I haven't thought too much about your idea for patents, but I am willing to. I want to see research remain open to all and if new IP laws will help make that happen, I have no problem with it.
I don't want to forbid commercial research, and I do realise that patents are part of the incentive system to turn new science into technologies that improve people's lives. I agree with the need for patent reform, although I have not yet seen an agenda for reform that I find convincing. But I still persist in believing that real science must be public in order to work, and the maintenance of publicly funded research is the only way I know of to do that. Considering the public benefits of science and the technology that derives from it, I consider my taxes spent to that end money well spent.
Yes, Hawking and Gould derive their fame and fortunes in large part to publishing well-written, well-read books, and being telegenic certainly doesn't hurt. However, had they been merely good writers and not high-prestige theorists in their respective fields, they would never have been able to command the audiences and some of money that their books command. No one has ever invited John Gribbin to do a walk-in on the USS Enterprise, and he is twice the writer Hawking is.
In short, the kind of fame and fortune enjoyed by the likes of Gould and Hawking is a perk of doing public research that leads to high prestige. No one whose most important work has been in closed corporate or military research has ever attained such fame. The knowledge that a handful of scientists can do what Hawking and Gould have done is an important motivating factor for young scientists. I know it was for me in my youth, and I still have dreams of attaining fame and fortune for my theories and getting TV appearances and book contracts (although I'm a bit more realistic about the odds that it will happen.) It beats the hell out of honest work.
Actually, I'm on the opposite side from Gould on most things, and I think it is only due to prejudices among scientists and Gould's excellent command of the English language that anyone pays attention to what he says at all.
I was trained in Hawking's line of work, but ended up in territory much closer to Gould's, so trust me, I understand about undeserved authority. I still belief in public science, because without it, widely accepted authorities like Gould will never be overcome.
Deep down, I'm a Popperite. I know, for a borderline Marxist that's a bit strange. (Actually, it's incredibly strange, but that's another posting.) Popper's description of how science functions is the only one I've ever found even vaguely convincing. For Popper, science was about making conjectures, little more than inductive guesses really, then exposing them to the community of scientists. There, the conjecture is subject to the most destructive criticism its proponents and opponents alike can think of. If it survives, it's eventually accepted (usually when those who oppose it die off.)
In principle, even the most venerated theory is always subject to the same scepticism and test by falsification as the latest thing out of CERN. It doesn't always work that way - you are absolutely right on that - but that is a problem of the sociology of science. Eventually, if a theory is wrong, the amount of evidence against it will make it impossible to hold. In science all false doctrines eventually die. This is a product of subjecting every hypothesis, no matter how well established, to public criticism. I don't see how closed commercial labs or any other environment of secrecy can do this.
Science is not an optimally efficient process. It is full of constant conflicts between theorists and schools of thought, not to mention the inevitable battle of the young and radical against the old and established. Peer review can be a tortuous matter when you are flying in the face of received knowledge. (Thomas Gold just wrote a book on the subject if you're interested.) Science is a battlefield of ideas. It's practitioners are egotistical, prejudiced and motivated by the same desire for prestige, fame and fortune as other men. So long as the route to those things is only available through publication and public criticism, this awkward system works.
Classical physics took a half century to die, long after the classical view became untenable. Indeed, there are still people who oppose relativity (look at James Hogan's website for an example) and quantum mechanics (too many of those to list.) This is not economically efficient, I don't doubt that, the only justification of the traditional culture of open science is that it works. It may work in fits and spurts, but it works. And I don't want it to stop working.
I did make a dig at Gould and Hawkings, but I'm of the same opinion as you: it doesn't bother me that they take the cash since they can. If a physicist gets famous, good for him. My point is that they didn't get to be rich or famous by doing commercially viable private research, they did publicly funded research which they published openly. Their fame derives from the same prestige system which I claim is being undermined by the drop in public funds for research.
In the long run, science can't prosper without review by other scientists. It's far too easy for one research team to believe they are on the track of something that doesn't really exist. In the end, the process of peer review and disemmination is what prevents calamities like Lysenkoism.
The Manhattan project used physics that was already well-known. It sought techniques for the specific application of that physics. Uranium was first split in a public lab, and the physics of mass-energy conversion were as well-known to German physicists as to American ones. And lastly, the Manhattan project did not continue to produce new science for very long. It ended with the war and most of its participants went back to their labs to do science the old-fashioned way.
No classified lab has ever started a revolution in science, and only occaisionally in engineering, but frankly, I disagree with the high level of secrecy of DOE and DOD research. So does much of the DOE and DOD - ARPA projects are rarely secret, and the Defense department funds a great deal of public research because they know that there is more to gain in open science than there is to loose.
Closed science is the enemy, not corporations, or even corporate research. It is the culture of secrecy that springs up when science ceases to be about prestige and becomes a pursuit of short-term profit.
The average salary of a tenured professor is about $48,000 (...) According to the Office of Institutional Research at Iowa State University, the average salary of a full professor at ISU for the 1996-97 academic year was about $73,000. (...) Salaries at the University of Colorado-Boulder are also greater than those at K-State. UCB Office of Budget and Planning reported an average professor salary of $71,627 for the 1995-96 year.
Average salary including the law school in 1995-6: $42,416/yr.
In fact, go to http://www.econ.umn.edu/~cswan/AAUP/Spring96.html and check out the 1996 pay scale for top research universities. A full prof at Stanford, Yale, Harvard and CalTech made just over $100,000 per year. At Stanford and CalTech, that's a comfortable middle class living. (Move out here if you don't believe me.) Adjuncts and Associates don't even get close to that.
The reason research institutions have traditionally felt free to give their tools, results and expertise away is because they were mostly publicly funded. No one (okay, almost no one) ever got rich doing science - it was a bit like the old Marxist cliché from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Once money is out of the picture, prestige becomes the measure of success, in part for the reasons so frequently outlined by Eric Raymond, but also because the only people in science who do get rich are high-prestige scientists who get book contracts, do the lecture circuit, and for the really lucky, get bit parts in TV shows like the Simpsons and Star Trek.
From that perspective, giving it all away makes a great deal of sense.
Now, governments are pushing universities and other research institutions to seek private funding and cut deals with profit-seeking companies for whom prestige is inevitably secondary to the bottom line. With the advent of the "dot-com" boom, researchers in biotech and anything related to computing or cognitive science have the potential to make a fortune quickly by keeping their knowledge secret; and as long as they cut their bosses in for even a small piece of the action, most universities and research institutes are glad to let them.
The traditional culture of science and research is breaking down, and without a return to substantially publicly funded research, open source ideas will stop coming out of those places. This has an impact far beyond mere software. Science can't function in secret and in the long run there is a real risk that the technological revolution of the past 300 years will slow down or come to an end.
I know that open source as a movement relies on all sorts of volunteers. It's likely that Linux and the GNU packages we've come to know and love can survive without a flow of new ideas from researchers, but there will be a lot of suffering without them.
