Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Simple, yeah. [inaudible 00:23:47]. I think naive is an indication that’s incorrect somehow. It’s trivial, too simple. I think it could very well be correct. But it’s interesting how sticky … It feels like two people got together. It just feels like once you figure out certain aspects of a language that just becomes sticky and the tribe forms around that language, maybe the tribe forms first and then the language evolves. And then you just agree and you stick to whatever that is. These are very interesting questions. We don’t know really about how even words get invented very much. Assuming they get invented, we don’t really know how that process works and how these things evolve. What we have is a current picture of few thousand languages, a few thousand instances. We don’t have any pictures of really how these things are evolving really. And then the evolution is massively confused by contact. As soon as one group runs into another … We are smart, humans are smart and they take on whatever’s useful in the other group. And so any contrast which you’re talking about which I find useful, I’m going to start using as well. I worked a little bit in specific areas of words, in number words and in color words. And in color words, in English we have around 11 words that everyone knows for colors. And many more if you happen to be interested in color for some reason or other, if you’re a fashion designer or an artist or something, you may have many, many more words. But we can see millions. If you have normal color vision, normal trichromatic color vision, you can see millions of distinctions in colors. We don’t have millions of words. The most efficient … No, the most detailed color vocabulary would have over a million terms to distinguish all the different colors that we can see. But of course, we don’t have that. Somehow, it’s useful for English to have evolved in some way such that there’s 11 terms that people find useful to talk about, black, white, red, blue, green, yellow, purple, gray, pink. And I probably missed something there. There’s 11 that everyone knows and depending on your … But if you go to different cultures, especially the non-industrialized cultures, there’ll be many fewer. Some cultures will have only two, believe it or not. The Dani in Papua New Guinea have only two labels that the group uses for color, and those are roughly black and white. They are very, very dark and very, very light, which are roughly black and white. And you might think, “Oh, they’re dividing the whole color space into light and dark.” Or something. And that’s not really true. They mostly only label the black and the white things. They just don’t talk about the colors for the other ones. And then there’s other groups … I’ve worked with a group called the Tsimane down in Bolivia in South America, and they have three words that everyone knows but there’s a few others that many people know. It’s depending on how you count, between three and seven words that the group knows, okay. And again, they’re black and white, everyone knows those. And red, that tends to be the third word that cultures bring in, if there’s a word. It’s always red, the third one. And then after that, it’s all bets are off about what they bring in. And so after that, they bring in a big blue-green group. They have one for that. And then different people have different words that they’ll use for other parts of the space.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.