“tests”

The above definitions after this inspiring but somewhat muddled definition of free trade. I particularly like the second, satellite definition because it safeguards the first: If you want to contort a party into a trade and still call it free, having to specify exactly what it is this party owns can make the contortion clearer—all sorts of patronizing, noble-sounding words can be used to camouflage deception, but to own is a very strong word that makes us pay attention and rightly so.

What structure would you give to Mexico’s 2006 GDP, the wealth it generated in a year? Just gather your prejudices, take a guess, and try to put it into numbers.

Food. Hands down.

Though, strangely, if it’s between hunger and lust, then lust. Hands down.

You? Food or Sex? Hunger or Lust?

The test.

Watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth^WP a couple of days ago. Besides being astonished by the quality of the presentation that is the core of the documentary, he did manage to intrigue me, if not convince me, about global warming—I’m definitely reading Skeptical Environmentalist^{AM, E} soon.

At any rate, what surprised me most was Gore’s evident hubris and mocking towards skeptics. I thought of a question for him then,

And it hit me that it was too good a question not to ask ourselves.

That’s the game I’m proposing today. It’s like when they asked you in high school to take the other side of a debate only this time it’s not about arguments, it’s about reasons—the difference here being that a reason is a fact you yourself are forced to accept while an argument is a verbal tool you use to to try to convince others. This is not about others, posing or fighting, this is about you and truth.

You know there have to be reasons for both sides, don’t you? Anything of more than trivial complexity is inherently ambiguous. If you can’t find them it’s probably because your knowledge of the subject is, well, trivial and superficial.

So take one of your most entrenched beliefs—say, in my case, that government is evil or that there is no god—and find a reason—a reason you can do nothing but accept—for disbelieving it. It is not about you abandoning that belief, it’s about letting doubt back inside your cramped head.

Personally, I’m losing so far. It’s incredibly easy to come up with plausible, convincing arguments that would be good weapons and yet you personally know are ultimately flawed and phony. But to come with true reasons—well, it’s much, much harder than I thought…

I read this in a great post, 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will, soon after he^WP died—which was, personally, surprisingly sad—SlaughterHouse 5^{WP, AM} has got to be among the best books I’ve read. Anyway, I’m still fascinated by the phrase and particularly by the interpretation offered there (which seems obvious and inevitable now, but you never know so maybe you—virgin you—may want to make your own unadulterated meaning before reading the following):

So the songpiece has lived inside me since and served as an interesting flashlight^ELZR. Hope it’s useful to you too.

Oh, and here’s an interesting elaboration on it, from, of all places, a Grey’s Anatomy writer (yup, I’ve become such a rabid fan I gobble up the writers’ blog…shut up already):

What would you give up first, capitalism or democracy?

Here’s a (controversial) idea for a language test inspired by the famous Turing test for artificial intelligence^WP:

The test could be easily constrained to test for more specific capabilities: one could test for written command of language X by only permitting written communications, test only for accent by limiting “communication” to the spoken repeating of the judge’s written sentences, and so on.

It is simply stated but almost a “thought test”^WP—it could be done, but there would be a myriad practical complications and scaling would be a bitch. What’s important about it, though, is that it is a valid test to demand of (foreign) language learning: passing it should at least be its hypothetical goal.

The problem is that ridiculously few people would pass it if it where applied today. And because it seems impossibly difficult most people turn away, dismiss the test as wrong or irrelevant, and sink their heads in the sand (“what shouldn’t be, can’t be right”). Which only highlights the current sorry state of language education. It is NOT asking too much. It is not asking for exceptional performance—it doesn’t ask of you to be a Nobel-prize, a literati, or a rapper. It’s merely demanding average, pick-a-guy-from-the-street native-speaker capabilities. Why isn’t that a valid goal to ask of language education?

You could say that most people don’t need native-speaker level to start benefiting from a foreign language and that’s entirely true. But it is just as true that not reaching it is a serious, frustrating, even painful hurdle to communication. A hurdle that will plague ever more people the more the world shrinks. Some of the world’s smartest people can’t get their r’s right hard as they try. And we mock them for it. (Soon, we will be the mocked ones for not getting our intonations right.)