Let's make this more interesting by taking a look at Bureau of Labour Statistics data. Go to http://146.142.4.24/cgi-bin/surveymost?pr and select "Nonfarm Business Output per Hour of All Persons % chq qtr ago" and "All years."
You will get tables for annual productivity growth for all nonfram businesses since 1959.
Using this, table, average annual productivity growth during the 90's was only 2.0%. In the 80's t was 1.4%, 2.0% for the 1970's, and 2.9% for the 1960's. The 90's growth in productivity isn't very spectacular, nor are the annualised quarterly rates of the last two quarters in 1999. Indeed, the only reason productivity growth even seems very high is because Reagan bungled the American economy so badly.
Americans may be more productive than ever, but so is everyone. Productivity growth is normal, it's the rate of growth that's the useful statistic, and by that standard, things are only okay at best.
So much for the idea that productivity is increasing faster than ever because of computers. - obviously it just ain't so.
Now, we can retrieve statistics for average number of weekly hours worked from http://146.142.4.24/cgi-bin/surveymost?ee . The length of the work-week, on the average, hasn't changed much in the last decade.
Please not that this is true for all sectors of the economy covered by the BLS.
However, this is the average. For every overworked tech there is a burger flipper getting half as many hours as he wants. The median would be a helpful statistic here - but I can't get it from the BLS.
Personally, I put in most 40 hour weeks, a few 60 hour ones, but mostly 40. I also took 3 weeks of vacation last year and days off around midterms and finals each term, so I figure its about even. On the average Americans aren't working much more than they used to, but I suspect the average covers up a lot of sectorial differences.
It may be true that long work weeks are more standard in technology, but if so, it's being compensated by shorter weeks elsewhere. Non-electronics manufacturing is slowing down, and the loss of jobs there alone might compensate for the small number of people working in technology. Certainly, there is anecdotal evidence of large-scale overwork in certain parts of the computer industry, but remember that computing employs a very small percentage of Americans.
A more interesting idea is that labour is being underreported. Employees and employers may feel pressure to underreport hours worked, especially at start-ups and non-unionised service companies with salaried employees.
But there would have to be massive underreporting in order for "this round-the-clock work ethic [to be] an integral part of the high-tech economy." I just don't buy it - I know too many lazy bums like me in every part of the economy. I quit a start-up in order to regain a 40 hour work week, and I don't know many people who stick it out with high pressure shops for long these days.
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I guess you could make the point that we're getting right-wing pablum nowadays instead of left-wing pablum. Indeed, I might just agree with you on that one.
I've never developed much of a taste for Moorcock, so I'll take your word that his current work is much improved.
Heinlein - now there was a conservative one could enjoy (mostly - after 1980 I have to wonder about his overall mental health. Expanded Universe has to be one of the worst things he ever wrote.) At any rate, there certainly isn't anyone talking politics in SF today of that calibre. Certainly, as much as I disagree with him, I can at least see where he's coming from.
As for H. Beam Piper, I never took him very seriously, and you're right that Niven and Anderson have already done their best work.
I love Delaney's novels, mostly. Triton is great, and Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand is one of my all time, favourite SF novels. Dhalgren, however, just confuses the hell out of me. Delaney is most of what I still respect about postmodernism.
I've lived roughly half my life in the States, so I'll give The Intuitionist a shot.
We'll have to differ about Glen Cook. He was certainly well to the right of centre in the 70's and 80's. None of your points strike me as especially liberal. Cynical, maybe, but not liberal.
Are you sure you're a right libertarian? As long as you're willing to conceed that government does have some valid functions in maintaining high standards of living other than simply running the courts and police, I suspect there's room for you on this side of the fence if you want to defect. The Greens may be Luddites, but the rest of us aren't. Certainly your literary tastes won't be a barrier.:^)
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Asimov is dead. So is Brunner. LeGuin is way past her best years and so is Moorcock. I am encouraged by Iain Banks's books and occaisionally Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson. No, not all SF is right-wing, but not much on the left side has been coming out in recent years.
I'll have to read Freedom and Necessity although Hegel's philosophy isn't exactly my cup of tea. I may have to reevalutate Tor, although a look at their 2000 publishing schedule isn't encouraging. There are two MacLeod book (The Stone Canal and The Sky Road), but there is also a James Hogan novel, a David Drake, Larry Niven (who admittedly is a lot less political when Pournelle isn't around), Vernor Vinge, Poul Anderson and Glen Cook.
There are a few who could be viewed as moderately liberal on their calendar too - Frederick Pohl and Orson Scott Card and perhaps Piers Anthony - but not by me.
I'm not a beliver in censorship - if Tor can make money selling this stuff I'm not bothered to see it on shelves - but I remember the days when SF was a liberal medium where people looked forward to a future of equality and democracy. Back then, a utopia was a place where everyone had a place to live and food to eat and a chance to better themselves, not a place where the rich make the rules and the poor take whatever scraps are left.
No, of course not all SF is right-wing, but more and more of what you can actually find on the shelves is either Tom Clancy wannabes or dull space opera. I suppose Sturgeon's rule still applies: 90% of everything is crap. A lot of the old leftist SF was also, no question, crap.
But there was a time when people like Norman Spinrad and John Brunner were big names who put out a book a year, and the cyberpunks were taking a big bite out of utopian fantasies on both the left and right. Now, I find only a handful of SF authors willing to look at social issues without some kind of right libertarian perspective, and most of those are Greens (blech!)
As a leftist, I find the return to a rational, technologically literate liberal (and even socialist) SF to be a real breath of fresh air, and I desperately hope this is a trend that will continue.
None of this "meme" stuff - at least in this article - is new. All of it was common knowlege 50 years the first time an adman came up with the words "4 out of 5 dentists agree."
Memes as a metaphor for human cultural behaviour is interesting, and possibly useful, but not to be taken too seriously. The art and science of good PR incorporates most of the real insights I've seen coming out of memeologists.
As for attacking censorware, let me express my support, my thanks and my encouragement. A good lie can go around the world while the truth is still getting out of bed, so those who have the truth on their side still have to work extra hard despite what ought to be an advantage.
...which is where I'm getting my copy, the next time I'm back in Canada. Try www.chapters.ca.
It's novels like this that give me some hope that the left might still have some place in English-language science fiction. The dominance of reactionary capitalists in SF is getting really old, and awfully annoying. I've had all I can take of retread space army stories, lawless "high frontiers" stolen from a largely mythical memory of the Old West and how either welfare or environmentalism will destroy America. Enough is enough! (This means you, Jerry Pournelle!)
I was shocked to see Tor put out The Cassini Division, given the politics of most of its stable of writers.
Ken MacLeod's left seems to be a materialist (in the old-fashioned Marxist sense), pragmatic, moderately revolutionary and not even vaguely Green left. He takes a very dim view of the Greens in The Sky Road and proposes a socialism based on only the most cynical view of human nature in The Cassini Division. It's a socialism which expects people to do whatever they think they can get away with.
