Comment by atum47
1 year ago
This reminded me of a story my professor once told us back in college. I was studying sign language and she is deaf. She told us growing up in the old days they didn't had specialized schools for deaf people (since they could read?!) so she attended regular school and was not doing ok. She struggled a lot until she finally got the attention that she needed from a teacher who was able to instruct her in sign language (which believe you or not is Brazil's second official language). Before that she told us she was not able to have complex thoughts. She didn't know her father had a name, for instance. She thought his "name" was daddy. She is a brilliant woman and I'm glad I attended her class and also, that she was able to find someone who helped her, growing up.
James Gleick in The Information also describes cases of the effect of traditional literacy on complexity/abstraction of thought.
He claims that literacy is nearly a prerequisite for things like zeroth-order logical reasoning and understanding of abstract shapes. Two examples he gives:
- Some illiterate people are told that all bears in the north are white, that Greenland is a country in the north, then they are asked what colours bears in Greenland have. They answer, "Different regions have differently coloured bears. I haven't been to Greenland. But I have seen a brown bear."
I would have said, "Based on the information you gave me, I would guess white."
- When shown a rectangle and asked what shape it is some illiterate answer things like "a door" or "a playing card" but struggle to find things doors and playing cards have in common.
I go to the abstract shapes immediately when I'm shown drawings by my son. It's almost at a point where it feels like my logical/abstract reasoning stands in the way of creativity.
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But I don't know how much this is personality (I happen to have a knack for logical/abstract reasoning and I happened to learn to read when I was very young) and how much is an effect of reading. After all, anthropologists are great at the concrete rather than abstract, but maybe they get lots of training in it. I've also heard the Japanese are better at it.
TFA clearly postulates it has more to do with the kind of vocabulary, or maybe it's on an increasing scale with more language.
This makes me wonder about what turned out to be a pivotal moment in my early life. It was the day I first realized other people have their own minds, and that I could predict with some degree of accuracy what was in them.
My dad wrote the numbers 1 through 4 on a piece of paper, then asked me to pick one, but not tell him which I'd chosen. Once I had it, he said, "You picked 3, didn't you?" I was dumbfounded. "How did you do that??"
"Most people don't like to be out on the edges. It makes them uncomfortable. So they don't pick 1 or 4. And most people, like you, are right-handed, so they pick 3 over 2."
"OK, OK, do it again." (This was the moment a flash of magic happened in my head.)
"You picked 1 this time, didn't you?"
"No, I picked 3 again because I knew you would think I would pick 1 this time."
With a fear in his eyes that I only later discovered came from the fact that his own sense of safety depended on being the smartest person in the room, he said, "You're only 3. I don't think you're supposed to know how to do that yet."
But here's the other thing--I was literate when I was 3. Nobody really knows how I picked it up, but one day I told my mom it was my turn to read the stories, and I've been reading fluently ever since. I've been told I read differently than most people even now (blocks of text rather than individual letters or words), but I was definitely reading.
I've never associated the two events before, nor that maybe I was only able to do one because of the other, but it makes sense of the fact that other kids didn't really start to seem reasonable or thoughtful until 1st or 2nd grade. They lived in these imaginary worlds where things didn't have to make sense. It seemed like a lot of fun, but I had trouble joining them there. I always assumed both skills just correlated with age, not that one might facilitate the other.
My story obviously doesn't prove anything, but you've given me an interesting thing to think about today!
This is called theory of mind and I've been experimenting on my first child as he has grown up and he had it much earlier than research would suggest. (I even tried replicating one of the actual experiments used.)
I suspect there's large individual variation as to when it is acquited. My son is relatively socially competent and intetested in letters and numbers but not yet literate at four.
We'll see how my second child fares -- she is even more socially competent but does not yet speak (first child did her age) so we'll see when it can be done.
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> I told my mom it was my turn to read the stories
My son did the same thing at 3. I tested whether he was really reading by turning the pages wrong, and he recited the story just like we read it every night... not reading the actual pages in front of him. He really thought he could read, but he had just memorized. And he did read quickly after that, but when recalling your own memory of reality from toddlerhood, odds are your memories are not accurate.
I'd be wary about how much of your ego you base on such memories, otherwise you sound similar to how you described your dad - as having a need to be smart.
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"With a fear in his eyes that I only later discovered came from the fact that his own sense of safety depended on being the smartest person in the room, he said, "You're only 3. I don't think you're supposed to know how to do that yet.""
I feel like that episode describes most of common education. In theory outstanding excellence is wanted, in reality often not so much, as this causes problems. Better teach them how to stay in line.
