Tag Archives: Learning

The Language Instinct 2 – Steven Pinker

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” – Max Weinreich

Today, just a few choice quotes on language. You can go here for the actual book review.

On Oranges

Orange comes from the Spanish Naranja – originally, the word was norange. Over time, however, ‘a norange’ became ‘an orange’. The same reason is why Ned is a short form of Edward: ‘Mine Edward; became ‘My Nedward’. Or, if you didn’t know why Shakespeare used ‘nuncle’ as an affectionate name, the same reasoning applies – ‘mine uncle’ to ‘my nuncle’.

On Western Languages

The Proto-Indo-Europeans were an ancient group who took over Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Northern India, China, and Western Russia, with a few small exceptions, and are the reason many Western languages seem to have similar words for many nouns: they’re all based on the same root. They’re also the reason English has irregular verbs like shake/shook: in Proto-Indo-European, pluralisation came from changing the vowel in word, not using an s. Based on the enormous area they covered, scientists speculate they represent either an enormous military culture, or the advent of farming, which would have allowed for cultural dominance.

An exception: the Basque Region in Spain, who must have resisted their hegemony somehow and maintained their own language.

On the Passive Case

English teachers always tell us not to use the passive: Pinker fights back. Passive can actually reduce the complexity of sentences, he explains, by reducing how much information you have to hold in memory to understand it.

“Reverse the clamp that the stainless steel hex-head bolt extending upward from the seatpost yoke holds (trace) in place”

“Reverse the clamp that (trace) is held in place by the stainless steel bex-head bolt extending upward from the seatpost yoke.”

The Language Instinct – Steven Pinker

“In our social relations, the race is not to the swift but to the verbal – the spellbinding orator, the silver-tongued seducer, the persuasive child who wins the battle of wills against a brawnier parent.”

I have always assumed that we learn language. Steven Pinker thinks otherwise, and in his book he argues that though we may learn words and the superstructure of an individual language, language in general is something we instinctively do.

Though this is well out of my usual interests, the evidence seems compelling. Children will make consistent errors as they learn languages, errors they cannot have overheard an adult say: “Don’t giggle me” or “we holded the baby rabbits.” Language complexity is universal, Pinker suggests, because children reinvent it every generation. This is why children of parents who speak a language only very poorly, like deaf children whose parents speak very poor sign language, will without further input still end up using advanced and very complex signing rules, ones their parents do not use correctly. They shut out the errors of their parents and develop their own rules.

Languages have far fewer synonyms than we believe: most things we call synonyms actually have slightly different meanings. Children, Pinker points out, intuitively understand this. If you give a child a picture of pewter tongs, call it biff, and ask them to pick out another biff, they’ll pick out plastic tongs: they associate biff with tongs, because they don’t know the word. If you give them a picture of a pewter cup and repeat the process, children will pick out a pewter spoon as being biff. Since they already know the word cup, they assume biff is the material.

Why does it all matter? Pinker worries we tend to undervalue the importance of nature and overvalue the importance of environment in human development. Of course, both matter, and language neatly captures this interaction. Nature provides structure and underlying rules: environment determines which language we learn.

Language is not my area, and I flipped through several chapters that went into the structure of language in detail. That said, Pinker argues frequently for what seems like common sense in language, helping engage those of us who are not experts. He even takes on the language experts and shows that how people intuitively use the language actually makes more sense than the so-called rules, or how the rules are actually misinterpretations of the language. Everpresent, too, is Pinker’s vast knowledge and love of digressions: frustrating if you wish to write a paper, I suppose, but great fun for the casual reader. I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I liked his Better Angels, but I learned a lot and it was certainly worth the read.

Want more? You can pick up a copy of the Language Instinct here (or in the UK or Canada).

Who Killed Canadian History? – J.L. Granatstein

“[T]he achievements of the past, and even the failures of the years gone by, can be a source of strength to meet not only today’s challenges, but tomorrow’s, too.”

Yup, it’s another Canada post. In my defense, I do try to focus on the underlying themes of these books, but I grant they’re not interesting to everyone.