He obviously has little truck with American academic Marxism or luddite Green sentiments. Oddly, this makes him seem more conservative than most of the American right, who seem to want to tear the country down and rebuild it, in the same way the left did 30 years ago.
I suspect he's something of a reformed Scotish Trotskyite, but I'm just guessing. I note that his socialist revolution is, and can only be, global. That is the traditional position of the Trots.
Anyway, he's putting forward interesting ideas and the two books I've read (The Sky Road and The Cassini Division) are well worht reading.
Most of his ideas aren't new per se, but with the left in such a dismal state in the anglophone world these last 20 years, I suspect they will seem new to his audience.
I'm going to attempt a different definition of geek, a psychological one and to some extent a cultural one.
A geek is someone who fits their cultural milieu poorly and substitutes skills or knowledge for social approval as a form of self-valuation.
Not everyone will approve of this definition. 'Geek' has come to represent a lot of different things to different people over the last 15-odd years, but I think my definition describes the thing Katz is most trying to find.
I think it's important to have a conception of 'geek' that is completely apart from computers. I have seen and known geeks of other varieties. Every language department has its geeks - the ones who speak the language fluently and know it inside and out. I've been one of those. Science departments are full of geeks who are only marginally interested in computers. (I've been one of those too.) Even traditional humanities have their geeks: anthropology geeks who know everything there is to know about digging stuff up and what happened to the Hittites, lit geeks who live for obscure 19th century French authors, medival studies geeks who can explain in detail the economic system of 13th century Romania. Those people are all geeks, and any geek would recognise them nearly on sight.
They tend to be highly literate and have a lot of distain for at least some aspect of common culture, but which are the causes and which are the consequence of their condition is not clear.
'Geekhood' is not about science-fiction, although SF plays a role in the lives most highly-literate young anglophones. 'Geekhood' is not about computers, although few young, literate, skilled anglo-americans are ignorant of computing these days. It is about knowing instead of peer approbation.
It's true that, perhaps for the first time in human history, geekhood has been a mark of success rather than failure. In the past, there was far less need for specialised knowledge, although there was some need. Today, it's hard to undertake any important enterprise without the assistance of some form of geek, possessing a specialised knowledge that not everyone has the time to learn.
However, geekhood has by-products. The most notorious is poor self-esteem, because ultimately knowledge is a poor substitute for peer approval. Geeks are sometimes, perhaps even often, able to find a few of their own kind and join a social circle, but even there the poor self-esteen can be fatal. A community of geeks, by its nature, is poorly suited to providing emotional support. When you have a group of people, all of whom hate themselves, they probably also hate each other at some level. It's hard, if not impossible, to get over the desire to bail on your geek friends and become one of the 'normal' people, if only you could.
That kind of damage can easily follow you through your entire life.
It's relatively easy for a geek to decide that their specialised skills or knoledge are more important than the trival pursuits of others. Isolation and a belief that everyone else is stupid can, in a fairly important segment of the geek population, become debilitating. You get guys like the Unibomber that way.
I don't wish to say that geeks are mentally ill, or at any rate more so than the so-called normals, but that a psychological understanding of their circumstances is important to who, and what, they are. I hope Katzes book helps to find that kind of understanding.
We (the X-er geeks) are the first large generation of geeks not to be labelled loosers after growing up. We can at least try to make life a little easier for the next generation of geeks, but it won't happen until we try to understand what happened to us.
It depends on what you mean by 'word' (and what you mean by 'snow') but in the Inuktitut spoken in Iqaluit, I remember only two root words for snow. It think one of them was "qaniit" (or maybe "qanik"?) and the other one was "aput" (or maybe just "apu"?).
There were other words that made references to snow and ice, but so do far more than two words in English.
Also, remember that Inuktitut uses a lot more morphology than English. In theory, Inuktitut could be said to have an effectively infinite number of words for snow, since sometimes complex sentences are turned into single, long words - but in that sense, Inuktitut also has an infinite number of words for 'coffee.'
I'm familiar with Lakoff's work on metaphors, but I don't think his work touches on the Sapir-Whorf question. To put it simply, I don't think his work in metaphors qualifies as linguistics.
Now, I think what he is doing is useful and I'm all for it. I like Lakoff, and his work on categorisation (which is a linguistic topic) was a major influence on me before I traded career for money and became a programmer. However, are his metaphors really linguistic, or rather cultural commodities? None of the metaphors I know him to have described involve word play (eg confusing 'free as in free beer' vs 'free as in freedom'). If I recall what Lakoff was saying, there is no fundamental reason, other than chance and culture, why those same metaphors couldn't exist in Chinese, or Inuit for that matter.
Common sense can throw you for a loop. Look at quantum mechanics - it's about as counterintuitive as you can get. Always hold out for empiricism.
I know Anna Wierzbicka firmly believes in her Lingua Mentalis (even if I'm sceptical) and she's still taken seriously. If she's right, even weak forms of Sapir-Whorf have to be false.
It is hard to say with certainty whether a person's language has any impact on how they think, but I have yet to find any concept that can't be understood and manipulated by a sufficiently intelligent speaker of another language. I don't think even the weak form is generally accepted these days, although I admit some linguists are still holding out for a weak form of the hypothesis.
I have to conceed that a desperately weakened for of Sapir-Whorf may be true, due to the difficulty of distinguishing cultural impact on thought from linguistic impact. But every clear case I know of has failed to show even the weak form.
If you redefine cognitive science to include any scientific data about human minds, I'll agree that the only scientific inputs linguistics is getting come from CogSci. But by that definition, most linguists are cognitive scientists.
I could argue that the data coming from computer science, while helpful, isn't science at all.
The roots of linguistics aren't descriptive, they're even worse, there philological. Early linguists were interested in literature and historic language change. That's the one thing I have to give Chomsky credit for: establishing linguistics outside of the humanities.
Linguistics is no longer taught as an art at any respectable school of theoretical linguistics. There are still many universities where they teach what I might risably call applied linguistics but which mostly ought to be a part of the education department. That is a different story, but it also has different goals.
I spent two semesters in math classes and three in programming labs in order to get my linguistics degree. I spent hours doing SQL queries on usage databases in hopes of getting enough data to do serious statistical analysis to support my hypothesis.
More recently, it has become harder to be taken seriously as a young linguist without some knowledge of AI methods. (This doesn't apply to the hard-core Chomskyans, who don't believe in AI, as if that made any difference.)
In short, things are changing in linguistics.
As for having no feel for science, I have a Bachelor's in Nuclear Physics (from before doing linguistics) and let me point out that my citation of Berlin and Kay is not inappropriate. If the strongest form of Sapir-Whorf were true, this experiment should not have turned out that way. It covers more ground than the neurology of vision processing, since it shows that the mental manipulation of visual signals is independent of the native language of the subject.
We can reformulate Sapir-Whorf to get around this, but depending on who you read, we are left either with a hypothesis that can't be verified (and is thus not science) or a hypothesis so weak as to be useless.