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I have a very similar personal experience. Perchance, are you dyslexic? Part of my applied /intuitive reasoning comes from my inability to perceive direct language but early ability to read based on contextual extraction that applied to problems solving and communication.
The brain is so interesting at what point certain pathways activate. The blocks/shapes of text piece is especially similar to my experience.
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I'm more interested in what the lesson is supposed to be. Any ideas?
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I checked the reference. The "bears story" is based on work done in 1930s.
Psychology, a hundred years later is a shoddy science, despite us having learning quite a lot about how to do decent experiments and field surveys. It's very very difficult to tease out replicable effects in human behavior. I would immediately reject any psychology finding from the 1930s, unless it has been replicated more recently.
Extremely shoddy story. People back in the day (working in agriculture) had to perform tons of complex tasks. Obviously they were able to reason.
It's clearly only someone quite far removed from any kind of practical work who could become convinced people who don't immediately answer the expected answer to test questions have no ability to reason.
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The second one seems odd, or maybe Im misunderstanding. Most children develop the idea of abstract shapes well before they can read.
The correlation may have been on a cultural level, rather than individual. I.e. cultures with a high degree of literacy train their children in logic and abstraction; primarily oral cultures do not.
The hen and the egg problem is obvious here, of course. Does writing lead to logic, or does an emphasis on logic necessitate learning writing? I don't know how this is controlled in the studies Gleick refers to.
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a bit of sidetrack, but i think interesting; there are some people with aphantasia (which is lack of mental imagery), and they seem to be doing fine (Craig Venter is one of those people). On this distinction, what exactly is abstract shape? I can imagine cube quite easily, but tesseract is a lot harder. Would it be helpful not to have this visual preconceptions in the mind?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
No one cannot truly judge the complexity of someone else’s[0] experience unless it is both deconstructed[1] into categories and those categories exactly fit one’s preexisting categories.
In other words, a claim like “literacy is a prerequisite for things like logical reasoning” (or complex thought, or consciousness, etc.) may be:
A) true not as a result of an empirical observation, but in a circular way by definition—as a catch-22 where “if you do not think like we do, you may well not think” is trivially correct from most humans’ perspective, because if you do think but really unlike how they think (you are unable to communicate it using the same vocabulary[2] they use) then from their vantage point there may be no clear difference between you thinking in your own way vs. you acting unpredictably—contributing to it being
B) simply not a useful claim to make: as your experience cannot be completely reduced to categories that exactly match those of some random scientist’s, that scientist can mnever fully judge the complexity of your experience or your capability of abstract thought (of course, they could mistakenly assume they can, by simply presuming their way of thinking to be the true reference point, as they are prone to).
[0] That “someone else” can be yourself in the past, e.g. as a small child before social integration, in which “one” could be the current-you.
[1] That deconstruction is lossy. Your experience is changed as a result, possibly lessened for those aspects of yourself that perceive reality as a whole.
[2] Using any vocabulary (including language) requires deconstruction of experience, by definition.
Thoughtful comments: I have no idea why you are being down-voted.
You can only genuinely belive all this because you lack the capacity for symbolic communication. (you can't process the sound of the word "dog" as refering to the animal) You only learn language as a way to command people, then you call them "autistic" when they interpret what you say according to its symbolic meaning. ("taking things literally")
That's why IQ is a metric that can be improved. It highly correlates with education to a certain point.
the people who study, design, and create IQ tests are not ignorant of what you are suggesting, "the difference between education and intelligence", and if there were any way to "improve" IQ testing, they would incorporate it.
Rather, IQ tests are our very best tools for measuring intelligence, much more reliable than any other assessment, and most of the criticism of IQ comes from people who don't like the results.
There are no shor
> Some illiterate people are told that all bears in the north are white, that Greenland is a country in the north, then they are asked what colours bears in Greenland have. They answer, "Different regions have differently coloured bears. I haven't been to Greenland. But I have seen a brown bear."
I wonder how much the answer would change if you simply said "if all bears in the north..." It's probably not obvious to everyone whether you're setting up a hypothetical or asking a literal question with a false or vague premise (Grizzlies range as far north as the nothern coast of Alaska).
I think James Gleick is missing a lot of context her.
James Flynn[0] also gave a TED talk and mentioned those interviews[1]. Apparently it's based on interviews done by Alexander Luria[2] and he put those in writing in one of his books The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology (Chapter 4[3]).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flynn_(academic)
[1]: https://youtu.be/9vpqilhW9uI?t=354
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Luria
[3]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luria/works/1979/mind/ch04....
