This reminded me of a story my professor once told us back in college. I was studying sign language and she is deaf. She told us growing up in the old days they didn't had specialized schools for deaf people (since they could read?!) so she attended regular school and was not doing ok. She struggled a lot until she finally got the attention that she needed from a teacher who was able to instruct her in sign language (which believe you or not is Brazil's second official language). Before that she told us she was not able to have complex thoughts. She didn't know her father had a name, for instance. She thought his "name" was daddy. She is a brilliant woman and I'm glad I attended her class and also, that she was able to find someone who helped her, growing up.
James Gleick in The Information also describes cases of the effect of traditional literacy on complexity/abstraction of thought.
He claims that literacy is nearly a prerequisite for things like zeroth-order logical reasoning and understanding of abstract shapes. Two examples he gives:
- Some illiterate people are told that all bears in the north are white, that Greenland is a country in the north, then they are asked what colours bears in Greenland have. They answer, "Different regions have differently coloured bears. I haven't been to Greenland. But I have seen a brown bear."
I would have said, "Based on the information you gave me, I would guess white."
- When shown a rectangle and asked what shape it is some illiterate answer things like "a door" or "a playing card" but struggle to find things doors and playing cards have in common.
I go to the abstract shapes immediately when I'm shown drawings by my son. It's almost at a point where it feels like my logical/abstract reasoning stands in the way of creativity.
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But I don't know how much this is personality (I happen to have a knack for logical/abstract reasoning and I happened to learn to read when I was very young) and how much is an effect of reading. After all, anthropologists are great at the concrete rather than abstract, but maybe they get lots of training in it. I've also heard the Japanese are better at it.
TFA clearly postulates it has more to do with the kind of vocabulary, or maybe it's on an increasing scale with more language.
This makes me wonder about what turned out to be a pivotal moment in my early life. It was the day I first realized other people have their own minds, and that I could predict with some degree of accuracy what was in them.
My dad wrote the numbers 1 through 4 on a piece of paper, then asked me to pick one, but not tell him which I'd chosen. Once I had it, he said, "You picked 3, didn't you?" I was dumbfounded. "How did you do that??"
"Most people don't like to be out on the edges. It makes them uncomfortable. So they don't pick 1 or 4. And most people, like you, are right-handed, so they pick 3 over 2."
"OK, OK, do it again." (This was the moment a flash of magic happened in my head.)
"You picked 1 this time, didn't you?"
"No, I picked 3 again because I knew you would think I would pick 1 this time."
With a fear in his eyes that I only later discovered came from the fact that his own sense of safety depended on being the smartest person in the room, he said, "You're only 3. I don't think you're supposed to know how to do that yet."
But here's the other thing--I was literate when I was 3. Nobody really knows how I picked it up, but one day I told my mom it was my turn to read the stories, and I've been reading fluently ever since. I've been told I read differently than most people even now (blocks of text rather than individual letters or words), but I was definitely reading.
I've never associated the two events before, nor that maybe I was only able to do one because of the other, but it makes sense of the fact that other kids didn't really start to seem reasonable or thoughtful until 1st or 2nd grade. They lived in these imaginary worlds where things didn't have to make sense. It seemed like a lot of fun, but I had trouble joining them there. I always assumed both skills just correlated with age, not that one might facilitate the other.
My story obviously doesn't prove anything, but you've given me an interesting thing to think about today!
This is called theory of mind and I've been experimenting on my first child as he has grown up and he had it much earlier than research would suggest. (I even tried replicating one of the actual experiments used.)
I suspect there's large individual variation as to when it is acquited. My son is relatively socially competent and intetested in letters and numbers but not yet literate at four.
We'll see how my second child fares -- she is even more socially competent but does not yet speak (first child did her age) so we'll see when it can be done.
My mother had stroke like 20 years ago. All of my siblings including myself have had moments of real trouble when we talk to her. She's very functional, but there's a sense that she is not putting herself in our shoes, which comes across as lacking empathy. Even when we try to outwardly express distress, it's like she's blind to it. I just realized recently that stroke survivors can suffer impairment to their Theory of Mind, basically rendering them blind to what others are feeling. That sense can be gone or be impaired. This was such a revelation to me and suddenly everything in the last decade made perfect sense. All this time we thought she was just really self-centered or 'slow'. It caused real frustrations and there were times we even broke down because we expect something that's just not there. We didn't know.
My own mother has never had a stroke, but she has very little awareness of her own emotional states. She is an incredibly intelligent person and works in clinical medicine, but she has always come across as harsh and even cruel, because she has never shown much empathy for emotions more complex than simple fear. I think her deficiency in recognizing her own emotional states contributes to her apparent lack of empathy.