Read Pinker on the subject, he puts forward his case against Sapir-Whorf on the basis (in part) of Berlin and Kay as a cognitive scientist.
If color, which is obviously expressed differently across langauges, does not affect perception of color or mental processing of colours in the abstract, tell me what test will show that a concept can't be manipulated, or whose processing is in some way affected, by a person's langauge.
Having worked with the people responsible for making phone books in Inuktitut, and Bible translators for languages that don't even have a word for 'cross', I submit that the relative ease with which ideas and documents are translated and communicated across language groups is pretty damning evidence agsinst that idea.
I can write a toy language that is incapable of doing certain things.
However, assuming C is Turing complete (since I can write a Turing machine in C, I assume it must by definition be complete), I should be able to do anything in it. There is, therefore, no logical reason why choice of language should influence choice of projects. Now, as you pointed out, that doesn't mean I would want to write the Linux kernel in assembly - but it doesn't mean that if I had only assembly language to work with, the idea of the Linux kernel would never occur to me. (This is all hypothetical - I don't write kernels and I doubt I personally would ever write one, in C or any other language. That has nothing to do with the choice of language, it's an admission of my own limited experience and skill.)
However, I'll conceed that empirical analysis of programmers' habits could prove me wrong. There may be influences that I don't see. That's why I expressed scepticism about the conclusion (as far as computer languages go) not hostility (as I have with regard to the same conclusion about human languages.)
C'est clair que l'anglais a emprunté pas mal de mots du francais, mais la question, c'est s'il a emprunté les sens qui y sont liés.
Borrowing words happens. Germans call computers "Komputer", but it doesn't mean that until German had a word for "computer," Germans were incapable of thinking about computers. As soon as the first German was introduced to a computer (perhaps even earlier) the concept became thinkable, even if he (probably he not she) had to borrow a word to say it.
You speak English (I assume you're unilingual, if not, imagine the many folks on/. who are) yet you can clearly understand the difference between 'free as in speech' vs. 'free as in free beer.'
Your language has obviously not restricted your ability to think in this respect. Someone, somewhere, once upon a time, explained what they meant by 'free software' and now you have no trouble thinking clearly about it. The lack of a simple translation has no impact on your ability to think.
But, there are alternatives. One is that thought takes place in some kind of lingua mentalis that is the same for everybody and exists only in the mind. I think this is the majority position among linguists (but is by no means universal.)
There certainly is no evidence that people think in their native language at all, and considerable evidence agsinst the idea. The details would take some time to document and explain.
Due to the failure of experiment to show any Sapir-Whorf effect, after decades of trying, I feel secure in saying that the hypothesis is, certainly in its strongest form, as without merit as the aether or flogiston in physics.
As for books, I recommend starting with Pinker's Language Instinct. It contains some things that I don't think are true, but for someone who isn't a linguist these are mostly minor matters. Language Myths (edited by Bauer and Trudgill) is another good one, and The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax by Pullum and McCawley.
Those are good places to start. If you're looking for something more like an entry level textbook, e-mail me.
...and many even be possible, but it's a very weak form.
Now, computer languages and human languages are very different matters. It is true that I pick my languages on the basis of what kind of project I have to do, unless the spec requires a specific language. When that happens, I can usually solve the problem, even if it isn't as much fun. If I can solve the problem in a language, I'm have some reason to doubt that the choice of language restricts project choices.
So, I'll retain my scepticism with regard to computer languages, but it's just scepticism, I may be wrong about the habits of programmers.
I disagree, but I will conceed that a weakened for of Sapir-Whorf is possible. I don't think people think within the paradigms of a language (in fact, I'm not sure what paradigms a language could have.)
So, my disagreement with a heavily weakened form of Sapir-Whorf is an opinion, not science.
If you can think of a good way to test it, many linguists will be interested to hear it. This whole discussion (while fun) is off-topic to the issue of computer languages. I just wanted to put a stop to some inaccurate folk linguistics, just as I would have if someone had said that eskimos have fifty words for snow.
Actually, my Chinese sucks.:^) I have no idea how to say 'moral hazard' in Chinese. I've studied the language quite a lot, but don't get that much practice.
I have, however, faced similar enough problems in other langauges to feel confident in my answer. I invite you to look through the linguistics literature if you want a fluent Chinese speaker to pronounce on the issue. I'm sure there is one who has published on the topic.
Gimme an example of someone incapable of thinking something because of language.
I've been in academia. I spent the best years of my life in academia. I know that many disciplines teach the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as received truth, but it is still wrong, wrong, wrong. Would you believe an English prof if he or she was taking about physics, while a physics prof said that it was incorrect? This is a subject where linguists should be trusted over literature profs and anthropologists.
Pinker convers the topic briefly in The Language Instinct. A search at linguistlist.org should find several discussions of the issue. I believe Berlin and Kay's book Basic Colour Terms is back in print, if you want to go to he horses mouth.
I like reading Orwell - certainly I don't mean to dis the guy - but with regard to newspeak, he was just dead wrong. Since he was writing fiction, and since most of modern linguistics didn't exist at the time (and even if it had he probably wouldn't have known anything about it), I don't take it as a big deal.
I direct you to the Berlin and Kay study of colours, the perfect, near completely culture-neutral, test of this hypothesis. Finding a relevant URL will take some time, and I have code to write, so I assure you if you look at their papers for 1969 you will find the one in question.
That 5% was a concession to the handful of linguists (mostly anthropologists) who still take some portion of Sapir-Whorf seriously. In some very weakened form, the idea is still possible, but the strongest form is either unverifiable (and thus has no place in linguistic science) or has already been falsified (as the Berlin and Kay studies, among others, ultimately showed.)
A unilingual Chinese speaker is capable of understanding the notion of 'moral hazard' and can use it as well as an anglophone. Speaking Chinese is not a barrier to comprehension.
Should a Chinese economist wish to discuss the problem of 'moral hazards' in a paper in Chinese, this person will quickly find or devise a term for it and continue without difficulty, at most having to explain the notion at the beginning of the paper. The same is true of most anglophones, the majority of whom probably do not understand the term moral hazard intuitively (at least in the sense that I understand it - primarily as a term in economics) and would require that same explanation.
If this hypothetical economist wishes to show off his English, or simply because any short Chinese term he might use for 'moral hazard' implies too many unwanted connotations, he may simply plop the English term 'moral hazard' into the language. That's how 'deja vu' started. There is no reason why 'deja vu' can't be said using other terms in English - the concept no doubt existed for anglophones before the French term became current.
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I haven't thought too much about your idea for patents, but I am willing to. I want to see research remain open to all and if new IP laws will help make that happen, I have no problem with it.
I don't want to forbid commercial research, and I do realise that patents are part of the incentive system to turn new science into technologies that improve people's lives. I agree with the need for patent reform, although I have not yet seen an agenda for reform that I find convincing. But I still persist in believing that real science must be public in order to work, and the maintenance of publicly funded research is the only way I know of to do that. Considering the public benefits of science and the technology that derives from it, I consider my taxes spent to that end money well spent.
