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Definitely tangential to this discussion, but it's about language and sufficiently geeky I think the HN crowd would probably appreciate:

I read a book a few years ago called Alex's Adventures in Numberland (https://www.amazon.com.au/Alexs-Adventures-Numberland-Alex-B...). In it he has a story about a group in South America who have no words in their language for a number greater than two (or maybe it was three? It's been a while since I read it). Anything larger than that was just referred to as "many". It's not as though seeing more than two of anything was uncommon, most families would have a half dozen to a dozen children. But if you asked how many children they had it was just "many". Whether it was eleven or twelve just wasn't an important distinction to them.

He goes on to discuss how language can expose what's important to a group and shape thinking. The introduction of a concept and word for zero was hugely important for our advancement in all number of fields. He also discusses how our constant pursuit for ever increasing levels of specificity has it's trade-offs: we seem to be becoming increasingly bad at estimating (which is both language, social expectations around what we value, and a reliance on tools).

Anyways, it was a story about language and numbers that I thoroughly enjoyed.




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