For example, she cannot recognize her own anxiety. She is a pathologically anxious person with OCD, but would never describe herself as so. As such, she has never been able to empathize with the fact that both of her children have anxiety disorders and one had severe childhood OCD.
It was not a great way to grow up, although that kind of emotional neglect is what made me a more resilient person in the end...
I firmly believe now that this is a skillset missing in families/cultures that is totally developable in therapy (recognizing own and as a consequence other people’s emotions).
This is actually a missing education in my opinion.
Absolutely. I use my grandmother as an example of what happens when you take family away from someone.
My grandmother lived between orphanages and an abusive mother who literally beat one of her children retarded with a frying pan.
She was determined to give her children a better life. And she did! She turned to her friends to figure out basic life skills. My mother had an idyllic childhood.
However, my grandma only knew how to survive an abusive childhood. She taught my mother to 'pretend everything is okay' when things were bad, because that's how she survived.
My mother married an angry and cruel man and had children with him - my sister and me. She pretended everything was okay as our father told us we were stupid and worthless, backing up his opinion with violence. Years later, she still doesn't understand why we are distant with her because she still lives in her fantasy world.
Now, imagine taking family away from an entire group of people. All traditions wiped out.
Do you mean required education? Therapy exists but it is not required unless asked for.
I have mixed feelings on it. It can be great for some people. For me, understanding how I feel and act now as a consequence of my parents actions was not helpful. Taking 2-3 months to get to these points also was not a good use of time.
No I’m not saying therapy should be required, but I do say that we miss it as a society on educational level.
I’m not saying I know how to fulfill that.
I am in therapy for 2 years now (and not planning to stop for a while), the results I really enjoy and that are visible from outside and clear conseqences are only starting to crystallize.
Imagine “learning C++” in 2 months. And that is purely mental. These emotional skills are not easy at all. This is a whole new “riding a bike”, but on all the million wheels of a real human that is you.
Understanding is not the result. The result is your comfort, your confidence, your loving yourself, you being your own perfect loving parent and close friend.
this missing piece also seems to be described under the banner "narcissism", which is a coping mechanism often acquired in childhood to deal with some sort of abuse or trauma
> I told my mom it was my turn to read the stories
My son did the same thing at 3. I tested whether he was really reading by turning the pages wrong, and he recited the story just like we read it every night... not reading the actual pages in front of him. He really thought he could read, but he had just memorized. And he did read quickly after that, but when recalling your own memory of reality from toddlerhood, odds are your memories are not accurate.
I'd be wary about how much of your ego you base on such memories, otherwise you sound similar to how you described your dad - as having a need to be smart.
Site note: As a grade A certified computer nerd I come here for tech discussions.
However the article comments I enjoy the most are always these threads regarding sociology or psychology. I don't know other places where readers can psychoanalyze each other respectfully. Kudos.
I'm so curious about the last part of your comment. You're not the only one who seems...at least uncomfortable with?...the idea that there was an odd little 3yo girl back in the '80s somewhere who once had a weird conversation with her dad. I can't even think of a reason someone might make that up in a pseudonymous internet forum. It's not like any of you know (or care, I'm sure!) who I am.
I related the story because I thought my experience might offer an uncommon perspective on the parent comment. That's all.
Even granting the likelihood that you didn't see my comments elsewhere in the thread about how he was an abusive narcissist, warning me about becoming like the unnecessarily insecure guy in the story seems like an oddly low blow to try to strike in this context.
"With a fear in his eyes that I only later discovered came from the fact that his own sense of safety depended on being the smartest person in the room, he said, "You're only 3. I don't think you're supposed to know how to do that yet.""
I feel like that episode describes most of common education. In theory outstanding excellence is wanted, in reality often not so much, as this causes problems. Better teach them how to stay in line.
I figured out far too early that I was thinking on abstraction levels different from my teachers. I say "far too early" because it was before I had the social maturity to know better than to point it out. I didn't mean to be a pain in the ass. I genuinely wanted to know if they had thought about the things I was wondering. I didn't mean to make them look stupid. I didn't even know enough to realize it was how I asked questions, not their own stupidity, that was making them look stupid.
School was rough, though not as rough as having a parent who felt threatened by me.
I feel like this story of a memory reimagined by an adult from the perspective of himself as a very precocious three year old sounds more like projection of the OP's current relationship with their father back onto a childhood memory mixed with arrogance and a desire to brag about how smart they are online for attention.
It's downright unbelievable to me that anyone would have this detailed of a memory of when they were three, or that a three year old could detect subtle and repressed jealousy for intelligence -- if such an emotion was expressed and not imagined by the child in the first place -- and additionally the emotion allegedly detected is extremely advanced for a toddler to understand.
