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James Gleick in The Information also describes cases of the effect of traditional literacy on complexity/abstraction of thought. He claims that literacy is nea

by kqr 2y ago

James Gleick in The Information also describes cases of the effect of traditional literacy on complexity/abstraction of thought. He claims that literacy is nearly a prerequisite for things like zeroth-order logical reasoning and understanding of abstract shapes. Two examples he gives: - Some illiterate people are told that all bears in the north are white, that Greenland is a country in the north, then they are asked what colours bears in Greenland have. They answer, "Different regions have differently coloured bears. I haven't been to Greenland. But I have seen a brown bear." I would have said, "Based on the information you gave me, I would guess white." - When shown a rectangle and asked what shape it is some illiterate answer things like "a door" or "a playing card" but struggle to find things doors and playing cards have in common. I go to the abstract shapes immediately when I'm shown drawings by my son. It's almost at a point where it feels like my logical/abstract reasoning stands in the way of creativity. ---- But I don't know how much this is personality (I happen to have a knack for logical/abstract reasoning and I happened to learn to read when I was very young) and how much is an effect of reading. After all, anthropologists are great at the concrete rather than abstract, but maybe they get lots of training in it. I've also heard the Japanese are better at it. TFA clearly postulates it has more to do with the kind of vocabulary, or maybe it's on an increasing scale with more language.