Well looked, Turing level is perhaps even a modest goal. We all possess it already in the language we are born into and we all contained within us the same language potentiality at birth. So it should be perfectly achievable and shouldn’t take nearly as much time as starting from zero.

Yes, I know. We are nowhere near knowing how to reach such a level efficiently. It’s too hard and too long a goal—currently. But we should at least strive for it. (And be honest with students on what the status quo of our language technology is: no more “Learn to speak Chinese in 21 days!”—for now.) Languages are some of the most complex and powerful artifacts we have created. It’s only to be expected that their learning is one of the most complex and difficult challenges we face.

But it is also one of our most rewarding (and valuable) experiences. I want to commoditize it.

Chances are we are on the brink of Turing level language translation^ELZR. Why aren’t we even close to practical Turing level language learning? I’d still want it.

That’s an example of the questions Ellen J. Langer, as she recounts in Mindfulness^AM, p167-170, posed to a group of elementary school kids in a study on discrimination. I’ve been rattling my brain for good answers since: Why?

No satisfactory answers have been found but here are some stabs at it, in markedly decreasing order of quality:

Any thoughts?

An epithet is a term used to characterize a person or a thing—a meaningful nickname if you will—and I’ve been obsessed with them (through my obsession with self-definition) for a long time. Examples abound, from the simple Dougie Houser, MD, to Warrren Buffet, the sage of Omaha:

• Claude Piron^WP, famous Esperantist and psychotherapist, calls himself ”plifelicxigisto” (literally, more-happy-maker), because most of the people that come to him don’t do it because of a particular ailment but because they want to enjoy life more.
• Piron also famously described Esperanto as ”la bona lingvo” (“the good language”).
• Margaret Thatcher is “the Iron Lady”.
• Guadalajara^WP prouds itself as “The Pearl of The West.”
• Among the X-Men, mutant Forge^WP, whose special power is technological brilliance (that is, a superhuman ability to understand, conceive, and build machines), is often referred as “Maker” (and that has got to be the coolest, most heretical epithet ever).
• William Gibson^WP is invariably introduced as “the coiner of the term ‘cyberspace’”.
• William Shakespeare is “the Bard (of Avon)”.
• Steven Johnson describes himself numerically as “a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of five books.”
• Lord Voldemort^WP is best known as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”.
• Benito Juarez^WP is the ”Benemérito de las Américas” (“the meritious one of the Americas”).
• Juan Gabriel^WP is fittingly called “El divo de México” (“Mexico’s male diva”).
• In role-playing games epithets according to your level and race are common; I remember Erasmo, who usually used Yang, an assassin, as his main character, really fancied his early-level epithet: “Yang, the man.”
• Adolfo calls himself (amusingly) an “infoplebeian.”
• Carl Friedrich Gauss^WP is “the prince of mathematicians.”
• Madonna^WP has long been known as “the material girl.”
• Shiva is usually “the destroyer”, but he is given thousands of names^WP in Hindu scriptures.
• Satan is “the prince of darkness”, or, in Michael Bakunin’s famous description in God and the State, “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker, the emancipator of worlds.”
• Jaime Sabines wondered, upon being called “a great poet”, if he could even be considered, simply, but truly, “a poet”—only to conclude he’s actually just “a pedestrian.”

I could go on forever.

But on a more pedestrian note (or not) what epithets do you fancy for yourself?

Without any pretense of deserving any of them, I personally like webcraftsman, formist^ELZR, and whimsicist^ELZR (which I stole shamelessly from someone I can’t remember now!). Other favorites, preceded with the same warning as before, include singularitarian, amateur, (techno-)libertarian, anarchocapitalsit, dynamist, reader, freethinker, and designer—this last one with or without any qualification, but I’m particularly fond of interface designer and analytic designer. Symbolist would also be a nice (undeserved) compliment and so would hacker. As of this moment, perhaps my favorite epithet of all is conceptual designer—a huge post on the subject upcoming.

For my webfront and brand-to-be, , I came up with the sloganesque epithet of “avantgarde webcraft” and I quite like it.

But really, I’m all ears, what labels look good on you? (And you don’t have to write them here, just think about it, between you and you.)