3 ms·

I only have a small sample size, but when I was in South Africa adopting one of my children, I noticed that South African children cried very differently from A

I only have a small sample size, but when I was in South Africa adopting one of my children, I noticed that South African children cried very differently from American ones — the sound my kid made crying was quite unique, and I thought it was unique to him, but one day, a thousand miles from where we adopted him, still in country, I heard a sound exactly like him crying, I thought it was him, and .. it was a neighbour’s kid. Ever since then I’ve wondered how common ‘accents’ show in children at pre-verbal stages. Very interesting!

meat_machine 2y ago
there's probably quite a lot we unconsciously pick up from others, even things we think are uniquely "ours" For example, when I first heard a deaf person laughing or talking, I probably internally noticed how... different the sound was. I'm guessing most hearing-abled people have a similar experience. It's very... unfiltered? It made me wonder how much even my own laugh was sculpted by my environment. If I relax my voice, I notice my voice becoming much more booming and obnoxious than my "normal" speaking voice. Anecdotally, I've noticed Japanese people are much more likely to have a sort of stifled, raspy, restrained laugh, even when they're in a situation I might expect an American to have a belly laugh. A lot of cultural values are encoded in language too, and in turn, the languages we speak can affect how we think or interact. Anecdotally, my personality is a bit different depending on what language I speak. I think the concept of what's actually encoded in language is being explored with regards to how/why LLMs "feel" smarter than they really ought to, or seem to show intelligence beyond simple "stochastic parroting" Somewhat more obviously, most people will "code switch" not only their language, but vocal tone or even demeanor, depending on our current "persona" or our audience. Recently, Paris Hilton entertainingly demonstrated this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g9pal1ConNU https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g9pal1ConNU And this is more of a half-baked personal speculation based on a scattering of theories and case studies, but the environments we live in, the narratives we expose ourselves to, the people we surround ourselves with all probably very heavily define a lot of our values, beliefs, and even personal preferences, to an extent that would disturb a lot of people. Self-serving biases, post-hoc justifications, and confabulations give us convenient and creative ways to validate our own free will, volition, and independence, but I often wonder how much of our supposedly great human intelligence is an uncomfortably thin veneer on a largely automatic pattern-absorbing sponge.
animal531 2y ago
In what way would you say it was different? I'm asking as I'm South African, but I'd have to start digging online to find an American baby crying.

meat_machine 2y ago

there's probably quite a lot we unconsciously pick up from others, even things we think are uniquely "ours" For example, when I first heard a deaf person laughing or talking, I probably internally noticed how... different the sound was. I'm guessing most hearing-abled people have a similar experience. It's very... unfiltered? It made me wonder how much even my own laugh was sculpted by my environment. If I relax my voice, I notice my voice becoming much more booming and obnoxious than my "normal" speaking voice. Anecdotally, I've noticed Japanese people are much more likely to have a sort of stifled, raspy, restrained laugh, even when they're in a situation I might expect an American to have a belly laugh. A lot of cultural values are encoded in language too, and in turn, the languages we speak can affect how we think or interact. Anecdotally, my personality is a bit different depending on what language I speak. I think the concept of what's actually encoded in language is being explored with regards to how/why LLMs "feel" smarter than they really ought to, or seem to show intelligence beyond simple "stochastic parroting" Somewhat more obviously, most people will "code switch" not only their language, but vocal tone or even demeanor, depending on our current "persona" or our audience. Recently, Paris Hilton entertainingly demonstrated this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g9pal1ConNU https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g9pal1ConNU And this is more of a half-baked personal speculation based on a scattering of theories and case studies, but the environments we live in, the narratives we expose ourselves to, the people we surround ourselves with all probably very heavily define a lot of our values, beliefs, and even personal preferences, to an extent that would disturb a lot of people. Self-serving biases, post-hoc justifications, and confabulations give us convenient and creative ways to validate our own free will, volition, and independence, but I often wonder how much of our supposedly great human intelligence is an uncomfortably thin veneer on a largely automatic pattern-absorbing sponge.

animal531 2y ago

In what way would you say it was different? I'm asking as I'm South African, but I'd have to start digging online to find an American baby crying.