I second this. I could have said I "agreed" with this, but to "second" this conveys something different. Or rather, from my intent it seems to convey X but maybe you receive it as Y.
The challenge I find with so much language is the vast number of associations we carry with words and how connotations can vary so extremely even amongst people who "have the same background."
One of the best descriptions I heard for language I think was written by James Pennebaker talking about expressive writing and how words were basically putting a digital categorization onto an analog signal of experience.
Words are not very precise and are often very relative approximations that require so much negotiation to reach shared meaning. Some will read "quests," as I did, and immediately think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and feel a bit goofy and have a hard time saying "I'm going on a quest" seriously. Others will feel excited and maybe encouraged to see it that way. Others might be annoyed because they love the word "goals" and have built their brands and careers around the word "goals." At the same time, with repeated usage of the word "quests," even my emotional reactions to it may change and I start to embrace the word with more seriousness.
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> just bad unreproduceable psychology research. there is zero proof of this. we actually have examples going the other way though.
For example, I read something like this and in my head, I often reframe it. I read "just bad unreproduceable psychology research" as "I do not trust the research you are quoting because I think it is not reproduceable." I read "there is zero proof of this" as "I have not seen any proof of this or do not believe any proof exists." I read "we actually have examples going the other way though" as "I have seen examples that seem to dispute what you are saying."
The way it was originally written, in terms of word choice, seemed to describe to me an objective truth in the universe, whereas the reframe I applied shows more of a relative belief that you may have. That's not to say your beliefs are not the capital T truth, but rather for me to feel less angry when someone tells me "how the world is" and to try to see the world from their perspective and learn from it.
Hey Jim! Yeah I think you hit the nail on the head, the difficulty of measuring language's impact on us comes from the individuality of response to it. Even minor shift in situational context can alter our response, as can the measurement window (e.g. you can see yourself warming to 'quests' over time), and of course the actual precise stimulus (our response to close- vs open-ended framing, process vs outcome framing, and the individual's cultural knowledge of the specific language used). Thus it's very hard to generalize these snapshot-in-time personal experiences across populations.
A recent comparison might be SSRI's effects, which are proving to be no better than placebo at a population level, yet a large body of individual anecdotes show they have very positive effects on some. Rather than dismiss the anecdotes, we need to acknowledge the difficulty of measurement for such a complex & high level topic and be curious enough to look at the problem through different mechanisms of ascertaining truth like qual analysis, logic, and common sense, rather than just accept some murky methods and results as the final word.
The challenge I find with so much language is the vast number of associations we carry with words and how connotations can vary so extremely even amongst people who "have the same background."
One of the best descriptions I heard for language I think was written by James Pennebaker talking about expressive writing and how words were basically putting a digital categorization onto an analog signal of experience.
Words are not very precise and are often very relative approximations that require so much negotiation to reach shared meaning. Some will read "quests," as I did, and immediately think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and feel a bit goofy and have a hard time saying "I'm going on a quest" seriously. Others will feel excited and maybe encouraged to see it that way. Others might be annoyed because they love the word "goals" and have built their brands and careers around the word "goals." At the same time, with repeated usage of the word "quests," even my emotional reactions to it may change and I start to embrace the word with more seriousness.
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> just bad unreproduceable psychology research. there is zero proof of this. we actually have examples going the other way though.
For example, I read something like this and in my head, I often reframe it. I read "just bad unreproduceable psychology research" as "I do not trust the research you are quoting because I think it is not reproduceable." I read "there is zero proof of this" as "I have not seen any proof of this or do not believe any proof exists." I read "we actually have examples going the other way though" as "I have seen examples that seem to dispute what you are saying."
The way it was originally written, in terms of word choice, seemed to describe to me an objective truth in the universe, whereas the reframe I applied shows more of a relative belief that you may have. That's not to say your beliefs are not the capital T truth, but rather for me to feel less angry when someone tells me "how the world is" and to try to see the world from their perspective and learn from it.