Yes, Hawking and Gould derive their fame and fortunes in large part to publishing well-written, well-read books, and being telegenic certainly doesn't hurt. However, had they been merely good writers and not high-prestige theorists in their respective fields, they would never have been able to command the audiences and some of money that their books command. No one has ever invited John Gribbin to do a walk-in on the USS Enterprise, and he is twice the writer Hawking is.
In short, the kind of fame and fortune enjoyed by the likes of Gould and Hawking is a perk of doing public research that leads to high prestige. No one whose most important work has been in closed corporate or military research has ever attained such fame. The knowledge that a handful of scientists can do what Hawking and Gould have done is an important motivating factor for young scientists. I know it was for me in my youth, and I still have dreams of attaining fame and fortune for my theories and getting TV appearances and book contracts (although I'm a bit more realistic about the odds that it will happen.) It beats the hell out of honest work.
Actually, I'm on the opposite side from Gould on most things, and I think it is only due to prejudices among scientists and Gould's excellent command of the English language that anyone pays attention to what he says at all.
I was trained in Hawking's line of work, but ended up in territory much closer to Gould's, so trust me, I understand about undeserved authority. I still belief in public science, because without it, widely accepted authorities like Gould will never be overcome.
Deep down, I'm a Popperite. I know, for a borderline Marxist that's a bit strange. (Actually, it's incredibly strange, but that's another posting.) Popper's description of how science functions is the only one I've ever found even vaguely convincing. For Popper, science was about making conjectures, little more than inductive guesses really, then exposing them to the community of scientists. There, the conjecture is subject to the most destructive criticism its proponents and opponents alike can think of. If it survives, it's eventually accepted (usually when those who oppose it die off.)
In principle, even the most venerated theory is always subject to the same scepticism and test by falsification as the latest thing out of CERN. It doesn't always work that way - you are absolutely right on that - but that is a problem of the sociology of science. Eventually, if a theory is wrong, the amount of evidence against it will make it impossible to hold. In science all false doctrines eventually die. This is a product of subjecting every hypothesis, no matter how well established, to public criticism. I don't see how closed commercial labs or any other environment of secrecy can do this.
Science is not an optimally efficient process. It is full of constant conflicts between theorists and schools of thought, not to mention the inevitable battle of the young and radical against the old and established. Peer review can be a tortuous matter when you are flying in the face of received knowledge. (Thomas Gold just wrote a book on the subject if you're interested.) Science is a battlefield of ideas. It's practitioners are egotistical, prejudiced and motivated by the same desire for prestige, fame and fortune as other men. So long as the route to those things is only available through publication and public criticism, this awkward system works.
Classical physics took a half century to die, long after the classical view became untenable. Indeed, there are still people who oppose relativity (look at James Hogan's website for an example) and quantum mechanics (too many of those to list.) This is not economically efficient, I don't doubt that, the only justification of the traditional culture of open science is that it works. It may work in fits and spurts, but it works. And I don't want it to stop working.
I did make a dig at Gould and Hawkings, but I'm of the same opinion as you: it doesn't bother me that they take the cash since they can. If a physicist gets famous, good for him. My point is that they didn't get to be rich or famous by doing commercially viable private research, they did publicly funded research which they published openly. Their fame derives from the same prestige system which I claim is being undermined by the drop in public funds for research.
In the long run, science can't prosper without review by other scientists. It's far too easy for one research team to believe they are on the track of something that doesn't really exist. In the end, the process of peer review and disemmination is what prevents calamities like Lysenkoism.
The Manhattan project used physics that was already well-known. It sought techniques for the specific application of that physics. Uranium was first split in a public lab, and the physics of mass-energy conversion were as well-known to German physicists as to American ones. And lastly, the Manhattan project did not continue to produce new science for very long. It ended with the war and most of its participants went back to their labs to do science the old-fashioned way.
No classified lab has ever started a revolution in science, and only occaisionally in engineering, but frankly, I disagree with the high level of secrecy of DOE and DOD research. So does much of the DOE and DOD - ARPA projects are rarely secret, and the Defense department funds a great deal of public research because they know that there is more to gain in open science than there is to loose.
Closed science is the enemy, not corporations, or even corporate research. It is the culture of secrecy that springs up when science ceases to be about prestige and becomes a pursuit of short-term profit.
...as a well-known professor.
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Most aren't. Which typical midwestern university pays over $100K for most of its profs?
A google search turns up:
Southwest Missouri State University at http://www.smsu.edu/OIR/factbook/faculty_and_staf
The average salary of all nine-month instructional staff for 1999-2000 was $48,889.
University of Nevada: http://www.unlv.edu/ssasc/st4dft.html
University: UNLV UNR
Professor: $78,700 $81,900
Associate Professor: $59,500 $60,500
Assistant Professor: $46,800 $49,000
About 1/3 of profs there are fully tenured - all others are associates or assistant profs.
Kansas State: http://collegian.ksu.edu/issues/v102/sp/n109/news
The average salary of a tenured professor is about $48,000 (...) According to the Office of Institutional Research at Iowa State University, the average salary of a full professor at ISU for the 1996-97 academic year was about $73,000. (...) Salaries at the University of Colorado-Boulder are also greater than those at K-State. UCB Office of Budget and Planning reported an average professor salary of $71,627 for the 1995-96 year.
Remember once again, few people get full tenure.
Northern Kentucky University:
http://www.nku.edu/~nku01/ngl9596e.html#avgsal
Average salary including the law school in 1995-6: $42,416/yr.
In fact, go to http://www.econ.umn.edu/~cswan/AAUP/Spring96.html and check out the 1996 pay scale for top research universities. A full prof at Stanford, Yale, Harvard and CalTech made just over $100,000 per year. At Stanford and CalTech, that's a comfortable middle class living. (Move out here if you don't believe me.) Adjuncts and Associates don't even get close to that.
The reason research institutions have traditionally felt free to give their tools, results and expertise away is because they were mostly publicly funded. No one (okay, almost no one) ever got rich doing science - it was a bit like the old Marxist cliché from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Once money is out of the picture, prestige becomes the measure of success, in part for the reasons so frequently outlined by Eric Raymond, but also because the only people in science who do get rich are high-prestige scientists who get book contracts, do the lecture circuit, and for the really lucky, get bit parts in TV shows like the Simpsons and Star Trek.
From that perspective, giving it all away makes a great deal of sense.
Now, governments are pushing universities and other research institutions to seek private funding and cut deals with profit-seeking companies for whom prestige is inevitably secondary to the bottom line. With the advent of the "dot-com" boom, researchers in biotech and anything related to computing or cognitive science have the potential to make a fortune quickly by keeping their knowledge secret; and as long as they cut their bosses in for even a small piece of the action, most universities and research institutes are glad to let them.
