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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

I'd challenge this with a thought experiment. Imagine we put a group of toddlers on an island and somehow give them knowledge of language (and enough sustenance to survive), but absolutely 0 external input otherwise. These people, as they grow, would gradually develop their own views, values, and perspectives. Do the exact same thing on another island and you'd get entirely different results! One can see this very thing with the various isolated/uncontacted tribes.

Obviously our environment influences us, but we are largely a product of ourselves. And that aspect is what drives us to seek out the things we do. Which can then, in turn, make it seem that the things we seek out have turned us into who we are.

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This thought experiment is deeply flawed as it assumes that what you propose is possible and the outcome would be as you suggest. I am not convinced that people can bootstrap themselves like this and that language itself does not contain views, values and perspectives.

Step one with someone locked or frozen-stuck in such belief-logic is that improvement is possible - which is part of developing psychological flexibility.

You'd have to pay attention and find any step forward possible for them to begin to enter the discomfort that is holding them back - which may be the biggest challenge of their lives up until that point.

Ideally though, as we're all sheep to some degree - which is exactly what this HN post is stating in a more sophisticated way, and attempting to warn for this - ideally there's a culture of practices that develop oneself, so you're just going along with the "herd" - that path hopefully not corrupted and led by bad actors attempting to send us off a cliff or into their totalitarian pen.

> that language itself does not contain views, values and perspectives.

Language itself does, in fact, very much contain views, values and perspectives. As an example, there are population groups that do not have a word for the color blue, and that cannot, in consequence, distinguish between green and blue objects. [0] [1] And that's an example that has been noticed throughout the world.

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-didn-t-even-see-the-colo...

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2023/how-blue-and-green-appeared-langua...

The claims in the first link, at least, should set off your BS detector. The colors they claim the group could trivially identify are very near identical in terms of 3d distance. By contrast, the colors they claim they could not determine the difference between are extremely far in 3d distance. It's objectively illogical. A quick search turns up that the claims are indeed false, and were fabricated by the BBC for a documentary. Here's [1] an email chain involving various researchers that worked on these experiments. The conclusion is that:

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"The experiment shown in the documentary was a dramatization; the genuine color experiments done with the Himba, some years before, used a different sort of stimuli and a different experimental method; the stimuli shown in the documentary were modeled on those used by Paul Kay and others in experiments on other groups; but in all of the relevant experiments, the dependent measure was reaction time (in finding a matching color or an oddball color), not success or failure.

The BBC's presentation of the mocked-up experiment — purporting to show that the Himba are completely unable to distinguish blue and green shades that seem quite different to us, but can easily distinguish shades of green that seem identical to us — was apparently a journalistic fabrication, created by the documentary's editors after the fact, and was never asserted by the researchers themselves, much less demonstrated experimentally."

---

[1] - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18237

I did not do a full literature study of the claims of the article, as that was meant as an illustration of the point, and it was the first relevant link that popped up.

Whatever the alleged fabrications of the BBC might have been or not been for the Himba experiments, similar observations have been made for other groups as well, from Amazonian tribes, to population groups in Papua New Guinea, to Aborigines in Australia. And the MIT research link is discussing a very similar result.

That languages influence how you perceive and see the world has been well studied and is well documented.

I do not think the actual experiments demonstrate this. The experiment the BBC demoed probably would, but it was fabricated. The actual experiments just demonstrate a pretty obvious aspect of learning. If you tell somebody who doesn't play chess all the names of the pieces, and ask him to tell you which is the rook, he's going to be slower and less accurate at it than somebody who plays chess. But there's not some huge epiphany like you can show him a collection of 5 bishops, 1 rook, and him be unable to tell which is different. It's no different with colors, or any new term.

I have personal experience with this, learning Russian. They don't have just blue, but rather a term for dark blue and one for light blue. It's hardly some eye opening thing - it's basically sky blue vs ocean blue. It's obvious and easy, but obviously I will always be slower than a native on a quiz of which is which for reasons that have nothing to do with the colors. Vice versa, compare our speeds in English with 'sky blue' vs 'ocean blue' and I'd be back to winning.

A common trend in the social sciences is creating experiments that aren't designed to challenge one's hypothesis, but confirm it. The publication bias against negative results is probably necessary, but also turning a lot of soft science into a facade.

Giving a knowledge of a language is a _huge_ external input, intertwined with culture and life experience of the language teacher.

And the smaller the external input we give to this group of toddler, the more they will resemble a violent pack of chimps in the end. Unlikely to develop their own values and perspectives.

why "violent pack of chimps" instead of free-loving bonobos?

Off topic but it seems that bonobos are not that peaceful compared to the chimps.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2426678-peaceful-male-b...

Interesting, thanks.

"However, Gisela Kaplan at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, says she found the paper extremely frustrating and that the word “aggression” is being misused.

Chimpanzee groups are ruled by one dominant male, whereas bonobos are ruled by females. Competitions for dominance and mating rights in bonobos shouldn’t be confused with aggression, says Kaplan. “There’s more pointless violence in chimpanzees and humans than in other species like bonobos,” she says."

