Comment by bkolobara
7 hours ago
There is a lot of research on how words/language influences what we think, and even what we can observe, like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors.
I have a suspicion that extensive use of LLMs can result in damage to your brain. That's why we are seeing so many mental health issues surfacing up, and we are getting a bunch of blog posts about "an agentic coding psychosis".
It could be that llms go from bicycles for the brain to smoking for the brain, once we figure out the long term effects of it.
> If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors.
That is quite untrue. It is true that people may be slightly slower or less accurate in distinguishing colors that are within a labeled category than those that cross a category boundary, but that's far from saying they can't perceive the difference at all. The latter would imply that, for instance, English speakers cannot distinguish shades of blue or green.
The point I was trying to make is that the way our brain works is deeply connected to language and words, including how fast and how accurate you perceive colors [0][1]. And interacting with an LLM could have unexpected side effects on it, because we were never before exposed to "statistically generated language" in such amounts.
[0]: https://youtu.be/RKK7wGAYP6k?si=GK6VPP0yoFoGyOn3 [1]: https://youtu.be/I64RtGofPW8?si=v1FNU06rb5mMYRKj&t=889
> If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors.
Perhaps you mean to say that speakers are unable to name the difference between the colours?
I can easily see differences between (for example) different shades of red. But I can't name them other than "shade of red".
I do happen to subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in the sense that I think the language you think in constrains your thoughts - but I don't think it is strong enough to prevent you from being able to see different colours.
No, if you show them two colors and ask them if they are different, they will tell you no.
EDIT: I have been searching for the source of where I saw this, but can't find it now :(
EDIT2: I found a talk touching in the topic with a study: https://youtu.be/I64RtGofPW8?si=v1FNU06rb5mMYRKj&t=889
> if you show them two colors and ask them if they are different, they will tell you no
The experiments I've seen seem to interrogate what the culture means by colour (versus shade, et cetera) more than what the person is seeing.
If you show me sky blue and Navy blue and ask me if they're the same colour, I'll say yes. If you ask someone in a different context if Russian violet and Midnight blue are the same colour, I could see them saying yes, too. That doesn't mean they literally can't see the difference. Just that their ontology maps the words blue and violet to sets of colours differently.
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You're probably thinking of the Himba tribe color experiment - which as it turns out, was mostly fabricated by a BBC documentary:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970
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The ability for us to look at a gradient of color and differentiate between shades even without distinct names for them seems to disprove this on its face.
Unless the question is literally the equivalent of someone showing you a swatch of crimson and a swatch of scarlet and being asked if both are red, in which case, well yeah sure.
But the color thing is self-evidently untrue. It’s not even hard to talk about. Unless you yourself are colorblind I think that would be obvious?
Sort of, at least some degree of relativism exists though how much is debated. Would you ever talk about sea having the same color as wine? But that's exactly what Homer called it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...