Unless the OP is thirteen. That would explain the arrogance and being able to remember being three so well.
I think it's central to the story that it was highly unusual. My dad couldn't believe I could do that, so it doesn't surprise me that you can't either. Many children aren't speaking clearly at 3, much less reasoning about what is likely to be in another person's mind. I do remember he reacted by growing cold, which surprised me because I thought it was a great cool new thing I had discovered. But as I said, I didn't interpret at the time. I only realized why he reacted so differently from how adult me would react to a 3-year-old today because I know so much more about him now.
I was an unusual little kid--and a girl, not a boy, though that's not terribly relevant to the story. Not really sure what else to tell you. I don't think I progressed intellectually any farther than most people do, but I did progress faster, which was especially noticeable when I was young. I have the handwritten list my mom made of the 100 words I could use correctly by my first birthday. My earliest vivid memory is of my 2nd birthday party. For all I know, I may also have been very close to turning 4 at the time this story took place, but I know my being 3 contributed to his unease, and I know I was reading at 3. It's not a brag. Being an unusual little kid (honestly I usually just say "weird") just added another perspective to the parent comment.
I thought your anecdote and commentary were relevant and extremely thought-provoking.
The person you're responding to here was clearly emotionally triggered by your anecdote. I wouldn't spend too much time trying "convince" them that what you wrote is true.
Those responses have puzzled me the most. Like, OK, there was an odd little girl somewhere in the world back in the '80s. So what?
We know there are kids who earn graduate degrees in their early teens. Why is it implausible that the occasional 3yo could have thought about picking 1, but then suddenly had a flash of, "No wait! That's exactly what he will expect! He'll never expect me to pick 3 again!" and remember it?
I believe you, why? Because I sat in the back of a friend's car next to her 3 year old that started conversing with me as fluently as a grown up.
It was extremely jarring to have a small child in a booster seat converse with me as if she was 16. Her mother laughed at me: "Oh yeah. She's very advanced for her age."
I've heard stories of 3 year olds who speak 5 languages. Even writing this it makes me recall children who can write / play symphonies.
The "3 year olds aren't smart" thinking is quite limiting.
One of the things I wish people had realized about me back then was that just because I had the verbal fluency and reasoning ability of a much older child, it didn't mean I had the maturity and life experience of one. I still had such an incredibly limited knowledge pool to draw from, having only been on the planet for 3 years and only able to move myself around in it (and even then, not through basic things like doors due to handles I couldn't reach) for an even shorter time.
It's so tempting to treat kids who are precocious on one front as though they're older than they are, and expect them to do things like recognize dangers, or navigate social situations, or even know how to manage their own limits, but they're still also really little kids who need the adults in their lives to love them and care for them!
"or that a three year old could detect subtle and repressed jealousy for intelligence"
He did not claim that. He claimed he interpreted it later like this.
Apart from that, there might be projection, but I know that I have some very clear memories from being 3 as well. Now I obviously do not know, how far my memory matches reality. But I would not just dismiss the story. Many people are insecure about their intelligence. And when there is an actual intelligent beeing - the common reaction of the crowd is not cheering, when the smart person is so stupid to show he is smarter than the crowd.
You’ll be censored but are nevertheless absolutely correct. I suspect many of those downvoting you have never had a 3 year old.
I have several children, and great relationships with all of them. A couple are definitely smarter than me, and I’m on roughly equal footing with the others. That said, 3 year old children are simply not capable of the complex thought and emotions described here.
I don't even think it means I'm particularly "smart," whatever that means. I just picked up one specific set of skills extremely early that happen to be highly valued in young children.
It may also be related to trauma. All of those I know with earlier memories were almost always in an unsafe home environment, eg: narcisstic/abusive parents. Probably kicks your memory into high gear because suddenly it matters that you remember what to do and what not to do to avoid injury or pain.
Hmm. I could definitely see that. Learn to speak early because the parent obviously isn't recognizing and responding to your needs the way you're already trying to communicate them (not that it'll help; not being able to understand isn't the narcissist's problem). Do your best to create extensive mental pattern lists of safe/unsafe things to do or say (not that it'll help; narcissists aren't consistent even with themselves). Do everything in your power to seem like those bigger people who are safer than you (not that it'll help).
It's amazing how much growing up with a parent like that can mess you up. I actually thought I had undiagnosed high-functioning autism for awhile, because I thought I was terrible at reading social cues, and was so easily and frequently overstimulated. It took some serious therapy to discover, no, I'm fine at reading nonverbal and social cues. I just spent the entirety of my formative years being gaslit at every turn about what my dad's expressions meant, so learned I couldn't trust myself. And I'm much more highly attuned to my surroundings because I spent the entirety of my formative years knowing threats loomed around every corner, because ANY wrong thing could set dad off. It was trauma, nit autism. My parasympathetic nervous system never learned to come online and down-regulate, because the threat was never over. My body and brain developed in the constant presence of cortisol and adrenaline. That does make it so I'm easily overstimulated.
