Ok. Now I'm ready to hear out your explanation for how it is that a person is capable of acquiring language without having a language instinct.
Chomsky's argument is fairly straightforward: Given a blank slate brain, a language-learner will never have sufficient language learning opportunities to learn a language, roughly because there are too many possible hypotheses to consider.
Your complaint that the Chomskys and the Pinkers of the world do not give enough consideration to the social environment learners are embedded in may have some justification, but I think that there are (at least!) two strong responses: 1)Until you give an alternate explanation of how we learn language that can address the poverty of stimulus question, language as instinct is the better of the two foundations 2)Regardless of the dynamics of a social environment, all of the linguistic information available to a language learner can be resolved to the term 'input' if it somehow gets inside the head of a language learner. The Chomskian isn't saying that social dynamics in a speech community is unimportant, but that it does not, and cannot, explain, in of itself, how we are capable of acquiring language.
You are talking about pulling a lot of energy out of the climatic system,
Yeah, I was thinking about that, but actually, I don't think that it would work out that way. That energy we take out of the climatic system (ultimately deriving from the sun (which might put an upward limit on the amount of energy available...)) will most likely be put back out into the atmosphere as heat energy: lightbulbs, computers, electric cars, boiling water.
The difference between that scenario and the present one is that we are expending enormous amounts of sun/fossil fuel energy to obtain more fossil fuel/sun energy (via food)- we are adding more heat than is being put in (at least in a local time-frame), and since we are producing green-house gases like crazy, we're hothousing ourselves at the same time. Adding more energy to the climatic system can have dramatic effects- though of course, what those are are disputed- will we bake, or will it lead to a deep freeze. Hell if I know.
Yes. That's right. And so what? Right now if Party A (the Republicans) get 49% of the vote in a state, and Party B (the Democrats) gets 45% of the vote in a state, and Party C (say, the Greens) gets 6% of the vote, party A wins, despite that Party C and Party B have a combined vote of 51%. Please tell me how this is different from your scenario, except that other parties have more than "no chance in hell" to win an election?
I think that they become less productive mostly because with academic success comes more responsibility- to graduate students, to running an academic department, etc. There is simply less time to devote to work. Also, if one has already made a valuable contribution to the field, and established a career, there is substantially less pressure to really push yourself. Professors trying to receive tenure work damn hard and the pressure is on- they gotta be productive.
But this does not imply that all researchers should be kept at that peak level for their entire career (to maximize productivity). I think that would be counterproductive, and physically and psychologically harmful. Pressure adds a lot of stress, and stress can really kill you. (:
I have my own pet theory about why that russian dude doesn't want the money- he doesn't want to get a visit by the Russian Mafia.
Re:How about supergun or space elevator?
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China Goes Nuclear
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"Probably cause it'd get shot right back up sooner or later (depending on where you dump it)."
Well, I'm not advocating putting it an explosive volcanoe like Mt. Saint Helens! But if you could mix it in a common magma flow, then the material would melt, mix, and become dilute, and then encased in solid rock. I wouldn't enhale while it was being poured in , but I think that is a reasonable solution.
I agree. I'm a left-wing liberal, but I think a lot of left-wing liberals are complete knee-jerk idiots. But then again, so are a lot of right-wingers- they're just less compassionate about it than the left-wingers. ( : For that matter, moderates are idiots too, because really moderate means 'Don't bother me, I'm making money' and/or 'I can't decide what to feel, but I'm not a ditto-head'. People who have both extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing political beliefs are not really moderates- though the 'average weight' of their beliefs is right there in the moderate middle. Hell- the left-right continuum is bull anyway, but it does shape our political discourse, doesn't it.
Re:How about supergun or space elevator?
on
China Goes Nuclear
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· Score: 1
Well, instead, why don't we just dump it in magma?
Thank you for the link. Yes I was a little lazy. ( : As for Tiger Force- I have three things to say- first, I gave links to them because the Tiger Force incident is the one that I am most aware of. I do not mean to characterize all military operations or combat soldiers as participating in the same kidns of stuff 2)I do believe that Tiger Force was not the only source of incidents in Vietnam, but I don't have any specific information available now to support this- I haven't looked. 3)The Tiger Force incident was not limited to the Tiger Force unit- information about the incidents were suppressed by persons up the chain of command- and according to the report the only person charged with a crime was the person who reported a beheading- the crime being that the person said he had personally witnessed the event when he had not. The others in the unit were relieved of duty- not much of a punishment for rape pillage and murder.
