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. 

There's plenty of research showing that bilingual children have some small advantages, e.g.: https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/advantages_of_a_bilingual_brain 

Then there's the cultural value of language that I raised in my previous post, especially for minority cultures (and you state that things from your culture like Buffy and TVTropes are valuable to you). I'm assuming you're from an English-dominant culture. Can you imagine if you moved to, say, Portugal, and you learned Portugese and all your friends and family spoke Portugese all the time, you might feel as though something was lacking if they watched Buffy episodes that had been dubbed into Portugese? 

Generally speaking, people who speak endangered languages also speak the majority language - otherwise it wouldn't be endangered. Preservation of endangered languages involves raising children bilingually in the majority and endangered language. Being bilingual has been linked with a lot of benefits, and the only downside is that it slightly slows initial language acquisition (but children quickly catch up).

Generally speaking, endangered languages are from a cultural minority and members of that minority culture enjoy being able to speak that language. I went on a date with an Australian man who was half belgian half japanese and he said that he wishes his parents had taught him either language, instead he just speaks english. 

Our local (australian) Indigenous language is called Noongar and is undergoing revitalisation. By all accounts, the Noongar people benefit from this socially, and the language itself has information and culture.

Imagine if english went extinct. In a sense, we'd lose Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Steinbeck. They can be translated into other languages (and, well, Chaucer has to be translated to be understood). But, to my mind, something valuable is lost if culture is lost. These "endangered" languages had culture too - songs and stories, maybe books and plays. That's important.

I get the feeling that a lot of people in the rationalsphere think that if something won't help us invent friendly AI or space travel it's pointless. Culture's important. Lesswrong has culture (HPMOR, the sequences, etc). 

Thanks, you're right. 

It's a real horses / zebra kind of thing, though.

The situation: a hiker goes missing in an area where hikers are known to go missing (and, sadly, die).

The problem: eyewitnesses report the hiker's truck being in one direction, then not present at all, then in another direction.

Solution 1: eyewitnesses were mistaken about whether they saw the car / what direction it was facing

Solution 2: someone stole the car, took it away for a bit, and then returned it to the trailhead

Occam's razor requires only one additional assumption for solution 1 (eyewitnesses sometimes/often make mistakes, which is well-known, especially about something as banal about an ordinary car), whereas solution 2 requires us to postulate an entire person (or persons?) who had a motivation to take and then return the car (what? any motivation - e.g. maybe Bill was involved in the drug trade - adds more assumptions).

Let me posit Solution 3: the ranger deliberately recorded his information wrong because he didn't want to be in trouble for not sounding the alarm about a missing hiker.

or Solution 4: the park management/police colluded together to falsify the witness reports to provide doubt to Bill dying hiking to try and reduce the number of deaths attributable to JTNP

Both Solution 3 and Solution 4 seem far less fanciful than Solution 2. Sure, Solution 5 ("Aliens!") would be more fantastical than the u-haul one, but just because the Solution 2 doesn't rely on us changing our understanding of our place in the world doesn't mean it's valuable to think about.

If Bill's body had been discovered buried in the back yard of some drug lord, then sure, Solution 2 all of a sudden looks good. But the situation presented (missing hiker in a place where hikers have been known to get lost and die) does not require that level of attention.

I don't deny Adam contributed more to the case than almost anyone out  there, but the u-haul theory doesn't become valuable just because it was he who postulated it.

For the record I'm the same person who brought it up in 2022 on reddit when he was found and objected to it when you posted the original blog to unresolvedmysteries in 2018, so I think this is a case of one particularly annoying person who follows you around chanting "U-Haul! U-Haul!" :)

Thank you for all your hard work on the case, I actually had no idea you were the same Adam on the search and the blog.

Thank you for posting this. I'd been following the Bill Ewasko story and Tom Mahood's blog for years so it's interesting to see it posted here.

I think the "Death Valley Germans" is another very good series of articles from the same blog, with a much more conclusive (but equally sad) ending.

What strikes me is before 2022 there were a lot of people posting theories, and there was one person who posted to /r/unresolvedmysteries that the discrepency between the reports of whether and how Bill's truck was parked could be explained by... someone putting it into a U-Haul, taking it away, and then returning it(!).  Source: https://ijustdisappear.com/wp/2018/05/22/unsolved-mysteries/

I don't know if you've seen this, but I feel it'd be right up your alley. It's the story of a war between a human who knows how to weld and a cat who wants to thwart their automatic feeder.

https://blondihacks.com/furiosas-cat-feeder/

I think I'm making a distinction between using it colloquially (i.e. I can say that my uncle is tall, which can be true, but it doesn't tell you much about my uncle's actual height) and using it with the rigor that Bezzi implied (i.e. "has someone studied this clear category of cautious drivers"?)

Then again, my example here seems to have failed because people do study tallness: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000291499390523F , but they crucially define tallness as above the 95th percentile. Other studies I'm glanced at use height as a continuous variable, so who the heck knows.