
Vocabulary as a Meta Mental Model - neilkakkar
https://neilkakkar.com/vocabulary-mental-model.html
======
jcims
Two quick unrelated thoughts on this.

\- I noticed one day that I was absent mindedly staring into the refrigerator.
This has happened before of course, many times actually, but at the time I was
trying to learn a bit about mindfulness and I thought this was an opportunity
to try to decompose how I got there. Working my way backwards, I realized that
I had experienced this little pang of a sensation that I 'chunked' as
'hunger'. But then, instead of responding to the sensation and all its
subtlety, I responded to the word and went to the refrigerator. It then
occurred to me that I probably do that a lot and don't even realize it. The
subjective experience is full of these incredibly rich and nuanced sensations,
and yet I compartmentalize them with my relatively coarse and dull vocabulary,
and then act on that chunk.

I'd be curious if people that have a native tongue that is more expressive in
a specific domain tends to cause them to operate differently within it.

\- Second thought is that language, or specifically the ability for one mind
to inject an idea into another without the second having to experience it
_AND_ the ability for the second mind to retain that information almost as if
they have experienced it, is an evolutionary shortcut that our biological
evolution has enabled. Essentially an evolution of evolution. (I then see
technology as the third type of evolution, in which our language allows us to
develop capabilities that exceed our biology, and ultimately AI will likely be
the fourth, in which technology enables a mind that exceeds our own).

~~~
neilkakkar
For the first one: Have you heard of the Piraha Tribe and their counting
system?

[http://web.archive.org/web/20040825185826/http://paulgraham....](http://web.archive.org/web/20040825185826/http://paulgraham.com/piraha.html)

~~~
jcims
OK so that seems to be 100% applicable to what I'm thinking. Very cool, thank
you for sharing the link!

~~~
neilkakkar
Cheers :)

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haddr
Another way to say that "the limits of my language mean the limits of my
world" (Wittgenstein). It is so true on many levels.

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jger15
Great post -- re: exploring new vocabularies, Ted Gioia touched on this in
regards to cultivating music taste which I found helpful.

"So what you need to do, if you really want to broaden your horizons as a
listener, is to get exposed to new things. Pick somebody. [...] Find somebody
who you trust as a guide, and let them open your ears to these new
experiences."

So what's the best way to find new guides?

Ref: [https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-
ted-...](https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-ted-gioia-
music-history-jazz-9a042d13b268)

~~~
neilkakkar
Thanks!

I think there's a lot of person matching involved here. Hard to find a one-
fits-all guide.

Luckily, there's lots of people publishing on the internet.

But how do you search through them? I don't know. That's something text based
search hasn't solved yet.

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nbashaw
A lot of this post seems to be loosely plagiarized from the "Eat Dirt" chapter
of the CFAR handbook:
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UZYBtOJ3QZ7FTI_4eKjVzBSNUqC...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UZYBtOJ3QZ7FTI_4eKjVzBSNUqC_Uba3/view)

Not good!

Edit: he does link to it in the post. But if you read his post then read the
CFAR "Eat Dirt" chapter it'll leave you unsettled.

~~~
neilkakkar
Hey Nathan, sorry you feel that way.

The third paragraph has a footnote stating that the 3 para above were "heavily
inspired" by the "Eat Dirt" chapter. I'm assuming you didn't see this first
footnote.

And a bit later, I do link to the manual as well (which is what you saw, I
guess)

Not my intention to copy Duncan's work. A big red disclaimer hurts
readability, and not attributing the source would indeed be plagiarism. I
think I struck the right balance.

I use that example because I love how it shows the concept I was trying to
explain pretty well. It's not the main point of the post.

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avindroth
This is true not only of words but also of artistic ‘qualia’. More
entertainment means more availability of such ‘movements’ or pallette.

Of course, if you have proper words to identify such things, it’s even better.