Granatstein disapproves of how history is taught in Canada, and I have a suspicion he feels that way about how history is taught in a lot of places. For him, history is about narrative and causality, about learning what happened in the past, and he worries that too much of history today is about exploring political themes like racism and sexism. He doesn’t disagree that those are important, of course, but argues they should be in politics classes, not history: history should include them, but not be limited to them.

In saying so, he’s not afraid to take a controversial stance. Social history, labour history, women’s history: all as equally important as political history, he says, but too often taught at the expense of political history. In practice those are the sorts of ideas that historians fight internecine wars over, and I suspect the knives were out for him when the book was released.

I don’t know what the right way to teach history is: one has only to look at textbooks in the West Bank to see how difficult it can be. Even an attempt to have each side write alternating pages of a textbook failed in that particular case, as the views of the two sides were so different as to be irreconcilable. As this blog may betray, however, I personally love history, and so definitely believe that knowing history is important in order to be a successful citizen of a democracy. Based on the polling data, it’s not clear North Americans (I haven’t seen data for anyone else) are learning any history at all, and so there is definitely room for improvement. As perhaps with all school subjects though, the challenge is finite hours and almost infinite subjects people think should be required. Assembling a common list appears to be almost as difficult as coming up with a common history.

The Righteous Mind – Jonathan Haidt

“Trying to understand the persistence and passion of religion by studying beliefs about God is like trying to understand the persistence and passion of college football by studying the movements of the ball….You’ve got to look at the ways that religious beliefs work with religious practices to create a religious community.” – Jonathan Haidt

You can read part 2 of this review here.

There’s enough (and more!) to The Righteous Mind that I’m going to spend today talking about Haidt’s analysis of morality, and Wednesday talking about its implications for politics. Mix and match as you please, but the broad takeaway should be that I was enormously impressed with the book.

Haidt argues that morality does not and cannot flow out of reason and rationality. Instead, he suggests we decide whether something is moral immediately, and then use our reason to justify why we think what we do. In other words, our reason is like the rider on an elephant. When the elephant leans, the rider doesn’t know what it’s thinking and can’t control it: all he can do is post-hoc attempt to explain why it did what it did. In his words,

“We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.”

What is morality though? Haidt compares it to the sense of taste. Some people may for cultural or personal reasons notice sour more than bitter, but everyone has the taste buds for all flavours. The bases of morality are;

Care – We feel and dislike the pain of others
Fairness – Justice, rights, and autonomy
Liberty – A resentment of dominance and restrictions
Loyalty – Patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group
Authority – Deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions
Sanctity – The body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral contaminants

He is no moral relativist, but for Haidt, understanding the morality of others means understanding that there is more than one base from which morality can be drawn. Reasonable people can disagree on the importance of each base, but that does not make them immoral.

Why, however, are we moral at all? The answer lies in a fundamental tension in how we evolved. We are partly selfish, Haidt agrees, but we are also partly groupish; willing to sacrifice for the good of the group. Morality is about suppressing and regulating self-interest in order to make cooperative societies possible. The key moment in human history was when a few individuals began to share a common understanding of how things were supposed to be done – from that flowed language, cooperation, and society. This groupishness is what we see in religion, in sports games, in Kibbutzim, in communes, and in other human institutions.

Unfortunately, though this can be good within a group, it does little for inter-group communication, as political dialogue today (I’m looking at you, American government shutdown) can testify. Fortunately, he addresses that too – see the next review! In the meantime, you can test your own morality bases and participate in his studies here.

You can pick up a copy of your own here (or in the UK or Canada). In light of the current state of politics, it’s perhaps particularly relevant, but honestly I found it one of the more profound books I’ve read in a long time.

The Book of Chuang Tzu

“The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao” – Tao Te Ching

The Book of Chuang Tzu (also known as Zhuangzi or True Classic of Southern (Cultural) Florescence) makes up one of the three core texts of Taoism. The Tao Te Ching, its arguably more famous fellow, is short to the point of cryptic, and uses as few as words as possible to illustrate the Tao. Chuang Tzu, on the other hand, is full of stories, personalities, events, and entertainment, to the point of being cryptic.