One of the things I'm working on is cultivating gratitude even for the worst things in my life, in light of the goodness in it now. I wouldn't be the same me were it not for those things, and if I'm grateful for who I am now, I can't really pick and choose which parts of that history I'm grateful for. I don't really like that it's all-or-nothing, that I can't be completely grateful for the present if I still reject my past, but it's working a lot better than anything else has. I do not and will never condone many of the things in my past, but being grateful for all the parts has been part of my journey to gratitude for the whole.
This gels so much with my experience, thank you for sharing. The lack of down-regulation is exhausting at times.
Your work on gratitude mirrors my experience as besides that and some psychedelic experiences to help process from a less traumatic dissociative state were some of the big keys for me helping to process the grief and anxiety coming from those experiences. I wish you the best! Breaking a trauma cycle is beyond difficult and tiring.
Huh? I read that comment and didn't find it problematic at all. I myself remember scenes, in detail, from before I was three years old. Some things will stick forever in memory, under certain circumstances.
I have a very similar personal experience. Perchance, are you dyslexic? Part of my applied /intuitive reasoning comes from my inability to perceive direct language but early ability to read based on contextual extraction that applied to problems solving and communication.
The brain is so interesting at what point certain pathways activate. The blocks/shapes of text piece is especially similar to my experience.
No, as far as I know I'm not dyslexic, and I suspect it would have come up in my life by now if I were.
The way I read is a lot like certain old speed reading trainers used to teach, where I'm able to pick up the meaning of the whole sentence or several lines without stopping on each word separately. That's what I meant by "blocks," like several lines of a page at once.
I can read the one-word-at-a-time way. I have to if I'm reading out loud, for example, and sometimes for very dense text, it's worth it to slow down that far like I might if I were asking someone to explain something slowly if it were difficult to process.
That is exactly my perceived experience and has been useful to me to read but I have immense difficulties spelling. Essentially can speed ready by shape and contextual grammar clues but cannot form the internal shape of the word. I had thought it was an adaptive response to dyslexia, fun to see others with it as a non-adaptive response. I also have a similar response to dense text where it's necessary/useful to slow down to fully grok.
Orthogonally I have excellent memory and pattern recognition for numbers so it's a fun mystery. Vision itself is such an interesting sense and it's super interesting how languages can feedback into the perception mechanisms.
Spelling hasn't ever been tough for me, but it's like I think of words in their entirety, one unit that includes all the letters. When I type, even with just my thumbs on a phone, I'm not spelling the words out, but rather typing the whole word, which essentially has a specific series of movements to represent it.
How did you find out you were dyslexic, and how does it affect your perception of letters or numbers? I know very little about dyslexia, but it's certainly interesting that the only other person I've encountered who reads like I do has it!
It's interesting, especially given the way that I read, when I start to try to spell out the word. It's like zooming into an artifacted picture. The picture starts out very clear but as I zoom in it gets fuzzy. What ordering the letters go in or what sounds come out of specific lettering combinations get "fuzzy" in my head when I go through the process of reproducing the entire word. It really bit me in college studying German with the "ie" "ei" letter combinations. I overcome it with intense memorization or eventual mnemonic recollection buts it's always fuzzy.
I didn't realize I was dyslexic until about 15 years ago (post college) due to my girlfriend at the time suggesting I get tested as I just assumed this was an area I was "stupid". This gets back into the upbringing where I was fostering interpersonal behaviors as weaknesses or personal failures due to my relationship with my father.
My kindergarten class had a practice that, now that you say that, might have been meant to help those letter-sound associations.
Besides routinely reciting the alphabet forward and backward (I didn't know being able to recite the alphabet backward was unusual until I was in high school!), we would also do a phonetic version that sounded something like, "A, ah. B, buh. C, kuh. D, duh. E, eh," making a sound for every letter.
I don't know if it helped the kids who didn't already know how to read, but those were some of the peak years for phonics instruction in primary schools, so I guess at least someone thought it was working!
Sesame Street also had this song where they would pronounce the whole alphabet as though it were one really long word, like, "Ab-keh-def-ghee-jeckel-menop-qwur-stu-vwix-is." That one always made me laugh, but I got good practice out of it!
