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John Francis's talk[0] was one of the very early TED online videos to go viral- definitely the first one I remember watching, introducing me to the entire TED f

• gridlockd 8y ago
  > Pretty powerful speaker. Ironic.
• ysavir 8y ago
  > Though, maybe that was part of his point. As the article states, that was not his point. The point of the experiment was for him to stop saying and to start listening to what others are saying, even if its not a perspective or argument he himself supports.
  • minikites 8y ago
    >even if its not a perspective or argument he himself supports This assume all perspectives/arguments are valid. Should we listen to the arguments put forth by someone who believes the Earth is flat?
    • klank 8y ago
      > This assume all perspectives/arguments are valid Not at all. It only assumes that an understanding of an argument is necessary to engage with it properly.
      • minikites 8y ago
        I disagree, by engaging a bad faith argument in good faith, you are playing their game and are going to lose by definition: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
        • burfog 8y ago
          Dismissing your opponents as "bad faith" and "completely unaware of the absurdity" and "frivolous" is a good indication that your own beliefs may be so. You are completely blocking out any consideration of your opponents. This suggests that you fear becoming convinced that they are right. You fear being forced to confront the fact that your own beliefs have not come about by a rational decision-making process.
          • minikites 8y ago
            What rational decision making process results in believing that people with darker skin are sub-human?
            • nostrademons 8y ago
              People don't make decisions rationally. If you want to change peoples' minds, you have to engage with the emotions underneath their rationalizations.
        • ordu 8y ago
          > by engaging a bad faith argument in good faith, you are playing their game and are going to lose by definition What does it mean to lose in a communication? You said "by definition", but what is the definition of losing?
    • KeepFlying 8y ago
      I'm the most cynical interpretation possible: You need to listen to them in order to be able to refute them. So if you want to change their minds you need to listen to understand what their belief is founded on so you know what you need to convince them of. But in a more open way of seeing it: It's important to understand where their beliefs are coming from to understand why they believe what they do. Maybe their belief is based on a fear of government and government influence on their lives. So maybe there is merit in talking about where that fear comes from. The flat Earth portion of their beliefs is not valid. But their reasoning for it might include some interesting points to discuss that can help everyone be able to work together better.
      • SkyBelow 8y ago
        >You need to listen to them in order to be able to refute them. So if you want to change their minds you need to listen to understand what their belief is founded on so you know what you need to convince them of. I agree, but I don't think you will get this just by listening to them. My own cynical interpretation is that people are often driven by more selfish desires which are the reasons they are attracted to certain positions, which they then find more palatable justifications for. The person arguing for free college and paying off existing college debt has many arguments, but the one that actually matters is that they are paying $1,000 a month on a student loan and highly prefer any solution that leaves them with that money back. Even a solution that increases taxes, as long as the taxes aren't more than $1,000, is preferable to their current state. The person arguing for a reduces/removed minimum wage, while having a lot of argument as to the negative impacts of minimum wage, personally thinks that prices will go up if minimum wage goes up and is against it because of the loss of purchasing power. (Consider that this outcome actually happening or not is irrelevant, only the belief it will happen matters when judging why a person takes the stance they want.) When I've argued for lowering the drinking age to 18, people will often assume I'm someone under 21 who wants the ability to legally drink. When I've argued for lowering the voting age below 18, people often assume I have political leanings that will be bolstered by under 18 voters. Both cases are false, but personally I cannot fault the people from assuming such based on how often it appears those assumptions are true.
    • tialaramex 8y ago
      Sure, if you have spare bandwidth it can be useful to understand why they're wrong.
    • ysavir 8y ago
      > This assume all perspectives/arguments are valid. It assumes no such thing. > Should we listen to the arguments put forth by someone who believes the Earth is flat? Listening does not imply joining in belief. Listening is the act of developing an understanding of another's perspective and why they hold to that perspective. The keyword being understanding, not agreeing. What we should learn from John Francis is to always be willing to listen; that if we want to live in a world where people listen to us, we have to be willing to listen to those people as well. If we want a society that uses civil discourse as a means of growing, we are obligated to learn how to listen and understand. We are under no obligation to agree with what we hear, but we do owe it to others to understand where they are coming from, and why they hold the belief they have. And on the fortunate occasions, perhaps to learn from what they have to say.
