Or is it a rationalization?
I am skeptical for two reasons:
In those words it sounds like a bad thing, but look past the words and is it, really?
In my opinion, yes. That is why I posted the question.
Why is culture so important, again?
I agree that the utility of preserving endangered languages is greater than zero. But how much greater.
These alternative ways of conceptualizing... how useful are they? What can we achieve with them? As far as I can tell, they are fun and interesting, but insignificant compared to other problems we can help solve.
Preservation of endangered languages involves raising children bilingually in the majority and endangered language...
Generally speaking, endangered languages are from a cultural minority and members of that minority culture enjoy being able to speak that language.
If the minority cultures can fix the problem themselves by teaching their children, great! Far be it from me to stop them from that. And of course the dominant cultures should not actively oppress minority languages.
But when outsiders are expected to put in extra effort to preserve minority languages - that is when I balk.
Imagine if english went extinct. In a sense, we'd lose Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Steinbeck. ... These "endangered" languages had culture too - songs and stories, maybe books and plays. That's important.
Important, sure. But other things are much more important, such as eradicating diseases and getting people basic education and preserving the environment.
If I had the choice between saving just one (decent quality) human life and keeping an endangered language alive for another generation, I would sacrifice the language to save the human.
I was talking specifically about childhood language acquisition, where learning a new language doesn't require you to forgo reading tvtropes or watching buffy the vampire slayer, it's just part of your background acquisition the same way that children learn how gravity works and how to manipulate small objects as they grow up.
It maybe easy for the child, but it can take a lot of effort and energy from the parents.
I am the father of a sort-of bilingual child. I am Danish and we live in Denmark, but my wife is Chinese. Our 4-year-old son speaks good Danish, but his Chinese is very weak. My wife tries on-and-off to insist on speaking Chinese to him, but it is a struggle because he does not like it. So it is hard work for her, and she often does not have the energy and falls back to speaking Danish to him.
I speak nary a word Chinese. I could of course study Chinese so I could contribute, but that would be a huge effort.
To me this sound suspiciously like the "Fallacy of Grey".
The Sophisticate: “The world isn’t black and white. No one does pure good or pure bad. It’s all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else.”
The Zetet: “Knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two-color view, yet you replace it with a one-color view . . .”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray
Is there any place in your sequence where you define what you mean by God? I have tried to read closely every time you mention the term, and I still do not understand what the term is supposed to refer to.
But my vague sense is that people mostly want frisbee and tea. I guess this isn't that surprising either, there's some kind of horror that's related to a nerd staring at the media that is actually popular and realizing "it's not bad [by nerd standards] by mistake. The people really did want Transformers 3."
I did not understand this. Could I get you to please explain it again?
(It is worth noting that I am a nerd who enjoyed Transformers 3...)
This is a valid point. But the world is far from a monoculture. Even if all currently endangered languages die out, we will have plenty of cultures left.
If the world ends up with less than, say, 100 languages, then I agree it starts to make sense to preserve them. As it stands now, I think we have more than enough cultural diversity, and keeping tiny minority languages and cultures alive is not worth the opportunity cost.