this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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i think that being used to properly structure sentences is important for reasoning well.
i agree that the effects of books and writing were probably beneficial to the brain, although they might have atrophied the memory and something else. But im not sure about tv, radio, internet and AI.
Ehhh yes and no. There’s prescriptive grammar (how it ought to be) and descriptive grammar (how it’s actually used within communities). This is where the ideas of code switching and such come in. You can certainly reason well in a Creole, if that’s what your community speaks and how you are taught, e.g. Belizean Creole.
yes, i wasnt advocating you should know any specific grammar. and that distinction is a good point. I meant that learning a prescriptive grammar decently is an important tool for reasoning. im not saying that descriptive grammars are bad, just defending that prescriptive grammars arent as useless as people seem to judge them.
The majority of grammar rules are arbitrary and unrelated to the expression of an idea. For example, does it really matter if you treat an inanimate object like a pencil as feminine or masculine? It's an object. Yet in Spanish/French/etc., there are grammar rules that define every inanimate object as being either feminine or masculine.
However, without a common grammar, it's impossible to communicate accurately. For that use case, AI functions as a language translator.
yes, its very arbitrary, but these are sets of rules that you can use to structure your thoughts. language helps us reason. it doesnt matter that it is arbitrary. definitions in mathematics are very arbitrary, but they are a foundation we can lean on to reason about abstract ideas. Being arbitrary is not a testament of uselessness. Different languages, lead to different foundations for structuring ideas. But dominating at least one of those foundations can be very important cognitively.
Gendering an explicitly non gendered inanimate object helps structure your thoughts?
I'd argue that following those grammar rules damages your thoughts.
what do you mean by "explicitly non gendered"?
Why is a pencil masculine? It's a pencil, not a person.