~~~
grabbalacious
Very true. From those classic movies I've watched frequently my brain has
gleaned a collection of images, phrases and situations which readily pop into
mind. They're not all fully-fledged parables: they're mostly quick analogies
which help me to grasp and sometimes to communicate what's going on in the
real world.

~~~
avindroth
Yeah referencing/re-enacting movies is such a great way to transfer implicit
knowledge

~~~
neilkakkar
Same for fiction. I used to read a lot as a kid, but it tapered off as I
switched to non-fiction. 5 years later, I'm now coming back to it.

There's something about fiction that makes things click - it's the story
standing in for experience :)

~~~
avindroth
I can’t do fiction sadly ):

I think there is something that clicks with people, and people should indulge
in whatever they end up indulging in. But I am definitely jealous

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danblick
It seems like there's a lot in common here with the idea behind design
patterns and pattern languages: giving names to "chunks" of expert knowledge
in order to allow those chunks to be communicated, taught, and put in relation
to other ideas.

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rgrieselhuber
“If you want to wage war, start by attacking your enemy’s language.”

~~~
shoo
c.f.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak)

------
constantine42
I don't entirely agree with this article, but I do understand its merits.

When I was really young, around 8, I didn't have books, TV, and the internet
wasn't around. I spent much of my time thinking about computers because I saw
them once and was fascinated by them. One of the thoughts I had was about
multi-socket computers. How did the two CPUs communicate and run in the same
system.

I eventually came up with the concept of race conditions, but I had no word
for this concept, but I could see it in my mind's eye. I eventually thought of
different ways to work around race conditions by making certain assumptions.

Nearly 2 decades later I was in my first job when a CPU bound problem showed
up and I quickly slapped together some multithreaded code that worked the
first time and was not only the first time I ever wrote multithreaded code,
but was also my first real world programming project. I hand rolled a lockless
queue. It was messy, it had some redundancies, but what I wrote was based on
the concepts that I thought about when I was 8 years old.

It was at this point that I decided to look into my concerns about "data
access ordering multithreading" and learned about the term "race conditions".

Of course learning this term opened up my mind, furthering my understanding of
the concept both in communications and in more concrete concepts than the
abstract blurs in my mind.

I actually deal with unknown unknowns all of the time. When I envision a
problem in my head, I tend to focus on guarantees. I enumerate assumptions
that my designs require, and if I can't prove to myself that I can guarantee
that assumption, then it is now a known unknown.

I have a track record at my work of finding corner cases. I do this entirely
by my "guarantee" approach. If I can't guarantee something, can I think of a
proof of concept that could cause the assumption to be violated. This also
works well for multi-threading. I don't need to worry about thinking about a
problem in a serial fashion, I only have to think about "in order for this to
work, what assumptions do I have to make and can I prove those assumptions."

It's quite often that I learn about new concepts by describing an assumption
that I can't guarantee, and I will find an existing answer or solution.

I've reflected on my obsession with correctness. I've found my issue is my
ADD. If I can't prove something can't happen, my mind will wander
uncontrollably thinking of what might go wrong. In order to cull these
distracting rabbit trail thoughts, I have to prove to myself that no issue can
occur.

This approach works well enough that I've had large complex mulithreaded
projects where the process deadlocked several times. When the problem got
priority and my team lead asked me if I had any ideas, I told him "I read
thought my code, it must be .Net framework". He thought I was joking at first.
Three times in a row, non-reproducible deadlocks that rarely occurred, I
diagnosed as "not my code", and 3 times I was correct.

Not only does this process seem to work well for me, but I've also used it
with other's who were stuck pair programming a bug that they couldn't figure
out. I can generally just start asking questions and eventually the
programmers figure it out on their own.

I think if more people focused on guarantees, there would be fewer issues.

Where was I? Oh yeah. If you can't guarantee something and you can't figure
out why, then there must exist an unknown. You don't need to know what this is
in order to know it exists. Having a word for it helps tremendously, but it is
not required in order to reason about it.

~~~
neilkakkar
I enjoyed reading this, thanks!

.. I don't think you're disagreeing with me at all.

I agree with this: "You don't need to know what this is in order to know it
exists. Having a word for it helps tremendously, but it is not required in
order to reason about it."

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avindroth
i think eating ice is actually a pretty ridiculous but fun and very inventive
way to ‘solve the problem’