Well, again - I think the isolated tribes are a good example. Two different examples are the Sentinelese and the Nukak. The former are actively hostile and violent to any outsiders, with very few exceptions, while the Nukak were completely peaceful and receptive since their first contact. These isolated tribes are largely a mirror into the past that give us a view of what humanity, in all of its diverse forms, might have looked like long ago.

In any case you also have an ancestor issue. The views, values, and so on that we take for granted simply did not exist at some point. Yet, here we are.

These tribes aren't isolated in true. Over 1000s of years, they have interacted with world outside and formed a generational wisdom and values. If 100 years back British/French came and enslaved some members, the behavior is expected.

No true Scotsman, eh? There's no reason to think these groups have had any contact with the outside world, beyond the fact that at some point they obviously diverged from whatever common ancestor we all share. Both are extremely small groups living in similarly extremely isolated locations - Sentinelese in an isolated island, Nukak deep in the Amazonian interior, far from rivers. And the Nukak's population has been decimated by common disease since they made contact, further suggesting 0 exposure to even other local peoples.

I am not a historian. Andaman and Nicobar (neighbor of Sentinelese) is occupied / use as naval base by outsiders for >1000 years. None of the Cholas, Europeans, Japan ever contacted/impacted them seems highly unlikely.

Contacts tended to be recorded. You can read ships logs now going back hundreds of years, often with illustrations. There's not a whole lot that happens in most ship voyages, so things like running into a weird group on an isolated island would absolutely have been recorded in immense detail. Of course I can't prove, beyond any question, that they weren't contacted, but there's 0 evidence to suggest they were, and immense evidence to suggest they were not. For the Nukak this is at least as true as well.

You're rolling a die and claiming the result was dictated by the die. All outcomes are probabilistic.

Though there's a shocking amount of convergent evolution.

Where do you see this convergence? From my perspective, the 'Out of Africa' hypothesis [1] suggests that the current breadth of humanity started from a migration from around 50,000-70,000 years ago. To get from a group that would have probably been quite homogeneous, to the extreme diversity of basically every single thing we see today - physical, ideological, cultural, etc - in such an incredibly short time frame, would suggest to me that even the briefest of moments apart sets us all on radically different courses.

Humans, relatively to most animals, also have an extremely slow generational time, which I think also further emphasizes this divergence. If we assume a low end generational time of just 20 years, even that is as few 2,500 generations, hardly a blink in time on a normal evolutionary scale.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder...

The books I've read have a say in this. Rutger Bregman concluded in his Humankind - a Hopeful History that deep down human is pretty decent. So I'm thinking the turnout would be rather similar in different communities.

I was kinda impressed with Bergman once the book came out so I took nine copies to Finnish MP's to share. Unfortunately they were not too interested in the humane message the book told

I would agree that humans are pretty decent in tiny communities. Scaling beyond that they are absolutely unquestionably horrific monsters. Without any doubt. And those communities are not ready to punish their own community for those horrific deeds they comitted.

I take a slightly different perspective (while sharing a similar final perspective) on the community issue. Rather I think individual choice drives people to communities that they, at least broadly, align with. So you end up with communities that are not only overly permissive towards their own, but also overly critical of those outside of it. But then as those communities grow large enough divisions start to form even within the like-minded community itself, and eventually you get a division there (that often ends in an internal conflict), and that community divides again, almost like a cell splitting into two new cells. And then the process starts to repeat once again in these new cells.

Add in cells merging every once in a while, and you have the abbreviated history of humanity in one paragraph.

>overly permissive towards their own, but also overly critical of those outside of it

aka: tribalism.

Small changes accumulate and lead to divergence.

Even if you could make the toddlers physically identical, you can't place them all in the same point in space and always see, hear, touch the same things.

Add randomness inherent in the current understanding of (quantum) physics and you'd need a strong convergence mechanism for your experiment to prove what you're saying.

> Obviously our environment influences us, but we are largely a product of ourselves

Even a brief look out your window will convince you this cannot possibly be true.

How many people have a different religion than their parents? How many Christians from Iowa have kids that decide they're actually Hindu? Just about zero.

Can you tell where someone is from based on how they dress? Heck yes. If they were making up their mind on their own you couldn't.

The likelihood you'll go into the military is far higher if other people in your family are in the military. 1% of Americans serve at all. But 60% of people who serve have an immediate family member (parent or sibling) who serves.

We could go on endlessly.

The idea that we're largely a product of ourselves is absurd. How many top physics were born in Eastern Europe be Africa? Do people in Africa genetically hate physics? No. But you're largely a product of your environment.

Ibn Tufail reached the same conclusion using the same metaphors 900 years ago in his Philosophus Autodidactus.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayy_ibn_Yaqdhan

Probably the most important work of Arabic philosophy.

The same will happen if you take two identical double pendulums and give them an as identical push as possible. Minute differences in initial conditions and in the environment can lead to arbitrarily large differences in outcome, while everything still being wholly deterministic.

We really have little idea how much our character and behavior is formed by experiences and how much by our DNA. Though pretty clearly, early experiences generally have a larger effect than later experiences.

Apparently Frederick II (the Holy Roman Emperor) tried it to see what was the innate language that people speak, but the toddlers just died.

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