Taoism differs from both modern philosophies and its contemporaries in emphasizing that it is a path to be walked, rather than a term to be defined. Rather than review it, therefore, for those interested I thought I’d share an anecdote from the book.

“Hui Tzu spoke to Chuang Tzu, saying, ‘I have a big tree, which people call useless. Its trunk is so knotted, no carpenter could work on it, while its branches are too twisted to use a square or compass upon. So, although it is close to the road, no carpenter would look at it. Now, Sir, your words are like this, too big and no use, therefore everyone ignores them.

Chuang Tzu said, ‘Sir, have you never seen a wild cat or a weasel? It lies there, crouching and waiting; east and west it leaps out, not afraid of going high or low; until it is caught in a trap and dies in a net. Yet again, there is the yak, vast like a cloud in heaven. It is big, but cannot use this fact to catch rats. Now you, Sir, have a large tree, and you don’t know how to use it, so why not plant it in the middle of nowhere, where you can go to wander or fall asleep under its shade? No axe under Heaven will attack it, nor shorten its days, for something which is useless will never be disturbed.”

Honestly, if you want to find out about Taoism, you’ll have to read it yourself: you can pick it up here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list!

Essays – Michel de Montaigne

“Everyone is well or ill at ease, according as he so finds himself; not he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is content; and in this alone belief gives itself being and reality.”

(Note the second part of this review can be found here)

Michel de Montaigne is perhaps best known not for his own works, but for his influence on other writers, including Descartes, Pascal, Rousseau, Emerson, Nietzsche, Balzac, Asimov, Shakespeare, and perhaps most recently, Taleb. He popularized the essay as a literary genre, and was one of the first authors to combine serious analysis with personal anecdotes, but as well as a writer he was a statesman, classicist, and skeptic.

Some of his works will ring oddly to modern ears, perhaps particularly his views on women and the need for obedience to authority, but in other ways he has much in common with modern viewpoints, including his dismissal of contemporary criticisms of the native peoples of North America as barbaric, arguing that cultures tend to assume everything different from themselves is barbaric without seeking to understand.

His essays vary from wide-ranging discussions on death, friendship, and education to narrow treatises on whether a commander should go to a parley in person or why we wear clothes. It is a book that relies purely on the judgment of the author, and in that respect he is actually more accessible to the modern reader than most of his contemporaries. For myself, I liked some of his essays and disliked others, but the good ones are very good, and even the poor ones are worth reading; agree or disagree, he has put considerable thought into his perspectives, and draws upon centuries of history to support them.

Next week, I’ll focus on his essays on Death and Education, but in the meantime here are some some samples of his thought:

“Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.”

“I, for my part, am very little subject to these violent passions; I am naturally of a stubborn apprehensions, which also, by reasoning, I every day harden and fortify.”

“I have lived in good company enough to know the formalities of our own nation, and am able to give lessons in it. I love to follow them, but not to be so servilely tied to their observation that my whole life should be enslaved to ceremonies, of which there are some so troublesome that, provided a man omits them out of discretion, and not for want of breeding, it will be every whit as handsome.”

You can pick up your copy of the Essays here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, if you’ve got a kindle, the essays are often cheap or free!

Antifragile 2 – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.”

Last time we explored the idea of antifragility – what, though, are its implications? Taleb has but one core lesson; we cannot escape or prevent volatility, so we must love it, and we can only do that if we are antifragile.

To do so, focus on doing, not on theory. Taleb argues that progress comes from small advances by doers, while theorists usually just post-hoc justify the progress of doers. As Yogi Berra tells us, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.” [Nick Note – I’m not sure I agree with this, and will object below, but I thought I’d pass it along anyway]

Second, focus on dispersion, not just on averages. For a stock portfolio, for example, don’t have all your money in a fund with moderate risk/return; put 10% in an extremely risky fund with a large upside, and the other 90% somewhere very safe. We are best, he argues, when faced with alternating periods of recovery and high intensity, whether we are talking weight lifting, investments, diets, or emotions.