The traditional culture of science and research is breaking down, and without a return to substantially publicly funded research, open source ideas will stop coming out of those places. This has an impact far beyond mere software. Science can't function in secret and in the long run there is a real risk that the technological revolution of the past 300 years will slow down or come to an end.
I know that open source as a movement relies on all sorts of volunteers. It's likely that Linux and the GNU packages we've come to know and love can survive without a flow of new ideas from researchers, but there will be a lot of suffering without them.
Let's make this more interesting by taking a look at Bureau of Labour Statistics data. Go to http://146.142.4.24/cgi-bin/surveymost?pr and select "Nonfarm Business Output per Hour of All Persons % chq qtr ago" and "All years."
You will get tables for annual productivity growth for all nonfram businesses since 1959.
Using this, table, average annual productivity growth during the 90's was only 2.0%. In the 80's t was 1.4%, 2.0% for the 1970's, and 2.9% for the 1960's. The 90's growth in productivity isn't very spectacular, nor are the annualised quarterly rates of the last two quarters in 1999. Indeed, the only reason productivity growth even seems very high is because Reagan bungled the American economy so badly.
Americans may be more productive than ever, but so is everyone. Productivity growth is normal, it's the rate of growth that's the useful statistic, and by that standard, things are only okay at best.
So much for the idea that productivity is increasing faster than ever because of computers.
- obviously it just ain't so.
Now, we can retrieve statistics for average number of weekly hours worked from http://146.142.4.24/cgi-bin/surveymost?ee . The length of the work-week, on the average, hasn't changed much in the last decade.
Please not that this is true for all sectors of the economy covered by the BLS.
However, this is the average. For every overworked tech there is a burger flipper getting half as many hours as he wants. The median would be a helpful statistic here - but I can't get it from the BLS.
Personally, I put in most 40 hour weeks, a few 60 hour ones, but mostly 40. I also took 3 weeks of vacation last year and days off around midterms and finals each term, so I figure its about even. On the average Americans aren't working much more than they used to, but I suspect the average covers up a lot of sectorial differences.
It may be true that long work weeks are more standard in technology, but if so, it's being compensated by shorter weeks elsewhere. Non-electronics manufacturing is slowing down, and the loss of jobs there alone might compensate for the small number of people working in technology. Certainly, there is anecdotal evidence of large-scale overwork in certain parts of the computer industry, but remember that computing employs a very small percentage of Americans.
A more interesting idea is that labour is being underreported. Employees and employers may feel pressure to underreport hours worked, especially at start-ups and non-unionised service companies with salaried employees.
But there would have to be massive underreporting in order for "this round-the-clock work ethic [to be] an integral part of the high-tech economy." I just don't buy it - I know too many lazy bums like me in every part of the economy. I quit a start-up in order to regain a 40 hour work week, and I don't know many people who stick it out with high pressure shops for long these days.
I guess you could make the point that we're getting right-wing pablum nowadays instead of left-wing pablum. Indeed, I might just agree with you on that one.
:^)
I've never developed much of a taste for Moorcock, so I'll take your word that his current work is much improved.
Heinlein - now there was a conservative one could enjoy (mostly - after 1980 I have to wonder about his overall mental health. Expanded Universe has to be one of the worst things he ever wrote.) At any rate, there certainly isn't anyone talking politics in SF today of that calibre. Certainly, as much as I disagree with him, I can at least see where he's coming from.
As for H. Beam Piper, I never took him very seriously, and you're right that Niven and Anderson have already done their best work.
I love Delaney's novels, mostly. Triton is great, and Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand is one of my all time, favourite SF novels. Dhalgren, however, just confuses the hell out of me. Delaney is most of what I still respect about postmodernism.
I've lived roughly half my life in the States, so I'll give The Intuitionist a shot.
We'll have to differ about Glen Cook. He was certainly well to the right of centre in the 70's and 80's. None of your points strike me as especially liberal. Cynical, maybe, but not liberal.
Are you sure you're a right libertarian? As long as you're willing to conceed that government does have some valid functions in maintaining high standards of living other than simply running the courts and police, I suspect there's room for you on this side of the fence if you want to defect. The Greens may be Luddites, but the rest of us aren't. Certainly your literary tastes won't be a barrier.
Asimov is dead. So is Brunner. LeGuin is way past her best years and so is Moorcock. I am encouraged by Iain Banks's books and occaisionally Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson. No, not all SF is right-wing, but not much on the left side has been coming out in recent years.
I'll have to read Freedom and Necessity although Hegel's philosophy isn't exactly my cup of tea. I may have to reevalutate Tor, although a look at their 2000 publishing schedule isn't encouraging. There are two MacLeod book (The Stone Canal and The Sky Road), but there is also a James Hogan novel, a David Drake, Larry Niven (who admittedly is a lot less political when Pournelle isn't around), Vernor Vinge, Poul Anderson and Glen Cook.
There are a few who could be viewed as moderately liberal on their calendar too - Frederick Pohl and Orson Scott Card and perhaps Piers Anthony - but not by me.
I'm not a beliver in censorship - if Tor can make money selling this stuff I'm not bothered to see it on shelves - but I remember the days when SF was a liberal medium where people looked forward to a future of equality and democracy. Back then, a utopia was a place where everyone had a place to live and food to eat and a chance to better themselves, not a place where the rich make the rules and the poor take whatever scraps are left.
No, of course not all SF is right-wing, but more and more of what you can actually find on the shelves is either Tom Clancy wannabes or dull space opera. I suppose Sturgeon's rule still applies: 90% of everything is crap. A lot of the old leftist SF was also, no question, crap.
But there was a time when people like Norman Spinrad and John Brunner were big names who put out a book a year, and the cyberpunks were taking a big bite out of utopian fantasies on both the left and right. Now, I find only a handful of SF authors willing to look at social issues without some kind of right libertarian perspective, and most of those are Greens (blech!)
As a leftist, I find the return to a rational, technologically literate liberal (and even socialist) SF to be a real breath of fresh air, and I desperately hope this is a trend that will continue.
None of this "meme" stuff - at least in this article - is new. All of it was common knowlege 50 years the first time an adman came up with the words "4 out of 5 dentists agree."
Memes as a metaphor for human cultural behaviour is interesting, and possibly useful, but not to be taken too seriously. The art and science of good PR incorporates most of the real insights I've seen coming out of memeologists.
As for attacking censorware, let me express my support, my thanks and my encouragement. A good lie can go around the world while the truth is still getting out of bed, so those who have the truth on their side still have to work extra hard despite what ought to be an advantage.
...which is where I'm getting my copy, the next time I'm back in Canada. Try www.chapters.ca.
It's novels like this that give me some hope that the left might still have some place in English-language science fiction. The dominance of reactionary capitalists in SF is getting really old, and awfully annoying. I've had all I can take of retread space army stories, lawless "high frontiers" stolen from a largely mythical memory of the Old West and how either welfare or environmentalism will destroy America. Enough is enough! (This means you, Jerry Pournelle!)
I was shocked to see Tor put out The Cassini Division, given the politics of most of its stable of writers.