I was mildly afraid that you were going to describe something that would make me go, "Wait--am I dyslexic?" but no, I don't experience spelling that way. Most words exist in my head in both written and spoken form inseparably. It's very rare that I mix up homophones when I'm writing, for example, because I'm not trying to put the sound of a word into letters or match letters to the sound if the word. The letters and the sounds are inextricably linked in each specific meaning unit.
I don't know that he meant to teach me a lesson. I think it was just a mentalist-style magic trick, not unlike pulling a quarter out of a kid's ear. Just for fun.
I guess it was useful to know people are alike enough to be predictable, but I don't think he was trying to teach me that necessarily.
Unfortunately I also have to interpret everything through the lens of, "He's an insecure narcissist, so he might just have been trying to keep me in line by proving he was smarter than me." Things changed a lot after this event. He intensified his efforts to isolate me from other people, even convincing my own mother I was so much smarter than her that she would never understand me. I was a three-year-old child. I don't care how smart you are when you're 3, most of what you need at that point is basic and common among all humans. But this gets back to seeing me as a threat to his own sense of safety, thus trying to make sure I felt small for the rest of my life.
Whew. I'm sorry you had that situation to grow up in, caught up from an early age in maneuvering relative to a parent's insecurities and emotional blindness. I can relate in some ways. I hope the clarity with which you wrote about it now is an expression of having come to some healing and peace!
You know, it's taken a lot longer than I would have hoped, but I'm grateful enough that it happened at all that I don't dwell much on what could have been!
I suspect my father was an easier man than yours, but he's also an insecure narcissist.
When I began playing chess, he was my opponent for many, many games. Until I won a game at 9 years old, which was the last game we ever played.
I've always been a bad study of people, though. I wish I could have seen through my father the way you seem to have always seen through yours. I was in my 30s by then.
I've always hated chess because of my dad! He wouldn't even prompt me about what I might have considered that could have helped, so after a dozen or so games in the span of an hour, I decided I didn't want to play with him anymore, and that the game was stupid. Only one of those was the right call.
By the time I was 10, basketball, pool, ping pong, darts, air hockey, and foosball were all on the list of things to stop playing as soon as dad started. I can't even relate to how insecure you have to be to beat an 8-year-old girl at "horse" by making shots from far enough away that she can't possibly have the muscle strength to throw that far. I get making your kids earn their wins, but what fun is it when you make it impossible??
It's not an accident that we haven't lived within a thousand miles of each other since I graduated high school.
Fortunately my mom eventually figured it out and left him, and we've had the chance to build a very strong relationship, so I tend to try to spend my time focused on the things I can do to keep improving that.
I checked the reference. The "bears story" is based on work done in 1930s.
Psychology, a hundred years later is a shoddy science, despite us having learning quite a lot about how to do decent experiments and field surveys. It's very very difficult to tease out replicable effects in human behavior. I would immediately reject any psychology finding from the 1930s, unless it has been replicated more recently.
Extremely shoddy story. People back in the day (working in agriculture) had to perform tons of complex tasks. Obviously they were able to reason.
It's clearly only someone quite far removed from any kind of practical work who could become convinced people who don't immediately answer the expected answer to test questions have no ability to reason.
And yet, that's still the state-of-the-art in psychology.
Circa 1990, good ol' Simon Baron-Cohen observed that autistic children answered certain questions (intended to test empathy) in a consistently unusual way, and he decided that meant autistic people had no theory-of-mind. Never mind that the questions were ambiguous, and the scenarios were underspecified. It wasn't until 2012 that somebody (Damian Milton) managed to get the obvious alternative considered by academia. The "no ToM" theory is still implicitly assumed by some new research papers, despite there being no reason to prefer it over the "double-empathy problem" hypothesis.
These seem like really easy kinds of tests to repro or re-examine? How is there a 22 year gap in this? Or is this perhaps mostly a question of not there being enough examination of the experimentation protocol, and so the idea remains despite the underlying experiment being iffy.
Most scientific research involves studying some aspect of the world as systematically as possible. Psychology has the added issue that the experimenters are also studying themselves. This is fairly unique among sciences, so we don't really have any protocols to deal with that: there's double-blinding, but that doesn't help you to analyse your results, or to decide what experiments to run to begin with.
That's one theory. Another theory is that it's just Simon Baron-Cohen: pretty much all the autism research he's done, even the biological theories, show the same "experiment does not actually test theory" issue. I'll illustrate what I mean:
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Autism diagnosis is performed, basically, by going through a questionnaire that asks about social and play behaviour in childhood. Simon Baron-Cohen noticed that most people diagnosed with autism were male, interested in sciencey things like engineering and maths, and behaved weirdly in social situations, so he set out to explain this.