awsanswers 2y ago
I love that book
- kqr 2y ago
  It's a bit pop-sciency but I realised how much I had learned from it when I re-read it!
simplicio 2y ago
The second one seems odd, or maybe Im misunderstanding. Most children develop the idea of abstract shapes well before they can read.
- kqr 2y ago
  The correlation may have been on a cultural level, rather than individual. I.e. cultures with a high degree of literacy train their children in logic and abstraction; primarily oral cultures do not. The hen and the egg problem is obvious here, of course. Does writing lead to logic, or does an emphasis on logic necessitate learning writing? I don't know how this is controlled in the studies Gleick refers to.
  - hnbad 2y ago
    I guess the (unanswerable?) question is whether they lack abstractions in general or merely lack the specific abstractions. Based on what we know about the stages of infant brain development, they clearly possess the ability to create abstractions so my intuition would be that they can form abstractions, they may just not be culturally useful (i.e. idiosyncratic and thus not helpful in communication). Children are literally taught "this is a triangle, here is an object shaped like a triangle, can you see anything else in this room/picture that's shaped like a triangle" (along with squares, circles, etc) and it will initially take them a while to recognize objects having that shape, even when it seems "obvious" to adults. This makes sense given that "things shaped like a triangle" is not a useful category during childhood development otherwise and instead mostly useful as a cultural aid (i.e. something you can reference in communication with others and establishing a basis for discussion of more complex shapes like pyramids). Just like "basic" shapes, "logic" is something that's mostly useful on a cultural level even if most people are likely not explicitly taught the basics of formal logic at an early age. To go back to the example: if you tell me all bears in the north are white and Greenland is in the north but I've never been to Greenland and all bears I've seen are brown, it's still a good heuristic to assume that bears in Greenland are brown because I don't know if what you're saying is true on a literal level. Maybe Greenland is not as far up north as the place where bears are white or maybe you just saw a white bear (or another white animal you mistook for a bear) in the north and therefore incorrectly assume that must be true for all of them, or you're simply an untrustful and unreliable foreigner who might be lying to me. Real-life conversations don't occur in a cultural vacuum, they're exchanges between individuals with personal histories and relationships. In other words, while abstract logic is culturally useful (i.e. it is a tool), real-life communication between individuals is not a game of abstract logic. Analysing language purely by its literal content (or "text") ignores subtext, context and meta text, all of which are crucially important. Expecting someone to engage with you on a purely logical plane and to ignore all of that, when they're not accustomed to doing so, seems extraordinarily silly. Given that the bears annecdote according to a sibling comment is nearly a hundred years old, I doubt the outside "researcher" took any of this into consideration.
3abiton 2y ago
That's why IQ is a metric that can be improved. It highly correlates with education to a certain point.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  the people who study, design, and create IQ tests are not ignorant of what you are suggesting, "the difference between education and intelligence", and if there were any way to "improve" IQ testing, they would incorporate it. Rather, IQ tests are our very best tools for measuring intelligence, much more reliable than any other assessment, and most of the criticism of IQ comes from people who don't like the results. There are no shor
abdullahkhalids 2y ago
I checked the reference. The "bears story" is based on work done in 1930s. Psychology, a hundred years later is a shoddy science, despite us having learning quite a lot about how to do decent experiments and field surveys. It's very very difficult to tease out replicable effects in human behavior. I would immediately reject any psychology finding from the 1930s, unless it has been replicated more recently.
- geysersam 2y ago
  Extremely shoddy story. People back in the day (working in agriculture) had to perform tons of complex tasks. Obviously they were able to reason. It's clearly only someone quite far removed from any kind of practical work who could become convinced people who don't immediately answer the expected answer to test questions have no ability to reason.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    And yet, that's still the state-of-the-art in psychology. Circa 1990, good ol' Simon Baron-Cohen observed that autistic children answered certain questions (intended to test empathy) in a consistently unusual way, and he decided that meant autistic people had no theory-of-mind. Never mind that the questions were ambiguous, and the scenarios were underspecified. It wasn't until 2012 that somebody (Damian Milton) managed to get the obvious alternative considered by academia. The "no ToM" theory is still implicitly assumed by some new research papers, despite there being no reason to prefer it over the "double-empathy problem" hypothesis.
    - rtpg 2y ago
      These seem like really easy kinds of tests to repro or re-examine? How is there a 22 year gap in this? Or is this perhaps mostly a question of not there being enough examination of the experimentation protocol, and so the idea remains despite the underlying experiment being iffy.
      - wizzwizz4 2y ago
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
whilenot-dev 2y ago
I think James Gleick is missing a lot of context her. James Flynn[0] also gave a TED talk and mentioned those interviews[1]. Apparently it's based on interviews done by Alexander Luria[2] and he put those in writing in one of his books The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology (Chapter 4[3]). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flynn_(academic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flynn_(academic) [1]: https://youtu.be/9vpqilhW9uI?t=354 https://youtu.be/9vpqilhW9uI?t=354 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Luria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Luria [3]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luria/works/1979/mind/ch04.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/luria/works/1979/mind/ch04....
strogonoff 2y ago
No one cannot truly judge the complexity of someone else’s[0] experience unless it is both deconstructed[1] into categories and those categories exactly fit one’s preexisting categories. In other words, a claim like “literacy is a prerequisite for things like logical reasoning” (or complex thought, or consciousness, etc.) may be: A) true not as a result of an empirical observation, but in a circular way by definition—as a catch-22 where “if you do not think like we do, you may well not think” is trivially correct from most humans’ perspective, because if you do think but really unlike how they think (you are unable to communicate it using the same vocabulary[2] they use) then from their vantage point there may be no clear difference between you thinking in your own way vs. you acting unpredictably—contributing to it being B) simply not a useful claim to make: as your experience cannot be completely reduced to categories that exactly match those of some random scientist’s, that scientist can mnever fully judge the complexity of your experience or your capability of abstract thought (of course, they could mistakenly assume they can, by simply presuming their way of thinking to be the true reference point, as they are prone to). [0] That “someone else” can be yourself in the past, e.g. as a small child before social integration, in which “one” could be the current-you. [1] That deconstruction is lossy. Your experience is changed as a result, possibly lessened for those aspects of yourself that perceive reality as a whole. [2] Using any vocabulary (including language) requires deconstruction of experience, by definition.
- Anotheroneagain 2y ago
  You can only genuinely belive all this because you lack the capacity for symbolic communication. (you can't process the sound of the word "dog" as refering to the animal) You only learn language as a way to command people, then you call them "autistic" when they interpret what you say according to its symbolic meaning. ("taking things literally")
- robwwilliams 2y ago
  Thoughtful comments: I have no idea why you are being down-voted.
smeej 2y ago
This makes me wonder about what turned out to be a pivotal moment in my early life. It was the day I first realized other people have their own minds, and that I could predict with some degree of accuracy what was in them. My dad wrote the numbers 1 through 4 on a piece of paper, then asked me to pick one, but not tell him which I'd chosen. Once I had it, he said, "You picked 3, didn't you?" I was dumbfounded. "How did you do that??" "Most people don't like to be out on the edges. It makes them uncomfortable. So they don't pick 1 or 4. And most people, like you, are right-handed, so they pick 3 over 2." "OK, OK, do it again." (This was the moment a flash of magic happened in my head.) "You picked 1 this time, didn't you?" "No, I picked 3 again because I knew you would think I would pick 1 this time." With a fear in his eyes that I only later discovered came from the fact that his own sense of safety depended on being the smartest person in the room, he said, "You're only 3. I don't think you're supposed to know how to do that yet." But here's the other thing--I was literate when I was 3. Nobody really knows how I picked it up, but one day I told my mom it was my turn to read the stories, and I've been reading fluently ever since. I've been told I read differently than most people even now (blocks of text rather than individual letters or words), but I was definitely reading. I've never associated the two events before, nor that maybe I was only able to do one because of the other, but it makes sense of the fact that other kids didn't really start to seem reasonable or thoughtful until 1st or 2nd grade. They lived in these imaginary worlds where things didn't have to make sense. It seemed like a lot of fun, but I had trouble joining them there. I always assumed both skills just correlated with age, not that one might facilitate the other. My story obviously doesn't prove anything, but you've given me an interesting thing to think about today!
- kqr 2y ago
  This is called theory of mind and I've been experimenting on my first child as he has grown up and he had it much earlier than research would suggest. (I even tried replicating one of the actual experiments used.) I suspect there's large individual variation as to when it is acquited. My son is relatively socially competent and intetested in letters and numbers but not yet literate at four. We'll see how my second child fares -- she is even more socially competent but does not yet speak (first child did her age) so we'll see when it can be done.
willis936 2y ago
This is a correlation, not a causation. "People that struggle with problem solving also struggle with reading" is not the same as "not reading results in poor problem solving". The latter is not even begun to be proven in these case studies.
rblatz 2y ago
Could it be that autism is in part the inability to think abstractly around social situations?
- solarmist 2y ago
  This feels approximately the correct shape to me.
- Doxin 2y ago
  So having autism, this doesn't seem right to me. I can think abstract circles around loads of allistic people on the topic of social situations, but that still doesn't really help me be good at social situations unless it's a situation I've had practice in.
qingcharles 2y ago
I spent the last decade surrounded predominantly by illiterate people. These comments are intriguing, but I don't think the effect is as strong as you make out. I never noticed any real difference in how illiterate people view the world, except that they are generally more prone to believing conspiracy theories. If you can not read or write, then you do have to find other outlets for your energy. Music plays a bigger role in the lives of illiterates I found. I would say on the whole they would seem more extroverted and social, too.
- fireflash38 2y ago
  Consider it's not just literacy - it's literacy and language. Presumably you spent time around people who might not read, but definitely can still talk and hear.
grog454 2y ago
> Some illiterate people are told that all bears in the north are white, that Greenland is a country in the north, then they are asked what colours bears in Greenland have. They answer, "Different regions have differently coloured bears. I haven't been to Greenland. But I have seen a brown bear." I wonder how much the answer would change if you simply said "if all bears in the north..." It's probably not obvious to everyone whether you're setting up a hypothetical or asking a literal question with a false or vague premise (Grizzlies range as far north as the nothern coast of Alaska).