Ken MacLeod's left seems to be a materialist (in the old-fashioned Marxist sense), pragmatic, moderately revolutionary and not even vaguely Green left. He takes a very dim view of the Greens in The Sky Road and proposes a socialism based on only the most cynical view of human nature in The Cassini Division. It's a socialism which expects people to do whatever they think they can get away with.
He obviously has little truck with American academic Marxism or luddite Green sentiments. Oddly, this makes him seem more conservative than most of the American right, who seem to want to tear the country down and rebuild it, in the same way the left did 30 years ago.
I suspect he's something of a reformed Scotish Trotskyite, but I'm just guessing. I note that his socialist revolution is, and can only be, global. That is the traditional position of the Trots.
Anyway, he's putting forward interesting ideas and the two books I've read (The Sky Road and The Cassini Division) are well worht reading.
Most of his ideas aren't new per se, but with the left in such a dismal state in the anglophone world these last 20 years, I suspect they will seem new to his audience.
I'm going to attempt a different definition of geek, a psychological one and to some extent a cultural one.
A geek is someone who fits their cultural milieu poorly and substitutes skills or knowledge for social approval as a form of self-valuation.
Not everyone will approve of this definition. 'Geek' has come to represent a lot of different things to different people over the last 15-odd years, but I think my definition describes the thing Katz is most trying to find.
I think it's important to have a conception of 'geek' that is completely apart from computers. I have seen and known geeks of other varieties. Every language department has its geeks - the ones who speak the language fluently and know it inside and out. I've been one of those. Science departments are full of geeks who are only marginally interested in computers. (I've been one of those too.) Even traditional humanities have their geeks: anthropology geeks who know everything there is to know about digging stuff up and what happened to the Hittites, lit geeks who live for obscure 19th century French authors, medival studies geeks who can explain in detail the economic system of 13th century Romania. Those people are all geeks, and any geek would recognise them nearly on sight.
They tend to be highly literate and have a lot of distain for at least some aspect of common culture, but which are the causes and which are the consequence of their condition is not clear.
'Geekhood' is not about science-fiction, although SF plays a role in the lives most highly-literate young anglophones. 'Geekhood' is not about computers, although few young, literate, skilled anglo-americans are ignorant of computing these days. It is about knowing instead of peer approbation.
It's true that, perhaps for the first time in human history, geekhood has been a mark of success rather than failure. In the past, there was far less need for specialised knowledge, although there was some need. Today, it's hard to undertake any important enterprise without the assistance of some form of geek, possessing a specialised knowledge that not everyone has the time to learn.
However, geekhood has by-products. The most notorious is poor self-esteem, because ultimately knowledge is a poor substitute for peer approval. Geeks are sometimes, perhaps even often, able to find a few of their own kind and join a social circle, but even there the poor self-esteen can be fatal. A community of geeks, by its nature, is poorly suited to providing emotional support. When you have a group of people, all of whom hate themselves, they probably also hate each other at some level. It's hard, if not impossible, to get over the desire to bail on your geek friends and become one of the 'normal' people, if only you could.
That kind of damage can easily follow you through your entire life.
It's relatively easy for a geek to decide that their specialised skills or knoledge are more important than the trival pursuits of others. Isolation and a belief that everyone else is stupid can, in a fairly important segment of the geek population, become debilitating. You get guys like the Unibomber that way.
I don't wish to say that geeks are mentally ill, or at any rate more so than the so-called normals, but that a psychological understanding of their circumstances is important to who, and what, they are. I hope Katzes book helps to find that kind of understanding.
We (the X-er geeks) are the first large generation of geeks not to be labelled loosers after growing up. We can at least try to make life a little easier for the next generation of geeks, but it won't happen until we try to understand what happened to us.
It depends on what you mean by 'word' (and what you mean by 'snow') but in the Inuktitut spoken in Iqaluit, I remember only two root words for snow. It think one of them was "qaniit" (or maybe "qanik"?) and the other one was "aput" (or maybe just "apu"?).
There were other words that made references to snow and ice, but so do far more than two words in English.
Also, remember that Inuktitut uses a lot more morphology than English. In theory, Inuktitut could be said to have an effectively infinite number of words for snow, since sometimes complex sentences are turned into single, long words - but in that sense, Inuktitut also has an infinite number of words for 'coffee.'
I'm familiar with Lakoff's work on metaphors, but I don't think his work touches on the Sapir-Whorf question. To put it simply, I don't think his work in metaphors qualifies as linguistics.
Now, I think what he is doing is useful and I'm all for it. I like Lakoff, and his work on categorisation (which is a linguistic topic) was a major influence on me before I traded career for money and became a programmer. However, are his metaphors really linguistic, or rather cultural commodities? None of the metaphors I know him to have described involve word play (eg confusing 'free as in free beer' vs 'free as in freedom'). If I recall what Lakoff was saying, there is no fundamental reason, other than chance and culture, why those same metaphors couldn't exist in Chinese, or Inuit for that matter.
Common sense can throw you for a loop. Look at quantum mechanics - it's about as counterintuitive as you can get. Always hold out for empiricism.
I know Anna Wierzbicka firmly believes in her Lingua Mentalis (even if I'm sceptical) and she's still taken seriously. If she's right, even weak forms of Sapir-Whorf have to be false.
It is hard to say with certainty whether a person's language has any impact on how they think, but I have yet to find any concept that can't be understood and manipulated by a sufficiently intelligent speaker of another language. I don't think even the weak form is generally accepted these days, although I admit some linguists are still holding out for a weak form of the hypothesis.
I have to conceed that a desperately weakened for of Sapir-Whorf may be true, due to the difficulty of distinguishing cultural impact on thought from linguistic impact. But every clear case I know of has failed to show even the weak form.
If you redefine cognitive science to include any scientific data about human minds, I'll agree that the only scientific inputs linguistics is getting come from CogSci. But by that definition, most linguists are cognitive scientists.
I could argue that the data coming from computer science, while helpful, isn't science at all.
The roots of linguistics aren't descriptive, they're even worse, there philological. Early linguists were interested in literature and historic language change. That's the one thing I have to give Chomsky credit for: establishing linguistics outside of the humanities.
Linguistics is no longer taught as an art at any respectable school of theoretical linguistics. There are still many universities where they teach what I might risably call applied linguistics but which mostly ought to be a part of the education department. That is a different story, but it also has different goals.
I spent two semesters in math classes and three in programming labs in order to get my linguistics degree. I spent hours doing SQL queries on usage databases in hopes of getting enough data to do serious statistical analysis to support my hypothesis.
More recently, it has become harder to be taken seriously as a young linguist without some knowledge of AI methods. (This doesn't apply to the hard-core Chomskyans, who don't believe in AI, as if that made any difference.)
In short, things are changing in linguistics.
