Learning a lot of complicated things is good for your brain, like programming in various languages or playing various musical instruments. It's fun too. But ha

Learning a lot of complicated things is good for your brain, like programming in various languages or playing various musical instruments. It's fun too. But having a multilingual globe comes at a massive, immeasurable cost. One of the greatest forces to improve economic opportunity and equality in the history of the world would be if everybody suddenly agreed on one simple, terse, expressive human language and switched to it, in all contexts except home life and shared spiritual or community services. No more IELTS tests, no more spelling bees, no more "why is 'wherefore art thou' not about Romeo's location?", no more notarized translation costs everywhere in the world... everybody gets equal access to all media created in all places (although of course there'll still be place-specific references in that media), etc If you were designing an ideal human world, the last thing you'd want to do is build a Tower of Babel on it.