by kqr 2y ago

awsanswers 2y ago

I love that book

kqr 2y ago
It's a bit pop-sciency but I realised how much I had learned from it when I re-read it!

simplicio 2y ago

The second one seems odd, or maybe Im misunderstanding. Most children develop the idea of abstract shapes well before they can read.

kqr 2y ago
The correlation may have been on a cultural level, rather than individual. I.e. cultures with a high degree of literacy train their children in logic and abstraction; primarily oral cultures do not. The hen and the egg problem is obvious here, of course. Does writing lead to logic, or does an emphasis on logic necessitate learning writing? I don't know how this is controlled in the studies Gleick refers to.
- hnbad 2y ago
  I guess the (unanswerable?) question is whether they lack abstractions in general or merely lack the specific abstractions. Based on what we know about the stages of infant brain development, they clearly possess the ability to create abstractions so my intuition would be that they can form abstractions, they may just not be culturally useful (i.e. idiosyncratic and thus not helpful in communication). Children are literally taught "this is a triangle, here is an object shaped like a triangle, can you see anything else in this room/picture that's shaped like a triangle" (along with squares, circles, etc) and it will initially take them a while to recognize objects having that shape, even when it seems "obvious" to adults. This makes sense given that "things shaped like a triangle" is not a useful category during childhood development otherwise and instead mostly useful as a cultural aid (i.e. something you can reference in communication with others and establishing a basis for discussion of more complex shapes like pyramids). Just like "basic" shapes, "logic" is something that's mostly useful on a cultural level even if most people are likely not explicitly taught the basics of formal logic at an early age. To go back to the example: if you tell me all bears in the north are white and Greenland is in the north but I've never been to Greenland and all bears I've seen are brown, it's still a good heuristic to assume that bears in Greenland are brown because I don't know if what you're saying is true on a literal level. Maybe Greenland is not as far up north as the place where bears are white or maybe you just saw a white bear (or another white animal you mistook for a bear) in the north and therefore incorrectly assume that must be true for all of them, or you're simply an untrustful and unreliable foreigner who might be lying to me. Real-life conversations don't occur in a cultural vacuum, they're exchanges between individuals with personal histories and relationships. In other words, while abstract logic is culturally useful (i.e. it is a tool), real-life communication between individuals is not a game of abstract logic. Analysing language purely by its literal content (or "text") ignores subtext, context and meta text, all of which are crucially important. Expecting someone to engage with you on a purely logical plane and to ignore all of that, when they're not accustomed to doing so, seems extraordinarily silly. Given that the bears annecdote according to a sibling comment is nearly a hundred years old, I doubt the outside "researcher" took any of this into consideration.