    • lhorie 8y ago
      You are not required to listen to anything anyone says, but if your goal is to get through to a flat earther/creationist/etc, it helps to understand their mental framework, or you'll just end up wasting time talking past each other. An interesting exercise I did way back in the day for fun was to try to debate some of those topics using only arguments within _their_ mental framework (e.g. if X pro-flat-earth argument is true, then why does the Bible contradictorily says Y). If anything, I ended up getting something out of it, as doing my own research to try to formulate these arguments taught me about topics I wasn't nearly as familiar w/ (e.g. history of religious documents)
      • balabaster 8y ago
        Another way is to learn to debate the merit of their arguments even though you don't believe them. For you can only argue your case when you understand theirs.
    • dang 8y ago
      Not all arguments are valid, but all people are valid. That's the reason for listening.
  • nostrademons 8y ago
    Listening is itself a form of communication, and a very powerful one.
• eindiran 8y ago
  ASL and other sign languages are literally languages. There are linguists that study how subfields in linguistics that traditionally only applied to spoken languages (e.g. phonology) have analogues in sign languages[0], so its now widely appreciated that anything expressible in spoken languages as a class is expressible in sign languages. All of that to say "not talking" has nothing to do with talking in a sign language. John Francis took a vow of silence. He wasn't talking in a non-spoken language; he was not talking. There is a lot you can do with non-verbal communication (i.e. non-linguistic communication, through your body), but that isn't nearly the same thing as speaking a sign language. [0] See Diane Brentari's research for example: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/prosodic-model-sign-language-phonology https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/prosodic-model-sign-language-...
  • thaumasiotes 8y ago
    This: > so its now widely appreciated that anything expressible in spoken languages as a class is expressible in sign languages doesn't follow from this: > There are linguists that study how subfields in linguistics that traditionally only applied to spoken languages (e.g. phonology) have analogues in sign languages at all. For example, phonology is the study of what sounds can be produced in a language, what equivalence classes they belong to, and in what contexts they can occur. That doesn't apply directly to silent languages, but it's straightforward to say that the "phonology" of a sign language would be the gestures that it uses, which gestures are considered equivalent or distinct, and the contexts in which any given gesture can occur. But the question of what it's possible to express doesn't need to be analogized. It applies just as directly to sign languages as it does to spoken languages. The conclusion that sign languages have the same expressive power as spoken languages would be equally true or false regardless of whether anyone was studying the analogue of sound production in soundless languages.
    • eindiran 8y ago
      The point there is that it's not necessarily obvious that sign languages would have phonology or morhphology or syntax, but once you've realized that that's true it absolutely does follow that they are as expressive (in the technical sense) as spoken languages. I don't want to get into an argument about linguistic relativity and the Minimalist program on Hacker News, but the Minimalists believe that the expressiveness of languages stem from their syntax: once a language has two syntactic operations (called "merge" and "move", that all natural languages have[0]), it becomes as expressive as every other natural language. Where you hide the complexity of this expressiveness depends a lot on the language: some put it in the lexicon, others in the morphology, etc. But at the end of the day, if sign languages have a syntax, they fall into the same class of expressiveness as spoken languages. As linguists started studying how something that looked like phonology, morphology and syntax might manifest in sign languages, it became clear that sign languages did have a syntax. You can see something that imo looks like the "move" operation going on with topicalization in ASL and something like "merge" going on with negations and numerical incorporation, although I don't actually know enough about ASL to say for sure. [0] Again, I really don't want to argue about this but one linguist named Daniel Everett doesn't think this is true (he believes that a language called Piraha does not have recursion or, by implication, a merge operation). But he's probably wrong, and Andrew Nevins and David Pesetsky at MIT have a very compelling argument about why that is.