Third, obey nature in the absence of opposing evidence. Taleb follows Burke, arguing that the burden of proof always lies with the unnatural or new. The natural or traditional has been tried and turned antifragile through an evolutionary process, while the new has not. It’s a principle he lives by; on breaking his nose and failing to find empirical evidence of the value of ice, he dutifully refused ice. I can only respect his adherence to principle.

Fourth, value heroism. Heroes, Taleb points out, are people who sacrifice for the community; they are extremely antifragile, taking society’s risks on themselves. As a society, we should only respect people who take risks for their opinions. Roman engineers, for example, were required to stand under their bridges after they were built, while bankers in Catalonia were beheaded if their banks failed. Consultants and investment bankers today, on the other hand, bear almost no risk from their advice. This, Taleb argues, is the core problem with capitalism; the basic unit of interaction is the corporation, by means of which no individual bears any risk for their decisions.

It can sometimes feel like Taleb is taking an unjustifiably extreme position to provoke controversy – perhaps it’s effective, but it’s also somewhat annoying. He is convincing that practical knowledge is undervalued, for example, but that is hardly the same as showing that theory is always useless. More generally, his book can sometimes feel a bit one sided, as he writes to convince, rather than to inform. That aside, the book is phenomenal; Taleb is one of the foremost thinkers of our age, and if he sometimes seems overeager to support his own ideas, the rest of the time is he is truly wise. He’s also, by the way, one of the rare authors who can throw in a line like “Genoa and Venice were competing for the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean like two hookers battling for a sidewalk.”

You can get your copy here (or in the UK or Canada), and it’s definitely worth a look. Antifragility is a concept all of us could benefit from.

Of Dice and Men – David M. Ewalt

“Unlike board games, which limit the player to a small set of actions, or video games, which offer a large but finite set of preprogrammed possibilities, role-playing games give the player free will…if clue was played like D&D, you could grab the lead pipe, beat a confession out of Colonel Mustard, and have sex with Miss Scarlet on the desk in the conservatory.”

Dungeons and Dragons arouses diverse emotions even apart from the social stigma it often carries, from scorn to obsession. Writing a history of the game, therefore, is a difficult endeavor at best. That said, approximately 30 million people have played the game since it started in 1974, and even today the release of an update to the rules commands the front page of the NYT Arts section. In the 1980s, tempers burned so hot it was linked to murders and satanic rituals, and it was banned by schools and churches. It’s an understudied, but important, subject.

At times, Of Dice and Men can feel a bit like hero worship – the author clearly loves the game. Its strength, however, lies with its exploration of the human need to play and tell stories. D&D is the foundation for dozens of ideas we take for granted in today’s board and video games, games of overwhelming popularity and influence. It was D&D, for example, that introduced the idea that characters get stronger over time, contributing to emotional investment and attachment on the part of players in games like World of Warcraft today.

What marks D&D as different from most games popular with teenage boys are its open-endedness and focus on cooperation. Instead of trying to beat the others, players compare D&D to communal storytelling, in which players work together to develop worlds and stories together. It appeals to the need for narrative in all of us.

Why does this open-endedness matter? In school, we teach children that there are correct approaches to solving problems, and that what they learn correlates exactly with problems they are given. In life, however, there are no limits on solution methods; originality is far more valuable in life than in school. To that extent, D&D introduces an important idea to children; the idea that they can achieve whatever they can think of.

D&D gives the players the opportunity to be heroes, in worlds they create and describe themselves. Perhaps in a similar manner, Of Dice and Men is fun, entertaining, and though likely appealing most to people already interested in games and D&D in particular, has insights to share even with those interested in neither. In the end, I suspect all of us would be better off with more opportunities to imagine and create.

Want the full history? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to your right! Disclosure: I read Of Dice and Men as a free advance reader copy – it is released on Tuesday.

