How Words Get Their Meaning, and How That Influences Your Thinking.
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- Опубликовано: 19 июн 2024
- There have been a lot of underlying themes in my Words MADDER videos that I thought I should dedicate a video to covering directly. My goal with this series is to help people gain more control over their own "programming" and gain awareness of how language affects their thinking. Most of all, I want people to understand how easy it is for those who have power in society to use language to manipulate their perceptions and behavior. These concepts are at the core of this series.
While I do have a little fun sticking my tongue out at academia, I do want to make it clear that I am definitely providing a hyper-simplistic overview of all these concepts. I do this because there is no point in these ideas if they don't ultimately contribute, and are accessible, to society as a whole. I want to present them in a way everyone can use and validate for themselves. If you are intrigued, I encourage you to dive in a learn more.
00:00 Introduction - Taking Words for Granted
01:59 How Our Brains Define Words
09:38 How Language Lives in the Subconscious Mind
16:40 How Language Works Differently for Different People
18:32 How Language is Used to Manipulate You
31:07 You Should Get MADDER About Words
The image in the video of the man holding slimy puppet strings is from my daughter's music video for "Feed the Machine" which you see here: • Feed The Machine (Unof...
Here are links to learn more about the concepts I mention in the video:
Prototype Theory:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototy...
www.amazon.com/Cognition-Cate...
Language Network Theory
www.nature.com/articles/s4159...
web.mit.edu/evlab/assets/pape...
link.springer.com/chapter/10....
Accommodation Theory
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communi...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_...
www.perlego.com/book/4227513/...
Thought Terminating Cliches
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought...
Negative Framing
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing...)
www.simplypsychology.org/fram...
Semantic Degradation (More commonly known as "Semantic Drift")
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semanti...
Great Book on Mind Control Through Language:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought...
Finally, I want to say that a lot of my work is inspired, at least in part, by George Carlin. It is a pity that intellectuals can be so snooty, that they can't recognize true insight if it doesn't come from a research paper or pretentious manuscript. Even though he called himself a comedian, George Carlin was true pioneer in hidden meanings and manipulations of language and rhetoric. I encourage everyone to watch his work, but my favorite is his routine on "soft language" which is related to what I presented on "Emotional Sterilization."
George Carlin on Soft Language:
• George Carlin on soft ...
As always, after doing a video I think of things that would have helped for clarification. Here are a couple more points:
- Because of the incredible influence of social acceptance on language, the feelings we often end up defining words with are the feelings of those around us have rather than our own.
- Language manipulators know they can get more approval of an idea by using words they know are positively reacted to by a group of people to describe it. For example, I can describe an economic plan (like using public parks to increase property values in a community) as "strategic capiltalism" to conservatives while calling it "value-based socialism" to liberals, and be describing the exact same thing.
The one "party trick" i keep in my back pocket is: "When the weather predicts a 30% chance of rain, what is the meaning of that 30%?" It is crazy to see the different interpretations of that 30% that people have.
The technical meaning is a chance that 0.01 inch of rain or more will fall in the forecasted area.
Which is not at ALL what it sounds like!
One thing that I think you should cover is jargon. For example, when I first entered university I heard words like "model" and "characterize" that I either had a completely different understanding of or really had no idea what they meant in the first place. But now that I'm engrained into the thinking habits of a chemist, I find myself using those words with people that I half consciously know won't get the meanings, but I still use them because they're really useful and technically unambiguous. For example, I was at a perfume shop recently, and I showed the clerk some scents I liked and asked "how would you characterize these". She had no idea what I meant. By learning very effective and unambiguous language, my ability to communicate has ironically gotten worse. What do you think?
I do intend on hitting jargon or "industry speak" - but it might actually be in my business/marketing series.
Here's some words for you- YOU'RE THE BEST!
LETS GOOO
😊 thank you
Yoooo this is my favorite series on your channel, keep it up!
Oh, so YOU'RE the person who watches these. 😜
@@ChrisTheBrain Yeah, you're stuck with me it seems!
