On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 7:59 PM, Kirk Fraser <overcomer....@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was pointing out that innovation for its own sake is worthless then was > agreeing with the view that not all the world's inventions come from people > who think in English yet pointing out communicating in English is best for > world wide distribution. I don't really know how many Jews who won Nobel > Prizes thought in Hebrew, English, or even Russian. But it is as you wrote > possible that Hebrew is more efficient. No, it's not. Whorfianism has been all but refuted. The only area in which the idea hold water, quite ironically, is formal/computer/programming languages (or so Paul Graham says, but he's right, as far as I can tell). Something about their culture tends to be productive compared to others. > Perhaps it's their orientation toward God, which is defined as absolute > spiritual perfection. That in itself would tend to produce more efficient > thought. > They've been oppressed by intellectually impoverished Christians for two millennia, denied the right to work in the fields of agriculture and crafts, and were forced to work in knowledge oriented professions such as medicine or finances. Of course that this nurtures a specific culture, and with the (most likely involuntary) need to become as indispensable for others as possible in over to avoid getting killed by hilt-happy Easter celebrators, they were virtually forced into what is usually referred to as overachievement (although here I have to admit, despite my former point, that you English people have the weirdest notions in your language). English has a property that unfortunately allows it to be redefined with > liberal definitions which are inefficient. > ^^^ This is a thoroughly nonsensical and meaningless statement. > Computers need smarter software to exceed the performance of Watson and > OpenCyc to create worthwhile innovations automatically. I think working to > automate Bible analysis is an efficient way to produce smarter software. > But based the failures of automatic translators, computers may be slow to > think flawlessly. > Again, you're completely ignoring the actual nature of speech, demonstrated in such phenomena as the existence of idiolects, referential indeterminacy, diachronic shifts etc. Language is what it is because there's a common sense component to its processing in our brains, and once you have that, you've successfully replicated a human being in silicon. Until that happens, all bets are off. (I'm tempted to wager that the inverse also holds, has_human_intelligence(X) :- understands_language(X). Although the fact that an average human being picked from your general population often fails at simple logical reasoning sort of suggests that the intelligence is of a slightly different kind that what we usually mean by saying "he's intelligent"/"he's a genius".) - Gath
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