Academically Adrift – Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa

“Historians remind us that higher-education institutions initially were created largely to achieve moral ends. A renewed commitment to improving undergraduate education is unlikely to occur without changes to the organizational cultures of colleges and universities that re-establish the institutional primacy of these functions – instilling in the next generation of young adults a lifelong love of learning, an ability to think critically and communicate effectively, and a willingness to embrace and assume adult responsibilities.”

For many, education is the silver bullet that can fix society’s ills, resolving inequality, safeguarding democracy, and inspiring the next generation of leaders. Given the expectations laid on it, it is hardly surprising that it is a fiery issue, subject to significant controversies on method, motivation, and goals.

For me, the most difficult aspect is that we do not have a single way to measure what education produces, or even agree what it should be producing. Some things correlate with increasing income later in life, others with increased self-confidence or improved results on standardized tests. In Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa try to summarize the quantitative literature on undergraduate education, attempting to draw lessons from what research exists.

In brief, they draw four lessons. First, that modern universities place a low premium on learning, leading to students who feel academically adrift. Faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents, all tacitly acquiesce to a collegiate culture with a low premium on learning and an absence of moral guidance, forcing students to attempt to find meaning in other activities. Second, that the gains in student performance from attending university are disturbingly low; students do little better at the end of their education than at the beginning on various critical thinking and writing exercises. Third, that individual learning is characterized by persistent and/or growing inequality of outcomes. Finally, that while overall learning is low, there is significant variation within and between institutions, suggesting that improved results are possible.

These are useful and important lessons. Unfortunately, I found none of them particularly surprising; though I don’t have mental numbers in mind for size of most effects they cite, the direction of the effects comes as no surprise. I didn’t know hours per week spent studying had declined from 25 hours in 1961 to 13 in 2003, for example, but I had assumed the direction. For me, therefore, the book is useful as a reference work but is dry for general reading. I have Michelle Rhee’s Radical further down my list (the hugely controversial ex-chancellor of the D.C. public schools), which though I suspect will be less informative, I hope may be more interesting.

Want to keep reading? You can get Academically Adrift here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!

Decisive – Chip & Dan Heath

“[T]hat, in essence, is the core difficulty of decision making: What’s in the spotlight will rarely be everything we need to make a good decision, but we won’t always remember to shift the light. Sometimes, in fact, we’ll forget there’s a spotlight at all, dwelling so long in the tiny circle of light that we forget there’s a broader landscape behind it.”

The shoe company Zaapos offers all trainees $1000 to leave immediately and not work for them. Why? Consider the following decision-making process.

You’re faced with an important decision. You first look for your options, but narrow framing means you ignore several critical ones. What options you’ve found, you analyze, but confirmation bias means you fail to adequately look for information that disproves your thesis. Then, you make a choice, but fall victim to short term emotion and temptations. Finally, you live with your choice, but overconfidence means you’ve failed to prepare for error.

That, essentially, is the process Chip and Dan Heath describe in Decisive. Our brains are wired to act foolishly in some situations; how, they ask, can we do better? To help, they outline a series of mental tricks and approaches that allow us to better analyze, understand, and most of all improve our decisions.

What really comes through, however, is how often we don’t do what we obviously should to make a good decision. In a study of businesses, only 29% of teams considered more than one alternative option, while experts forecasting the future do less well than a simple extrapolation of base rates (though better than novices). Simple techniques can therefore be powerful; searching for options until you fall in love at least twice (better for houses than for marriages, perhaps), testing the future instead of predicting it, focusing on process, and asking yourself what you would do if none of your current options were available, can all have large payoffs.

All of which brings us back to Zappos and their $1000 offer. People who accept it, Zappos argues, are people they didn’t want anyway. It forces employees to stop, think, and decide, not just accidentally drift into a job they didn’t want. Those who remain know that they valued this opportunity so much they turned the offer down.

I’m not sure I learnt very much reading Decisive, but it was a quick and easy read, and some of the tricks for improving decision-making will certainly be useful. If you’re looking for a substantive addition to the literature, I can’t recommend it, but if you’re looking for a fun summer read it’s worth picking up.

If you do decide to pick it up, you can get it here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right instead! (Doing both also permitted…)