As for the Swift Boat Veterans- off the cuff I wouldn't expect them to admit that they had participated in war crimes even if they had. We all have skeletons in our closets (or most of us anyway). On the other hand, I don't know enough about the situation to say if there had been war crimes.
"Call bullshit all you want but the truth is truth, Kerry said he personally saw war crimes, period."
Show me where.
And for that matter, it is well established fact that US Soldiers ripped ears off children, raped young girls, executed whole villages, and napalmed vast amounts of forest in Vietnam. Tigerforce in particular.
Yes, actually, I think that maybe it should have. And for that matter, (though this is something of a different issue), a new constitution might not be a bad idea either- for example one that eliminates all reference to blacks being 3/5 of a person. yes, I know these passages have been stricken through, but the message is still apparent when one reads a copy of the constitution.
What I should have said is that all of the great, long lasting legends, while having their amusing hook, usually seem feasible and/or hard to disprove.
I agree. I do think that one of the reasons that they don't tend to die out is because they are difficult to disprove (not many want to spend the time doing so either). I was a little harsh on you (rain on your parade). Sorry. Sometimes on/. we tend to forget that we're talking to other people. Anonymity doesn't always bring out the best in us. You were really civil.
Urban legends only perpepuate because people believe them.
Sorry to rain on the parade, but urban legends are not perpetuated simply because people believe them- they're perpetuated because people tell them to other people (the Perpetuate them!), irregardless whether or not they believe them. In any case, most story tellers just like to tell stories- its not a matter of believing or disbelieving, but a matter of- will the audience like the story?-
So what does that prove about a biological basis for Beethoven?
I basically agree with you. The nature/nurture continuum here is largely irrelevant. Any experience is going to have its physical correlate in the brain- but the whole idea of nurture as it is popularly espoused is contrary to this idea. But it is a matter of course. On the other hand, one should I think resist equating nature with genes. The neural machinery for vision does not fully develop until exposure to light. Nature should be something like gene information input and environmental information input affecting development. What is nurture should more properly be called information affecting development coming from an external social source. As such, nature vs nurture is not so much a dichotomy as it is a class-category relation- nurture is a sub-class of environmental inputs to development.
Well mostly banning most of these books is a little...silly. Banning 1984? come on!
On the other hand, I don't object that libraries may refuse to purchase "The Anarchists Cookbook". "So Johnny, why did you blow up the school?" "Well, sir, I checked out this book at the school library..."
Well, in any case the Cookbook isn't terribly reliable anyway.
Homosexuality isn't a choice any more than heterosexuality is. You can't "promote" something that you can't choose. By definition.
As far as I know, the innateness of homosexuality has yet to been conclusively confirmed or rejected. It certainly seems the case that many people disagree about this issue. However, we do know that some people choose to live certain lifestyles, or participate in certain acts that might be called lifestyle.
I think that itmay very well be the case that homosexuality and heterosexuality, as, um, polar opposites, is mainly a Western and modern invention- meaning that it might certainly be the case that our conception of people being either one or the other is equally as well founded, or as unfounded, as other conceptions of sexuality that have been prevalent in a variety of cultures though time.
f anyone can point me to some very well thought-out and well reasoned publications on homosexuality- both from the biological and the social point of view, I'd be interested in taking a look at them.
Indeed. An economist making a valuable contribution to science... that's almost as absurd as, oh, I don't know, a patent clerk making a valuable contribution to science.
That's a laugh. Economic theory has made valuable contributions to evolutionary theory, for example, especially to theory about mate selection.
The fields of economics (especially behavioural economics), psychology (especially evolutionary psychology), cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, etc. are integrating themselves to an unprecedented degree, with numerous cross-over. As a suggestion, read anything by Cosmides, Maynard Smith, Lewontin, Dwight Read, Robert Boyd, Daniel Dennet, Pascal Boyer, or anything from the working papers at the Santa Fe Institute.
For example, the kinds of cognitive biases and anomalies explored by, among others, Tversky, Wason, and Cosmides, naturally intersect with the concept of bounded rationality in behavioral economics, and have been implemented in the design of agents in game theoretic models to answer a variety of questions. Game theory itself is a richly useful tool. Game theory has been successfully applied to modeling biological evolution ever since the innovative work of R.C. Lewontin and Maynard Smith, and evolutionary game theory and the concept of an Evolutionary Stable Strategy have become standard game theoretic tools used in a number of disciplines. Game theory has been an important tool in the study of the evolution of altruism and the evolution of signalling, both significant topics in the study of the evolution of Homo sapiens. For example, our capacity to have 'theory of mind' has been tied to, among other things, an evolutionary pressure to gain the capacity to manipulate others and to avoid being manipulated by others. An interesting sub-genre of game-theory is that of iterated games played in structured populations where structure is defined in terms of network topology. Population structure is an important consideration in both population genetics, where it determines the pathways of gene flow, and in cultural evolution, where it determines the pathways of information flow.