3abiton 2y ago

That's why IQ is a metric that can be improved. It highly correlates with education to a certain point.

fsckboy 2y ago
the people who study, design, and create IQ tests are not ignorant of what you are suggesting, "the difference between education and intelligence", and if there were any way to "improve" IQ testing, they would incorporate it. Rather, IQ tests are our very best tools for measuring intelligence, much more reliable than any other assessment, and most of the criticism of IQ comes from people who don't like the results. There are no shor

abdullahkhalids 2y ago

I checked the reference. The "bears story" is based on work done in 1930s. Psychology, a hundred years later is a shoddy science, despite us having learning quite a lot about how to do decent experiments and field surveys. It's very very difficult to tease out replicable effects in human behavior. I would immediately reject any psychology finding from the 1930s, unless it has been replicated more recently.

geysersam 2y ago
Extremely shoddy story. People back in the day (working in agriculture) had to perform tons of complex tasks. Obviously they were able to reason. It's clearly only someone quite far removed from any kind of practical work who could become convinced people who don't immediately answer the expected answer to test questions have no ability to reason.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  And yet, that's still the state-of-the-art in psychology. Circa 1990, good ol' Simon Baron-Cohen observed that autistic children answered certain questions (intended to test empathy) in a consistently unusual way, and he decided that meant autistic people had no theory-of-mind. Never mind that the questions were ambiguous, and the scenarios were underspecified. It wasn't until 2012 that somebody (Damian Milton) managed to get the obvious alternative considered by academia. The "no ToM" theory is still implicitly assumed by some new research papers, despite there being no reason to prefer it over the "double-empathy problem" hypothesis.
  - rtpg 2y ago
    These seem like really easy kinds of tests to repro or re-examine? How is there a 22 year gap in this? Or is this perhaps mostly a question of not there being enough examination of the experimentation protocol, and so the idea remains despite the underlying experiment being iffy.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

whilenot-dev 2y ago

I think James Gleick is missing a lot of context her. James Flynn[0] also gave a TED talk and mentioned those interviews[1]. Apparently it's based on interviews done by Alexander Luria[2] and he put those in writing in one of his books The Making of Mind: A Personal Account of Soviet Psychology (Chapter 4[3]). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flynn_(academic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flynn_(academic) [1]: https://youtu.be/9vpqilhW9uI?t=354 https://youtu.be/9vpqilhW9uI?t=354 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Luria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Luria [3]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luria/works/1979/mind/ch04.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/luria/works/1979/mind/ch04....

strogonoff 2y ago

No one cannot truly judge the complexity of someone else’s[0] experience unless it is both deconstructed[1] into categories and those categories exactly fit one’s preexisting categories. In other words, a claim like “literacy is a prerequisite for things like logical reasoning” (or complex thought, or consciousness, etc.) may be: A) true not as a result of an empirical observation, but in a circular way by definition—as a catch-22 where “if you do not think like we do, you may well not think” is trivially correct from most humans’ perspective, because if you do think but really unlike how they think (you are unable to communicate it using the same vocabulary[2] they use) then from their vantage point there may be no clear difference between you thinking in your own way vs. you acting unpredictably—contributing to it being B) simply not a useful claim to make: as your experience cannot be completely reduced to categories that exactly match those of some random scientist’s, that scientist can mnever fully judge the complexity of your experience or your capability of abstract thought (of course, they could mistakenly assume they can, by simply presuming their way of thinking to be the true reference point, as they are prone to). [0] That “someone else” can be yourself in the past, e.g. as a small child before social integration, in which “one” could be the current-you. [1] That deconstruction is lossy. Your experience is changed as a result, possibly lessened for those aspects of yourself that perceive reality as a whole. [2] Using any vocabulary (including language) requires deconstruction of experience, by definition.