Chris. Your videos are what got me interested enough to go back and finish my Bachelors in Philosophy a year ago (on gravity and time, philosophy of physics interests). I went back august. I’ve been impatiently waiting for more on those, yet, this video I wasn’t gonna watch shines light on my potential thesis for masters (cognitive phenomenology) thank you for being a model educator. Truly exposing us to ideas that matter, whether where asking for them, or not!
This means a lot to me. Feedback like this certainly hits my "core motivations" for doing these. Thank you!
The next few science videos start seriously crossing that GR/QM bridge, so they have been extremely intense to write, research, and test. But, they are coming!
- Your presentations are excellent! Education with a side of humor. I hope to have the privilege of buying you a beer one day.
Thanks again!
Subscribed for the physics content, stayed for this. Good job Chris!
Thank you!
Thank you for sharing. I do believe words and sounds matter but this really gave me a perspective to look within and how I am using my words so that I am more aware w others. Thanks again Chris!
That intro was epic! ❤ and this is such a crucial concept prerequisite to cognitive behavioral development! I really like this one!
Thank you!
Great Video! I really enjoy learning with you :)
I personally really find the topics about how language can be used to manipulate people interesting, because it is used against us people so often in our everyday life by media and politics.
I am german, and it's the same way in our language and obviously before and during WW2 it got used extremely effective here and in all other countries.
Thank you! I think that the "health" of our common languages are at their worst state since WWII.
I've thought about this quite a bit, having learned philosophy, English and Japanese, while raised in Chinese. My thought is, natural language, (mother language, or well-learned foreign language) are based on words that simply have direct references to senses or emotions, words like good, purple, pain, loud, fast, five. These words have no definition other than the sensation they represent, they cannot be explained to someone who cannot have that sensation for whatever reason. Everything else in that same language, is just a massive web of references to those basic words. There is no such thing as completely objective language because there's no way to verify two people have the exact same sensation to one of these basic words, (maybe except the ones that pertain to logic itself). There is also no way to avoid connections between a complex word like eggplant, to a simple word like disgusting, because those connections are what gives the complex word meaning. We can attempt to tell people to form specific connections for the complex word we want, but once a connection is formed it is much harder to remove the connection.
Language is almost like a piece of recorded analogue music, where the sound waves through some machinery, carve grooves into a substrate analogous to the sound wave itself, which can also be easily played back into sound waves. Language is like that groove in the substrate, it is formed from emotions, and it can be played back to invoke the very same emotions. But since people don't have the same pool of emotions, plus the emotion that's supposed to be invoked by the same word, may feel different to another person, this process cannot be guaranteed to succeed.
BTW for language learning purposes, this is why it is CRUCIAL to form the correct emotional connections of those basic words, instead of leaning their "translation". Because the translation is not the same as those basic emotions, not only will it be much slower for you to understand that learned language, you also cannot decipher the most accurate intended meaning because you're working off of different fundamentals as a native speaker.
I in fact subscribe to the idea that language IS thinking, there can be no thought, or severely limited thought, without language. Without language to think about something would require invoking all of the original feelings, perhaps like imagining a story playing out, which is far more difficult and less flexible than thinking in terms of language. For example I can think about how the fire in a piston engine expands the gas which then pushes the piston to be converted to useful work. But if I were to think about it without language, there's really no way to do it other than to recall one of those CG movies on RUclips where someone explains how this works. Since I have no direct sensation of heated gas expanding and pushing on things, I cannot imagine this process without the linguistic knowledge, that this phenomena exists. As such, it should not be surprising that language is so powerful in influencing the way we think, for language is thought it self.
100% - I love having deep conversations with polyglots because by the very nature of learning different languages the mind learns to distinguish words from meaning.
This is also why great translations aren't "word for word" but work to find the most relevant "feelings" in a different language.
Many points, well made. However, I would say there is a different thought pattern that does not involve words directly. As an example, when designing the braking system, motor controls and steering for an experimental vehicle I was building, I would often visualize, in my head, various potential configurations, using readily available parts, manipulating them in 3 dimensions, trying first one idea and then another, until I arrived at a workable configuration. At no point was I consciously thinking of the names of the various sub-parts, only their qualities such as strength, size, and relation to each other, as I was performing this mental exercise. Therefore, words were not employed during the thought process. Sometimes, the solution would coalesce during rest periods, at another time, during a choir practice. Also, as a mathematician and astronomer, I must often use words which relate to quantities or properties, of objects or systems, that invoke no discernable emotion. I just offer these for consideration, as the subject of words and language are considered. 🙂
@@rfo3225 I would agree spacial imagination is a thing, maybe a hugely important thing for the creation of the first tools humans used.
