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Thanks for the feedback! Glad you've enjoyed the articles thus far :). The adjective order rules are interesting in that we have to reverse-engineer them from

by kalid 11y ago

Thanks for the feedback! Glad you've enjoyed the articles thus far :). The adjective order rules are interesting in that we have to reverse-engineer them from our brains, but aren't consciously aware of them. It's apparently an area of ongoing research why certain orderings are correct. (Maybe there's something about the specificity of the adjective, where the more-specific items are closest to the subject.) I think the higher-level concern is we can get tricked by thinking we need to consciously master the structure in order to be fluent, vs. letting our brain's pattern-matching skills do some of the heavy lifting.

clebio 11y ago
Hey, appreciate your reply to my comment! And fair response, I'm glad to hear from scientists that are able to talk about open research, as opposed to trying to make a dogmatic point or conjecture without evidence. I like the view that this is an open problem and an area of active research, much more than the more conventional, lay-person settling of the issue as "developed an ear for the language" and that's the end of it. The impressive work of people like Steven Pinker and Chomsky (in his actual academic field) is to look very carefully at different ethnographic groups, and the larger cultures those groups are embedded in. By doing so, finding groups isolated enough or with a materially different context, such that they don't exhibit the same patterns. The title of the article felt like a bait-and-switch, I guess. When I realized it was on betterexplained, it did make more sense that it was ultimately about mathematical reasoning. No worries!
- kalid 11y ago
  Thanks for the reply. I struggled with the title a bit, in my head I think of the "XYZ Fallacy" as a trap we are likely fall into. For me, the trap was overemphasizing a set of implicit rules and trying to explicitly teach those rules to newcomers. (I.e., the newbies are required to use a structured approach that proficient practitioners never needed or even know about.) This is my personal lingo though, and might not make sense to others.

by kalid 11y ago

clebio 11y ago

Hey, appreciate your reply to my comment! And fair response, I'm glad to hear from scientists that are able to talk about open research, as opposed to trying to make a dogmatic point or conjecture without evidence. I like the view that this is an open problem and an area of active research, much more than the more conventional, lay-person settling of the issue as "developed an ear for the language" and that's the end of it. The impressive work of people like Steven Pinker and Chomsky (in his actual academic field) is to look very carefully at different ethnographic groups, and the larger cultures those groups are embedded in. By doing so, finding groups isolated enough or with a materially different context, such that they don't exhibit the same patterns. The title of the article felt like a bait-and-switch, I guess. When I realized it was on betterexplained, it did make more sense that it was ultimately about mathematical reasoning. No worries!

kalid 11y ago
Thanks for the reply. I struggled with the title a bit, in my head I think of the "XYZ Fallacy" as a trap we are likely fall into. For me, the trap was overemphasizing a set of implicit rules and trying to explicitly teach those rules to newcomers. (I.e., the newbies are required to use a structured approach that proficient practitioners never needed or even know about.) This is my personal lingo though, and might not make sense to others.