Anotheroneagain 2y ago
You can only genuinely belive all this because you lack the capacity for symbolic communication. (you can't process the sound of the word "dog" as refering to the animal) You only learn language as a way to command people, then you call them "autistic" when they interpret what you say according to its symbolic meaning. ("taking things literally")
robwwilliams 2y ago
Thoughtful comments: I have no idea why you are being down-voted.

smeej 2y ago

This makes me wonder about what turned out to be a pivotal moment in my early life. It was the day I first realized other people have their own minds, and that I could predict with some degree of accuracy what was in them. My dad wrote the numbers 1 through 4 on a piece of paper, then asked me to pick one, but not tell him which I'd chosen. Once I had it, he said, "You picked 3, didn't you?" I was dumbfounded. "How did you do that??" "Most people don't like to be out on the edges. It makes them uncomfortable. So they don't pick 1 or 4. And most people, like you, are right-handed, so they pick 3 over 2." "OK, OK, do it again." (This was the moment a flash of magic happened in my head.) "You picked 1 this time, didn't you?" "No, I picked 3 again because I knew you would think I would pick 1 this time." With a fear in his eyes that I only later discovered came from the fact that his own sense of safety depended on being the smartest person in the room, he said, "You're only 3. I don't think you're supposed to know how to do that yet." But here's the other thing--I was literate when I was 3. Nobody really knows how I picked it up, but one day I told my mom it was my turn to read the stories, and I've been reading fluently ever since. I've been told I read differently than most people even now (blocks of text rather than individual letters or words), but I was definitely reading. I've never associated the two events before, nor that maybe I was only able to do one because of the other, but it makes sense of the fact that other kids didn't really start to seem reasonable or thoughtful until 1st or 2nd grade. They lived in these imaginary worlds where things didn't have to make sense. It seemed like a lot of fun, but I had trouble joining them there. I always assumed both skills just correlated with age, not that one might facilitate the other. My story obviously doesn't prove anything, but you've given me an interesting thing to think about today!

kqr 2y ago
This is called theory of mind and I've been experimenting on my first child as he has grown up and he had it much earlier than research would suggest. (I even tried replicating one of the actual experiments used.) I suspect there's large individual variation as to when it is acquited. My son is relatively socially competent and intetested in letters and numbers but not yet literate at four. We'll see how my second child fares -- she is even more socially competent but does not yet speak (first child did her age) so we'll see when it can be done.

willis936 2y ago

This is a correlation, not a causation. "People that struggle with problem solving also struggle with reading" is not the same as "not reading results in poor problem solving". The latter is not even begun to be proven in these case studies.

rblatz 2y ago

Could it be that autism is in part the inability to think abstractly around social situations?

solarmist 2y ago
This feels approximately the correct shape to me.
Doxin 2y ago
So having autism, this doesn't seem right to me. I can think abstract circles around loads of allistic people on the topic of social situations, but that still doesn't really help me be good at social situations unless it's a situation I've had practice in.

qingcharles 2y ago

I spent the last decade surrounded predominantly by illiterate people. These comments are intriguing, but I don't think the effect is as strong as you make out. I never noticed any real difference in how illiterate people view the world, except that they are generally more prone to believing conspiracy theories. If you can not read or write, then you do have to find other outlets for your energy. Music plays a bigger role in the lives of illiterates I found. I would say on the whole they would seem more extroverted and social, too.

fireflash38 2y ago
Consider it's not just literacy - it's literacy and language. Presumably you spent time around people who might not read, but definitely can still talk and hear.

grog454 2y ago

> Some illiterate people are told that all bears in the north are white, that Greenland is a country in the north, then they are asked what colours bears in Greenland have. They answer, "Different regions have differently coloured bears. I haven't been to Greenland. But I have seen a brown bear." I wonder how much the answer would change if you simply said "if all bears in the north..." It's probably not obvious to everyone whether you're setting up a hypothetical or asking a literal question with a false or vague premise (Grizzlies range as far north as the nothern coast of Alaska).