I'd also guess this is not a universal ability whether due to biological differences, or maybe people just got used to thinking in terms of words. And this is how people can be convinced of things like crystal energy, magnet healing or other such supposed physical effects without an explainable physical mechanism. People will believe that if the words are related, if it sort of "makes sense" in language, it must also work in reality.
I love this whole conversation.
Reaching the cusp of speaking a new language naturally is really scary. Moving from interpolation to extrapolation. When I speak Japanese, there are words that just pop into my mind that feel right but I have no idea what they really mean. Do I use that word and risk miscommunication and embarrasment or do I work around it?
Chris, I have yet to fully grasp your theories (I intend to spend more time watching/pondering over them), but I would like to suggest that you consider the special case of a photon entering a singularity. The photon fills the space and defines the notion of time within the space at every point. due to gravity on the outside, the wavefunction is continuously pulled in, causing an expansion
Normally; average and mean are good enough. 🙃
Explaining blindspots in communication - that’s proper rocket surgery.
Much respect!!
Thanks!
Thank you 🙏
For your information, I watched Berserk an in Berserk they say that "good" means "good for you", so there!
What's "the boy who called wolf" called, where there were loads of wolves and still nobody took any notice??
I think that's just society
I would offer that many of the uses made in American English, of common words such as 'good', are perhaps a shortcut if communication using context to convey the thought intended for transmission. Many other words are used similarly, such as 'like', 'run', and 'wonderful'. Conversations would become rather tedious if we insisted upon precision in all of our discourse. Just sayin'.
Absolutely. That's part of the beauty of "curse words." I am not a "grammar nazi" here to argue for more precision in our language, just more awareness of its nature. When people struggle to understand one another, that should lead to introspection on how the very meaning of our words might be getting lost or warped.
@@ChrisTheBrain
It's cool. 😎
It’s easy to disprove Prototype Theory as people with Aphantasia wouldn’t be able to communicate which is defiantly false.
Ok, I give up. It was an interesting first attempt but my correction comment got too long.
Not really a fan of Prototype Theory myself, I was more just using that as a "here's what some academics think" before I got to my larger point. I think the "reference" part of language works very different for different people. Prototype theory might be relevant to some, but not others.
Many worthwhile points. Wait till AI, either under nefarious direction or of its own initiative, decides to weigh in to the fray.
In some ways, AI can be big threat here. Thankfully, "reference" is the only part of the brain we have been able to reproduce in AI... so far.
@ChrisTheBrain
Thanks for the reply Chris. I'm pretty sure machines don't register feelings, at least at this point. However, corruption of language, or generation of misinformation would be only a small part of the tool kit of an AI purposed for action against human-based entities Three days after reading James Barrat's "Our Final Invention" around May of 2023, I was concerned and asking myself questions that were only exploding onto the internet discourse in early 2023. To keep that in perspective, JB wrote that book in 2012. So the 'experts' had wind of those possibilities 10 years ago. Anyway, I don't mean to drag this off into a discussion of AI. I am fairly sure you are not unaware of such things. Just spouting off, so to speak. 🙂
This was really interesting and great! Killing it.
Thank you!
Or, when displayed the word "birb" (2:30), we all transpose that to "bird" automatically.
You can thank my editor/daughter for that gag.
For me as a non-native speaker "börb" evokes much more than just "börd". It feels like it has to sg. with bulb, suburb, globe... It's more like an adjective to me: sg. spherical which has to surround/encapsulate stuff
You always bring the heat, dude. :)
Much appreciated 😊
Great content, thanks...maybe you've been told this before...but you sound pretty much like Brian Dunning...Skeptoid....same cadence, same tone of voice....best of luck with your channel
Usually, I get "Bob Odenkirk" - so that's a new one for me. Thanks!