This is a correlation, not a causation. "People that struggle with problem solving also struggle with reading" is not the same as "not reading results in poor problem solving". The latter is not even begun to be proven in these case studies.
Could it be that autism is in part the inability to think abstractly around social situations?
So having autism, this doesn't seem right to me. I can think abstract circles around loads of allistic people on the topic of social situations, but that still doesn't really help me be good at social situations unless it's a situation I've had practice in.
This feels approximately the correct shape to me.
I spent the last decade surrounded predominantly by illiterate people. These comments are intriguing, but I don't think the effect is as strong as you make out. I never noticed any real difference in how illiterate people view the world, except that they are generally more prone to believing conspiracy theories.
If you can not read or write, then you do have to find other outlets for your energy. Music plays a bigger role in the lives of illiterates I found. I would say on the whole they would seem more extroverted and social, too.
Consider it's not just literacy - it's literacy and language. Presumably you spent time around people who might not read, but definitely can still talk and hear.
I love that book
It's a bit pop-sciency but I realised how much I had learned from it when I re-read it!
I believed for years that my good friend’s dad’s name was Aba and even called him that once before I realized later that it’s the Hebrew word for father.
I had been having complex thoughts for years at that point so it was a bit embarrassing.
I see that you've been skipping Sunday school...
Not sure that Torah school is on Sunday ...
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Technically 'daddy' is a name. A name is fundamentally just a label that we use to identify other people and objects. Post Malone, your first and last name are part of the universal naming system like the Kilometer, and 'daddy' is a personal system relative to the conscious experience of the user.
People most often can easily can handle that there is a qualitative difference between common and proper name.
"daddy" is a kinship term, or familial title. It's a noun, and a mode of address, but it isn't a name, technically or otherwise. There are a few posts in this very thread about children realizing that "daddy" isn't just their father, but anyone's.
Much like when you refer to a doctor as "doc", or a professor as "professor".
To prove the point, there are people who have more than one person in their lives whom they call "Dad" or whatever variation. Raised by a gay couple, or close enough to a stepfather to think of him in those terms. Most of us only have one "Dad", but this isn't universal, and we all know that everyone has one, whether they refer to him that way, or even know him at all.
Even with sign language and the ability to read, deaf people often have very limited grammar and sometimes outright bad writing style. We rely far more on spoken language then we think. If you take that away, so much practice when it comes to using your native "tongue" is simply not had. A similar effect, although not as pronounced, is with blind people (my tribe) having very bad spelling. The reason for that is blind people seldomly read themseves, they usually employ speech synthesis to have text read to them. However, that also means they basically never see the spelling of uncommon words, so all they can do is guess, which sometimes leads to hilarious results. Since I use braille primarily to access a computer, the effect isn't as pronounced for me. But I noticed early on that I erred a lot when it came to street and city names. Until I realized, well, sighted people do actually read street signs. So after a while, certain spellings just stick. Since I almost never did that... I didn't know, wasn't soaked in the information to pick it up.
Note that for people deaf from birth, their written language is typically their second language, and their mother tongue is sign language
And written language is harder to learn exactly because they can't pronounce words
Yes, I was inaxact, sorry for that. Note that the term "mother" tongue is problematic in this context anyway, as there are many examples of caregivers and school systems not being fluent in sign language. I know a 70-something woman which turned out to have a deaf brother. Observing her while he was around, she didn't sign to him, she simply expected him to read from her lips. Which is very telling. Sign language is considered "their language" from her point of view, and she never aspired to actually learn it. After 50+ years of having a deaf brother... Just a recent anecdote, but still the norm. Deaf people have also been prevented from signing in certain schools. Similar things happened in the early days of Braille. Luis Braille never lived to see his system being used officially. He taught it in secret, as the power that be actually prevented it from being used for many decades. If you look long enough, there is a lot of patrnosation and ignorance in the way disabled people are treated by society, past and present.
I believe that bit about sign language in Brazil. When I spent some time there years back I was impressed that most people seemed to know a bit of sign language. There is also a lot of informal hand gesture-slang culture. I remember some things like "let's go", "robbery/rip off", "it's crowded"
Is the informal gesture slang based on the sign language, or Are they just gestures?
Cause I'm Italian and we have a ton of those but they have nothing to do with the Italian Sign Language (LIS).
I'm curious to see Italian Sign Language now. I bet it's way bigger and more urgent than most.
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Good question. I always assumed they were unrelated to the official sign language but I don't actually know.
I wonder if there are many commonalities between the informal gestures used in Italy and Brazil.
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In my university (public university in Brazil), sign language was an optional class for all majors. It surely must have helped that./