Today my coworker Marcello pointed out to me an interesting anti-majoritarian effect. There are three major interpretations of probability: the "subjective" view of probabilities as measuring the uncertainty of agents, the "propensity" view of probabilities as chances inherent within objects, and the "frequentist" view of probabilities as the limiting value of long-run frequencies. I was remarking on how odd it was that frequentism, the predominant view in mainstream statistics, is the worst of the three major alternatives (in my view, you have to presume either uncertainty or propensity in order to talk about the limiting frequency of events that have not yet happened).
And Marcello said something along the lines of, "Well, of course. If anything were worse than frequentism, it wouldn't be there." I said, "What?" And Marcello said, "Like the saying that Mac users have, 'If Macs really were worse than Windows PCs, no one would use them.'"
At this point the light bulb went on over my head - a fluorescent light bulb - and I understood what Marcello was saying: an alternative to frequentism that was even worse than frequentism would have dropped off the radar screens long ago. You can survive by being popular, or by being superior, but alternatives that are neither popular nor superior quickly go extinct.
I can personally testify that Dvorak seems to be much easier on the fingers than Qwerty - but this is not surprising, since if Dvorak really were inferior to Qwerty, it would soon cease to exist. (Yes, I am familiar with the controversy in this area - bear in mind that this is a politically charged topic since it has been used to make accusations of market failure. Nonetheless, my fingers now sweat less, my hands feel less tired, my carpal tunnel syndrome went away, and none of this is surprising because I can feel my fingers traveling shorter distances.)
In any case where you've got (1) a popularity effect (it's easier to use something other people are using) and (2) a most dominant alternative, plus a few smaller niche alternatives, then the most dominant alternative will probably be the worst of the lot - or at least strictly superior to none of the others.
Can anyone else think of examples from their experience where there are several major alternatives that you've heard of, and a popularity effect (which may be as simple as journal editors preferring well-known usages), and the most popular alternative seems to be noticeably the worst?
Addendum: Metahacker said of this hypothesis, "It's wrong, but only sometimes." Sounds about right to me.
I'm told that English is very easy to learn well enough to be functional, compared to other languages. You're pretty much good to go if you just
You won't be perfectly grammatical, but you will generally be understandable if you, for example, pluralize every noun by adding -s. There's little need to fuss with irregular conjugation rules, and no grammatical gender. English might (?) be harder to speak flawlessly than many other languages are, but it isn't necessary to master these nuances to make yourself understood in a wide variety of contexts. The distance from zero to functional is smaller than it is for other languages.
At least, I have been told this by several people who learned English as a second language.
(I'm a native Italian speaker with very fluent English and a smattering of Spanish and Irish; I studied French and Latin in high school but I've since forgotten most of them.)
Well, grammar-wise English is way easier than most other European languages (though way harder than creoles, Indonesian, or engineered languages), but the phonology is not that simple even by central/northern European standards (let alone by southern European or Asian standards), and the spelling-to-pronunciation “rules” are about as bad as they could be. (As a result, it's much easie... (read more)