Probably obvious but in the topic of thought terminating cliches I guess that’s used to manipulate religion
I feel like you are confusing how we categorize concepts and words
And how the the meaning conveyed by words are defined
Or I am. Either way good video, food for thought
As for the difference between girls and boys picking up language. I feel like it’s more of a result of how the caretakers engage in the children based on their assigned gender. What they must learn and what is allowed to simply be let go
Chris!!!!!! Veratasium is trending and he is not respecting Bell’s Theorem Violation. Doesn’t relativity assume locality? Which was disproven by Bell.
Bell didn't disprove locality so much as find a possible exception to it. But I'll tackle Bell eventually
"Good"
Latin roots back to "of benifit" the idea behind what's 'of benefit' is subjective to an individual, circumstance and present state. There you can find what's beneficial to an individual which claims something as 'good'. This also can uncover values with a patern of similar benefits.
But I did give the best known entomological response.
Yes, I'm fun at parties. The nd kind 😊
On that note, have you explored the nature of autistic minds vs allistic minds in terms of 'litteral thinking' ? I believe the term 'litteral thinking' in itself is harmful, due to my understanding around autistic people usually being able to think and respond, more abstractly to aspects allistics tend to stay firm within 'black and white'.
You might enjoy this: psychcentral.com/blog/aspie/2018/09/allism-spectrum-disorders-a-parody#Allism
@@ChrisTheBrain lmaooo 😭🤭 what an interesting perspective!!
Shocking in some regards, thank you for sharing!
6:49 i'm still in pause mode.
Good = more overall agency
Bad = less overall agency
Very nice. This tickles me because I have a future video where I plan on using that as a potential definition of "good" for a philosophical topic.
Oh please, it doesn't even seem difficult. Good is purely emotional. For something to be good it has to bring you something you desire. Weather that desire be for food, shelter, companionship. I'm pretty sure this is a pretty universal understanding of the word.
@@charlesdickerson8260Okey, but it's not difficult to have personal desires that go against the desires of a community. Psychology Vs sociology and we aren't even into religiosity
@@Littleprinceleon that doesn't change anything. Good is an adjective based on an individuals "feelings". And as such the concept of good changes from person to person. Many things are agreed upon to be good, and others are more controversial. Your input in no way challenges my original statement.
@@charlesdickerson8260 I don't FEEL THE NEED to challenge anything. 😉 I've worked in scientific research (molecular biology) so I don't think some YT comments have to (re)solve anything. ☺️ However, I like to ponder...
Desire and feelings are broad terms: while "desired outcome" of some activity (eg. a ritual) performed by a GROUP will likely include personal needs, but things perceived as good by a community may "transcend" wishes of some members. There has to be a mutual agreement of course, but there can be degrees in SENSING "goodness" , don't you think so?
First and foremost: I've grossly limited my usage of terms good/bad (and other vaguely definable judgements) since my adolescence but for the sake of this discussion I'll introduce them back to my vocabulary 🥴
I find automobiles to be a fairly GOOD (useful, entertaining...) invention but would be more glad if there would be much, much less of them and I can imagine a good (fulfilling, harmonious...) way of life completely avoid of them.
I know that there are people who think similarly about bikes, which are my favourite vehicles... So do I "judge" cars to be a good thing ?! 🤔
I tend to think and simultaneously have a feeling that cars bring us more good than bad (a sentence like written by an AI ☺️), not that such a childishly simplified view has any validity, but in general I find them to be GOOD for humanity. Is this opinion based solely on MY desires, needs etc? I don't think so!
I agree that in total it's still more about my feelings than actual knowledge about topics associated with cars, but that's true about most of my opinions. That's one of the reasons I find the excessive expression of opinions in debates (of layperson) fairly useless if not counterproductive. Sadly we aren't rational enough, yet. A lot depends on one's daily occupation: many of us can't "afford" to be more rational: part of psycho-hygiene to purge "negative" or overflowing emotions...
However to be "unfeeling" like the antagonists in Dark City (movie) isn't a GOOD alternative, either. Often we use this term (good) just as shortcut (instead of a bunch of adjectives) to reduce our efforts if we think the communicating partners already share our attitude. In a more meaningful debate anybody can have some partial objections if such a vague and broad term as "good" is used.
