Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…For us, it’s easy because we just count them. It’s just so easy to count them. But they don’t, they can’t count them because they don’t count. They don’t have words for this thing. And so they would do approximate. It’s totally fascinating. So they would get them approximately right after four or five, because basically you always get four right, three or four that looks, that’s something we can visually see. But after that, you have its approximate number. And there’s a bunch of tasks we did, and they all failed. I mean, failed. They did approximate after five on all those tasks. And it kind of shows that the words, you kind of need the words to be able to do these kinds of tasks. But there’s a little bit of a chicken and egg thing there, because if you don’t have the words, then maybe they’ll limit you in the kind of a little baby Einstein there won’t be able to come up with a counting task. You know what I mean? The ability to count enables you to come up with interesting things probably. So yes, you develop counting because you need it, but then once you have counting, you can probably come up with a bunch of different inventions, how to, I don’t know what kind of thing they do matching really well for building purposes, building some kind of hut or something like this. So it’s interesting that language is a limiter on what you’re able to do. Yeah, language is the words. Here is the words. The words for exact count is the limiting factor here. They just don’t have them in this-…

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