Building on his mind-blindness (lack-of-ToM) theory, which had been confirmed to his satisfaction, he observed that engineering is a "systemising" activity, and social stuff is an "empathising" thing. Obviously, systemising is for boys and empathising is for girls, so autism must be a condition of brains being too male (dubbed the "extreme male brain" theory).
To test this, he (and his colleagues: "Simon Baron-Cohen" is a synecdoche, since this was all a team effort) came up with a questionnaire to measure the Systemising Quotient, and a questionnaire to measure the Empathising Quotient. They found the expected association between EQ, SQ, and the Autism Quotient score from that first questionnaire (AQ), thus proving they were measuring what they thought they were measuring. (Just like IQ!)
While this proves the empathising–systemising theory, it doesn't quite prove the extreme male brain theory. We know that autism is a developmental condition, and we know that testosterone is the boy juice, so the "extreme male brain" theory predicts that when we measure higher-than-average foetal testosterone (FT) levels, we end up with autistic kids, and when we don't, we don't. Several studies that study amniotic fluid (where Simon Baron-Cohen is second-author) show that FT levels are positively correlated with SQ and negatively-correlated with EQ, and that's pretty slam-dunk. We've found the cause of autism! Hooray!
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From the way I've explained it, it should be obvious where the issues with his research are. And maybe I'm being too harsh on Simon Baron-Cohen: he was on that paper that actually measured foetal oestrogen levels (also found to be elevated: guess it's not "extreme male brain" after all), and while some of his critics had an intuition that something was wrong with his conclusions, I can't find evidence that anyone in academia actually identified the problems with his work – not until the autistic autism researchers came onto the scene.
The fact remains that he got a knighthood out of this, and approximately none of what he's "researched" is correct. (Excluding some lower-profile work, like demographic studies https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2022.21 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9314022/, for which he was last author. I'm not sure what last author means in this field, but this kind of work is very important.)
The worst thing is, he's a good sport about it when other people falsify, bit-by-bit, his life's work. It seems like he was (and still is) actually trying his best to do science. I don't think we can safely treat Simon Baron-Cohen as a weird outlier: the problem is with psychology-as-practised-in-academia, not with Simon Baron-Cohen.
(We haven't fixed the questionnaires, by the way. We do have questionnaires that work better – some are listed on https://embrace-autism.com/ –, but they aren't used. Instead, there are protocols to try to work around the fact the used questionnaires are asking the wrong questions. https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/what-is-autism... goes into some detail.)
Thank you for the detailed reply! I am hopeful that we can see improvements, and honestly having somebody be a good sport about their stuff being falsified at least means that there isn't a voice "countering" progress, so to speak. Definitely a weird position to be in!
The correlation may have been on a cultural level, rather than individual. I.e. cultures with a high degree of literacy train their children in logic and abstraction; primarily oral cultures do not.
The hen and the egg problem is obvious here, of course. Does writing lead to logic, or does an emphasis on logic necessitate learning writing? I don't know how this is controlled in the studies Gleick refers to.
I guess the (unanswerable?) question is whether they lack abstractions in general or merely lack the specific abstractions. Based on what we know about the stages of infant brain development, they clearly possess the ability to create abstractions so my intuition would be that they can form abstractions, they may just not be culturally useful (i.e. idiosyncratic and thus not helpful in communication).
Children are literally taught "this is a triangle, here is an object shaped like a triangle, can you see anything else in this room/picture that's shaped like a triangle" (along with squares, circles, etc) and it will initially take them a while to recognize objects having that shape, even when it seems "obvious" to adults. This makes sense given that "things shaped like a triangle" is not a useful category during childhood development otherwise and instead mostly useful as a cultural aid (i.e. something you can reference in communication with others and establishing a basis for discussion of more complex shapes like pyramids).
Just like "basic" shapes, "logic" is something that's mostly useful on a cultural level even if most people are likely not explicitly taught the basics of formal logic at an early age.
To go back to the example: if you tell me all bears in the north are white and Greenland is in the north but I've never been to Greenland and all bears I've seen are brown, it's still a good heuristic to assume that bears in Greenland are brown because I don't know if what you're saying is true on a literal level. Maybe Greenland is not as far up north as the place where bears are white or maybe you just saw a white bear (or another white animal you mistook for a bear) in the north and therefore incorrectly assume that must be true for all of them, or you're simply an untrustful and unreliable foreigner who might be lying to me. Real-life conversations don't occur in a cultural vacuum, they're exchanges between individuals with personal histories and relationships.