As for having no feel for science, I have a Bachelor's in Nuclear Physics (from before doing linguistics) and let me point out that my citation of Berlin and Kay is not inappropriate. If the strongest form of Sapir-Whorf were true, this experiment should not have turned out that way. It covers more ground than the neurology of vision processing, since it shows that the mental manipulation of visual signals is independent of the native language of the subject.
We can reformulate Sapir-Whorf to get around this, but depending on who you read, we are left either with a hypothesis that can't be verified (and is thus not science) or a hypothesis so weak as to be useless.
Read Pinker on the subject, he puts forward his case against Sapir-Whorf on the basis (in part) of Berlin and Kay as a cognitive scientist.
If color, which is obviously expressed differently across langauges, does not affect perception of color or mental processing of colours in the abstract, tell me what test will show that a concept can't be manipulated, or whose processing is in some way affected, by a person's langauge.
Having worked with the people responsible for making phone books in Inuktitut, and Bible translators for languages that don't even have a word for 'cross', I submit that the relative ease with which ideas and documents are translated and communicated across language groups is pretty damning evidence agsinst that idea.
Can you find a contrary case?
I can write a toy language that is incapable of doing certain things.
However, assuming C is Turing complete (since I can write a Turing machine in C, I assume it must by definition be complete), I should be able to do anything in it. There is, therefore, no logical reason why choice of language should influence choice of projects. Now, as you pointed out, that doesn't mean I would want to write the Linux kernel in assembly - but it doesn't mean that if I had only assembly language to work with, the idea of the Linux kernel would never occur to me. (This is all hypothetical - I don't write kernels and I doubt I personally would ever write one, in C or any other language. That has nothing to do with the choice of language, it's an admission of my own limited experience and skill.)
However, I'll conceed that empirical analysis of programmers' habits could prove me wrong. There may be influences that I don't see. That's why I expressed scepticism about the conclusion (as far as computer languages go) not hostility (as I have with regard to the same conclusion about human languages.)
C'est clair que l'anglais a emprunté pas mal de mots du francais, mais la question, c'est s'il a emprunté les sens qui y sont liés.
Borrowing words happens. Germans call computers "Komputer", but it doesn't mean that until German had a word for "computer," Germans were incapable of thinking about computers. As soon as the first German was introduced to a computer (perhaps even earlier) the concept became thinkable, even if he (probably he not she) had to borrow a word to say it.
You speak English (I assume you're unilingual, if not, imagine the many folks on /. who are) yet you can clearly understand the difference between 'free as in speech' vs. 'free as in free beer.'
Your language has obviously not restricted your ability to think in this respect. Someone, somewhere, once upon a time, explained what they meant by 'free software' and now you have no trouble thinking clearly about it. The lack of a simple translation has no impact on your ability to think.
But, there are alternatives. One is that thought takes place in some kind of lingua mentalis that is the same for everybody and exists only in the mind. I think this is the majority position among linguists (but is by no means universal.)
There certainly is no evidence that people think in their native language at all, and considerable evidence agsinst the idea. The details would take some time to document and explain.
Due to the failure of experiment to show any Sapir-Whorf effect, after decades of trying, I feel secure in saying that the hypothesis is, certainly in its strongest form, as without merit as the aether or flogiston in physics.
As for books, I recommend starting with Pinker's Language Instinct. It contains some things that I don't think are true, but for someone who isn't a linguist these are mostly minor matters. Language Myths (edited by Bauer and Trudgill) is another good one, and The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax by Pullum and McCawley.
Those are good places to start. If you're looking for something more like an entry level textbook, e-mail me.
...and many even be possible, but it's a very weak form.
Now, computer languages and human languages are very different matters. It is true that I pick my languages on the basis of what kind of project I have to do, unless the spec requires a specific language. When that happens, I can usually solve the problem, even if it isn't as much fun. If I can solve the problem in a language, I'm have some reason to doubt that the choice of language restricts project choices.
So, I'll retain my scepticism with regard to computer languages, but it's just scepticism, I may be wrong about the habits of programmers.
I disagree, but I will conceed that a weakened for of Sapir-Whorf is possible. I don't think people think within the paradigms of a language (in fact, I'm not sure what paradigms a language could have.)
So, my disagreement with a heavily weakened form of Sapir-Whorf is an opinion, not science.
If you can think of a good way to test it, many linguists will be interested to hear it. This whole discussion (while fun) is off-topic to the issue of computer languages. I just wanted to put a stop to some inaccurate folk linguistics, just as I would have if someone had said that eskimos have fifty words for snow.
Shi a! Wo shuo henhaode hanyu.
:^) I have no idea how to say 'moral hazard' in Chinese. I've studied the language quite a lot, but don't get that much practice.
Actually, my Chinese sucks.
I have, however, faced similar enough problems in other langauges to feel confident in my answer. I invite you to look through the linguistics literature if you want a fluent Chinese speaker to pronounce on the issue. I'm sure there is one who has published on the topic.
Gimme an example of someone incapable of thinking something because of language.
I've been in academia. I spent the best years of my life in academia. I know that many disciplines teach the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as received truth, but it is still wrong, wrong, wrong. Would you believe an English prof if he or she was taking about physics, while a physics prof said that it was incorrect? This is a subject where linguists should be trusted over literature profs and anthropologists.
Pinker convers the topic briefly in The Language Instinct. A search at linguistlist.org should find several discussions of the issue. I believe Berlin and Kay's book Basic Colour Terms is back in print, if you want to go to he horses mouth.
I like reading Orwell - certainly I don't mean to dis the guy - but with regard to newspeak, he was just dead wrong. Since he was writing fiction, and since most of modern linguistics didn't exist at the time (and even if it had he probably wouldn't have known anything about it), I don't take it as a big deal.
I direct you to the Berlin and Kay study of colours, the perfect, near completely culture-neutral, test of this hypothesis. Finding a relevant URL will take some time, and I have code to write, so I assure you if you look at their papers for 1969 you will find the one in question.
That 5% was a concession to the handful of linguists (mostly anthropologists) who still take some portion of Sapir-Whorf seriously. In some very weakened form, the idea is still possible, but the strongest form is either unverifiable (and thus has no place in linguistic science) or has already been falsified (as the Berlin and Kay studies, among others, ultimately showed.)
A unilingual Chinese speaker is capable of understanding the notion of 'moral hazard' and can use it as well as an anglophone. Speaking Chinese is not a barrier to comprehension.
Should a Chinese economist wish to discuss the problem of 'moral hazards' in a paper in Chinese, this person will quickly find or devise a term for it and continue without difficulty, at most having to explain the notion at the beginning of the paper. The same is true of most anglophones, the majority of whom probably do not understand the term moral hazard intuitively (at least in the sense that I understand it - primarily as a term in economics) and would require that same explanation.
If this hypothetical economist wishes to show off his English, or simply because any short Chinese term he might use for 'moral hazard' implies too many unwanted connotations, he may simply plop the English term 'moral hazard' into the language. That's how 'deja vu' started. There is no reason why 'deja vu' can't be said using other terms in English - the concept no doubt existed for anglophones before the French term became current.