I love the Economist, and though they are a biased news magazine, they also clearly state what their bias is in every edition. Most Economist articles are thorough and cheap. However, I'm curious why they covered this article- it wasn't published in a major journal. I haven't read the paper yet, so I can't judge it yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Chomsky's argument is fairly straightforward: Given a blank slate brain, a language-learner will never have sufficient language learning opportunities to learn a language, roughly because there are too many possible hypotheses to consider.
Your complaint that the Chomskys and the Pinkers of the world do not give enough consideration to the social environment learners are embedded in may have some justification, but I think that there are (at least!) two strong responses: 1)Until you give an alternate explanation of how we learn language that can address the poverty of stimulus question, language as instinct is the better of the two foundations 2)Regardless of the dynamics of a social environment, all of the linguistic information available to a language learner can be resolved to the term 'input' if it somehow gets inside the head of a language learner. The Chomskian isn't saying that social dynamics in a speech community is unimportant, but that it does not, and cannot, explain, in of itself, how we are capable of acquiring language.
Anyway, I'm waiting.
Give it to Saddam, to justify the war in Iraq.
You are talking about pulling a lot of energy out of the climatic system,
Yeah, I was thinking about that, but actually, I don't think that it would work out that way. That energy we take out of the climatic system (ultimately deriving from the sun (which might put an upward limit on the amount of energy available...)) will most likely be put back out into the atmosphere as heat energy: lightbulbs, computers, electric cars, boiling water.
The difference between that scenario and the present one is that we are expending enormous amounts of sun/fossil fuel energy to obtain more fossil fuel/sun energy (via food)- we are adding more heat than is being put in (at least in a local time-frame), and since we are producing green-house gases like crazy, we're hothousing ourselves at the same time. Adding more energy to the climatic system can have dramatic effects- though of course, what those are are disputed- will we bake, or will it lead to a deep freeze. Hell if I know.
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Yes. That's right. And so what? Right now if Party A (the Republicans) get 49% of the vote in a state, and Party B (the Democrats) gets 45% of the vote in a state, and Party C (say, the Greens) gets 6% of the vote, party A wins, despite that Party C and Party B have a combined vote of 51%. Please tell me how this is different from your scenario, except that other parties have more than "no chance in hell" to win an election?
But this does not imply that all researchers should be kept at that peak level for their entire career (to maximize productivity). I think that would be counterproductive, and physically and psychologically harmful. Pressure adds a lot of stress, and stress can really kill you. ( :
I have my own pet theory about why that russian dude doesn't want the money- he doesn't want to get a visit by the Russian Mafia.
Well, I'm not advocating putting it an explosive volcanoe like Mt. Saint Helens! But if you could mix it in a common magma flow, then the material would melt, mix, and become dilute, and then encased in solid rock. I wouldn't enhale while it was being poured in , but I think that is a reasonable solution.
I agree. I'm a left-wing liberal, but I think a lot of left-wing liberals are complete knee-jerk idiots. But then again, so are a lot of right-wingers- they're just less compassionate about it than the left-wingers. ( : For that matter, moderates are idiots too, because really moderate means 'Don't bother me, I'm making money' and/or 'I can't decide what to feel, but I'm not a ditto-head'. People who have both extreme left-wing and extreme right-wing political beliefs are not really moderates- though the 'average weight' of their beliefs is right there in the moderate middle. Hell- the left-right continuum is bull anyway, but it does shape our political discourse, doesn't it.
Well, instead, why don't we just dump it in magma?
Yes. Why couldn't you just dump it in a volcanoe? Even an erupting one- incase the waste in solid rock (once it cools).
As for the Swift Boat Veterans- off the cuff I wouldn't expect them to admit that they had participated in war crimes even if they had. We all have skeletons in our closets (or most of us anyway). On the other hand, I don't know enough about the situation to say if there had been war crimes.
thanks again.
Show me where.
And for that matter, it is well established fact that US Soldiers ripped ears off children, raped young girls, executed whole villages, and napalmed vast amounts of forest in Vietnam. Tigerforce in particular.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Force_(comman dos)
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/WNT/Investigation /vietnam_tiger_force_031112-1.html
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Tiger_force_1208 03.htm
Irregardless of whether or not Kerry's reports were valid.