In other words, while abstract logic is culturally useful (i.e. it is a tool), real-life communication between individuals is not a game of abstract logic. Analysing language purely by its literal content (or "text") ignores subtext, context and meta text, all of which are crucially important. Expecting someone to engage with you on a purely logical plane and to ignore all of that, when they're not accustomed to doing so, seems extraordinarily silly. Given that the bears annecdote according to a sibling comment is nearly a hundred years old, I doubt the outside "researcher" took any of this into consideration.
a bit of sidetrack, but i think interesting;
there are some people with aphantasia (which is lack of mental imagery), and they seem to be doing fine (Craig Venter is one of those people).
On this distinction, what exactly is abstract shape? I can imagine cube quite easily, but tesseract is a lot harder. Would it be helpful not to have this visual preconceptions in the mind?
No one cannot truly judge the complexity of someone else’s[0] experience unless it is both deconstructed[1] into categories and those categories exactly fit one’s preexisting categories.
In other words, a claim like “literacy is a prerequisite for things like logical reasoning” (or complex thought, or consciousness, etc.) may be:
A) true not as a result of an empirical observation, but in a circular way by definition—as a catch-22 where “if you do not think like we do, you may well not think” is trivially correct from most humans’ perspective, because if you do think but really unlike how they think (you are unable to communicate it using the same vocabulary[2] they use) then from their vantage point there may be no clear difference between you thinking in your own way vs. you acting unpredictably—contributing to it being
B) simply not a useful claim to make: as your experience cannot be completely reduced to categories that exactly match those of some random scientist’s, that scientist can mnever fully judge the complexity of your experience or your capability of abstract thought (of course, they could mistakenly assume they can, by simply presuming their way of thinking to be the true reference point, as they are prone to).
[0] That “someone else” can be yourself in the past, e.g. as a small child before social integration, in which “one” could be the current-you.
[1] That deconstruction is lossy. Your experience is changed as a result, possibly lessened for those aspects of yourself that perceive reality as a whole.
[2] Using any vocabulary (including language) requires deconstruction of experience, by definition.
You can only genuinely belive all this because you lack the capacity for symbolic communication. (you can't process the sound of the word "dog" as refering to the animal) You only learn language as a way to command people, then you call them "autistic" when they interpret what you say according to its symbolic meaning. ("taking things literally")
the people who study, design, and create IQ tests are not ignorant of what you are suggesting, "the difference between education and intelligence", and if there were any way to "improve" IQ testing, they would incorporate it.
Rather, IQ tests are our very best tools for measuring intelligence, much more reliable than any other assessment, and most of the criticism of IQ comes from people who don't like the results.
> Some illiterate people are told that all bears in the north are white, that Greenland is a country in the north, then they are asked what colours bears in Greenland have. They answer, "Different regions have differently coloured bears. I haven't been to Greenland. But I have seen a brown bear."
I wonder how much the answer would change if you simply said "if all bears in the north..." It's probably not obvious to everyone whether you're setting up a hypothetical or asking a literal question with a false or vague premise (Grizzlies range as far north as the nothern coast of Alaska).
I think James Gleick is missing a lot of context her.
James Flynn[0] also gave a TED talk and mentioned those interviews[1]. Apparently it's based on interviews done by Alexander Luria[2] and he put those in writing in one of his books The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology (Chapter 4[3]).
This is a correlation, not a causation. "People that struggle with problem solving also struggle with reading" is not the same as "not reading results in poor problem solving". The latter is not even begun to be proven in these case studies.
So having autism, this doesn't seem right to me. I can think abstract circles around loads of allistic people on the topic of social situations, but that still doesn't really help me be good at social situations unless it's a situation I've had practice in.
I spent the last decade surrounded predominantly by illiterate people. These comments are intriguing, but I don't think the effect is as strong as you make out. I never noticed any real difference in how illiterate people view the world, except that they are generally more prone to believing conspiracy theories.
If you can not read or write, then you do have to find other outlets for your energy. Music plays a bigger role in the lives of illiterates I found. I would say on the whole they would seem more extroverted and social, too.
Consider it's not just literacy - it's literacy and language. Presumably you spent time around people who might not read, but definitely can still talk and hear.
I believed for years that my good friend’s dad’s name was Aba and even called him that once before I realized later that it’s the Hebrew word for father.
I had been having complex thoughts for years at that point so it was a bit embarrassing.
Technically 'daddy' is a name.
A name is fundamentally just a label that we use to identify other people and objects. Post Malone, your first and last name are part of the universal naming system like the Kilometer, and 'daddy' is a personal system relative to the conscious experience of the user.
"daddy" is a kinship term, or familial title. It's a noun, and a mode of address, but it isn't a name, technically or otherwise. There are a few posts in this very thread about children realizing that "daddy" isn't just their father, but anyone's.
Much like when you refer to a doctor as "doc", or a professor as "professor".
To prove the point, there are people who have more than one person in their lives whom they call "Dad" or whatever variation. Raised by a gay couple, or close enough to a stepfather to think of him in those terms. Most of us only have one "Dad", but this isn't universal, and we all know that everyone has one, whether they refer to him that way, or even know him at all.
Even with sign language and the ability to read, deaf people often have very limited grammar and sometimes outright bad writing style. We rely far more on spoken language then we think. If you take that away, so much practice when it comes to using your native "tongue" is simply not had. A similar effect, although not as pronounced, is with blind people (my tribe) having very bad spelling. The reason for that is blind people seldomly read themseves, they usually employ speech synthesis to have text read to them. However, that also means they basically never see the spelling of uncommon words, so all they can do is guess, which sometimes leads to hilarious results. Since I use braille primarily to access a computer, the effect isn't as pronounced for me. But I noticed early on that I erred a lot when it came to street and city names. Until I realized, well, sighted people do actually read street signs. So after a while, certain spellings just stick. Since I almost never did that... I didn't know, wasn't soaked in the information to pick it up.
Yes, I was inaxact, sorry for that. Note that the term "mother" tongue is problematic in this context anyway, as there are many examples of caregivers and school systems not being fluent in sign language. I know a 70-something woman which turned out to have a deaf brother. Observing her while he was around, she didn't sign to him, she simply expected him to read from her lips. Which is very telling. Sign language is considered "their language" from her point of view, and she never aspired to actually learn it. After 50+ years of having a deaf brother... Just a recent anecdote, but still the norm. Deaf people have also been prevented from signing in certain schools. Similar things happened in the early days of Braille. Luis Braille never lived to see his system being used officially. He taught it in secret, as the power that be actually prevented it from being used for many decades. If you look long enough, there is a lot of patrnosation and ignorance in the way disabled people are treated by society, past and present.
I believe that bit about sign language in Brazil. When I spent some time there years back I was impressed that most people seemed to know a bit of sign language. There is also a lot of informal hand gesture-slang culture. I remember some things like "let's go", "robbery/rip off", "it's crowded"
It doesn't seem significantly different from other sign languages to me but I'm not fluent in any of them so YMMV. Sign languages always feel a bit "big and urgent" to me.
This is funny. I was sitting last night with two friends who are Greek like me and the Italian boyfriend of one of them, and watching a bit of that video, well, we all spoke just like that. None of us knows sign language. Tsipouro was flowing freely and it was warm and friendly and inhibitions were lowered so I guess we reverted to our natural behaviour, unimpeded by social norms (I live in the cold North).
Or it's something about Italians. I don't speak a word of Italian but I'm fluent in French so whenever I'm in Italy (that is, often) I basically try to speak French with an Italian accent. The vocabulary is almost identical, the grammar is very different, but I have never failed to put my point across. See, communication is a two-way street and Italians seem to be culturally trained to try and meet the other person halfway, and not leave anything to chance. Like "You have to understand what I'm saying (gesticulates wildly for emphasis)". Greeks are a bit like that also, but we have fewer common roots with other European languages than Italians so it's harder to just guess what the other person is trying to say. My experience with Northern and Western Europeans is very different. If I don't speak with a perfect French accent and grammar, for example, I get odd looks and questions for clarification. The British just sit and wait until you've said things exactly the way they expect them. Germans I think don't even try (I'm less experienced with Germans).
Bit of a thread hijack I guess, but I really do wonder where all this comes from. I don't believe in races, but there sure seems to be some kind of cultural influence because there is a pattern and it is impossible not to notice it. Some cultures are just better trained in at least some kinds of communication.
> The British just sit and wait until you've said things exactly the way they expect them.
You're expected to say "does that make sense?" (or "you know (what I mean)?", "(do) you get what I'm saying?", etc) once you've finished speaking, if your meaning isn't immediately clear. Up until that point, you're being given time to get your thoughts in order (and for the listener to work out your meaning: you'll usually be stopped once you've successfully conveyed the same thing three times in a row). But your summary isn't inaccurate.
Many gestures are shared across cultures even without an obvious shared history (e.g. some simulation of an erect penis will mean "f*ck you", which you can do by raising a finger or by raising your forearm) so I bet there are some :)
One gesture I know of which existed in Brazil and Italy is the "fig" sign[0]. AFAICT nobody uses it anymore in Italy, but it goes back to the Etruscans!
Some years ago I came across a nice book (pdf) by some academic cataloguing a bunch of gestures across cultures, but I am failing to find it again ATM :(
I definitely remember seeing wood carvings of that fig sign. I never really knew what it meant and assumed it was an afro-brazilian thing, but sounds like it has european roots, interesting.