Yes, actually, I think that maybe it should have. And for that matter, (though this is something of a different issue), a new constitution might not be a bad idea either- for example one that eliminates all reference to blacks being 3/5 of a person. yes, I know these passages have been stricken through, but the message is still apparent when one reads a copy of the constitution.
I agree. I do think that one of the reasons that they don't tend to die out is because they are difficult to disprove (not many want to spend the time doing so either). I was a little harsh on you (rain on your parade). Sorry. Sometimes on /. we tend to forget that we're talking to other people. Anonymity doesn't always bring out the best in us. You were really civil.
Sorry to rain on the parade, but urban legends are not perpetuated simply because people believe them- they're perpetuated because people tell them to other people (the Perpetuate them!), irregardless whether or not they believe them. In any case, most story tellers just like to tell stories- its not a matter of believing or disbelieving, but a matter of- will the audience like the story?-
I basically agree with you. The nature/nurture continuum here is largely irrelevant. Any experience is going to have its physical correlate in the brain- but the whole idea of nurture as it is popularly espoused is contrary to this idea. But it is a matter of course. On the other hand, one should I think resist equating nature with genes. The neural machinery for vision does not fully develop until exposure to light. Nature should be something like gene information input and environmental information input affecting development. What is nurture should more properly be called information affecting development coming from an external social source. As such, nature vs nurture is not so much a dichotomy as it is a class-category relation- nurture is a sub-class of environmental inputs to development.
On the other hand, I don't object that libraries may refuse to purchase "The Anarchists Cookbook". "So Johnny, why did you blow up the school?" "Well, sir, I checked out this book at the school library..."
Well, in any case the Cookbook isn't terribly reliable anyway.
Now where would all those sunflowers be grown, and what state will have to rename itself The Sunflower State?
6 bad movies must be better than 3!
As far as I know, the innateness of homosexuality has yet to been conclusively confirmed or rejected. It certainly seems the case that many people disagree about this issue. However, we do know that some people choose to live certain lifestyles, or participate in certain acts that might be called lifestyle.
I think that itmay very well be the case that homosexuality and heterosexuality, as, um, polar opposites, is mainly a Western and modern invention- meaning that it might certainly be the case that our conception of people being either one or the other is equally as well founded, or as unfounded, as other conceptions of sexuality that have been prevalent in a variety of cultures though time.
f anyone can point me to some very well thought-out and well reasoned publications on homosexuality- both from the biological and the social point of view, I'd be interested in taking a look at them.
I know, I totally missed the point. So I apologize, and I'll chalk it up to the fact that I was tired.
If I had the chance to do it, I'd call it Lindows.
I didn't mean to write 'cheap'. And the Economist is NOT cheap. strange that I wrote that.
That's a laugh. Economic theory has made valuable contributions to evolutionary theory, for example, especially to theory about mate selection.
The fields of economics (especially behavioural economics), psychology (especially evolutionary psychology), cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, etc. are integrating themselves to an unprecedented degree, with numerous cross-over. As a suggestion, read anything by Cosmides, Maynard Smith, Lewontin, Dwight Read, Robert Boyd, Daniel Dennet, Pascal Boyer, or anything from the working papers at the Santa Fe Institute.
For example, the kinds of cognitive biases and anomalies explored by, among others, Tversky, Wason, and Cosmides, naturally intersect with the concept of bounded rationality in behavioral economics, and have been implemented in the design of agents in game theoretic models to answer a variety of questions. Game theory itself is a richly useful tool. Game theory has been successfully applied to modeling biological evolution ever since the innovative work of R.C. Lewontin and Maynard Smith, and evolutionary game theory and the concept of an Evolutionary Stable Strategy have become standard game theoretic tools used in a number of disciplines. Game theory has been an important tool in the study of the evolution of altruism and the evolution of signalling, both significant topics in the study of the evolution of Homo sapiens. For example, our capacity to have 'theory of mind' has been tied to, among other things, an evolutionary pressure to gain the capacity to manipulate others and to avoid being manipulated by others. An interesting sub-genre of game-theory is that of iterated games played in structured populations where structure is defined in terms of network topology. Population structure is an important consideration in both population genetics, where it determines the pathways of gene flow, and in cultural evolution, where it determines the pathways of information flow.
cheers
I love the Economist, and though they are a biased news magazine, they also clearly state what their bias is in every edition. Most Economist articles are thorough and cheap. However, I'm curious why they covered this article- it wasn't published in a major journal. I haven't read the paper yet, so I can't judge it yet.