Feelings can be and most often are compatible with and even helpful for rationality (if we don't want to limit the content of the latter to be strictly scientific).
Is this good/rational that I spend so much effort to write just one comment ?! 😏 Time will tell (or not 🙃).
I should rather invest my time in a more interesting supposition which I heard recently: that BINARY (DUAL) DISTINCTIONS (which I thought to be the basis of rational thinking) may not be so ancient and possibly only become widespread in early bronze age cultures... I have to look up some more respectable source on this... Exciting to imagine that there were times when humans did not express their feelings and thoughts using so SHARP CONTRACTS.
Perhaps they didn't FEEL THE NEED to be so sure and definite about things.
I am slowly coming to terms with this video.
I appreciate the effort 😊
Also can you do the word Woke?
GOOD is the right brain word, for it is about relationships. If something is preferable in comparison, it is good.
But I got a better one. The most abused word is ENERGY. It is because as much as you try it *cannot be defined.* You might think it is about movement but it is not. Ask any scientist to explain energy, he can give you an equation but there are so many equations about energy a one or few equations do not define it. The more equations you have the less definable it is. Of course the equation does not explain it. So there.
So what is my definition of ENERGY? There is so much BS people talk about, the abuse of some words becomes inevitable. The synonym for ENERGY is "I don't know."
Another similar word you just brought up is "right". "Right" is like "good", but with the added presumption of it being objective. Compare "2+2=5 is not right" and "abortion is not right" and you can see the endless frustration this word creates. Even worse than right is justice, since it has the presumption of being morally superior in addition to being objective.
I think a better alternative for energy in physics is potential. "Potential" doesn't try to convince you it's a monolithic concept, and it avoids uses like "this painting has such energy".
ENERGY is a great example of where my two series here cross over. You are correct, it has been left ambiguous. However, I do intend on defining it precisely.
A lot of people are confused as to why I jump around, but they haven't caught on that my view of semantics is what drove me to scrutinize physics. Math is a language, and we have been treating it just as poorly as English.
After watching the series *The biggest ideas in the universe on Sean Carolls' YT and having heard about the broad outlines of S. Wolframs computational ToE, the concept closest to energy that actually FEELS to make sense (I'm a biologist) is ACTIVITY: amount of ACTION... ( The rule of "least action").
"Potential" to me evokes only half of the story about energy: but that's maybe only the influence of philosophical distinction between potentiality and actuality, terms introduced to me in puberty when mystical thinking (is that a thing?) was more dominant in my mind.
Speaking about action the term CHANGE comes to my mind (and a line from Tool's esoteric song 😊 *46 and two: "change is coming" - which to me implies that action and motion are separate physical phenomena).
I'll be so glad, when I finally manage to develop (evolve ?) a GOOD intuition of how a quantum system can EVOLVE without using the concept of time, (also the switch between time domain and frequency base when characterising waves...)
It seems to me that being in a quantum state requires to be separated from 3+1D space/time, and the "collapse" is the integration of specific configuration of a given Q-system into the macroscale order: but I'll need to watch Crhis's videos to get rid of some ingrained images to clear my view.
Thanks Chris for the GOOD content (and the "bad" too 😅)
Pineapple on a pizza is *good*.
Politicians, Pundits, and the Powers that Pee
That's what we call "trickle down economics"
Hey Chris
Cool video, but I‘m still waiting for more „gravitas“, „enLIGHTenment“ and „less two dimensional“ stuff from you.
;-)
Thanks!
They're coming. Probably next.
@@ChrisTheBrain You can‘t imagine how much I appreciate both, you answering to my comment and the information it contains.
I promise, I‘ll try to be patient while waiting for your next „massive“ video.
So long and thanks for all the brain-work.
1. You and the editor are hilarious
2. I think it would be good to dive into the terms "right wing" and "left wing" - they are seldom used to mean what they actually mean. Too often people will disengage from meaningful discussion because they can dismiss their 'opponent' as being "left" or "right"; you aren't from my faction therefore I don't need to listen to you. The error is in believing in the factions - no doubt this dichotomy has helped perpetuate two-party systems the world over.
Good point on 2 (thanks for 1 ☺️) - I will ponder that. I have content planned that covers issues which are currently presented as false dichotomies in left/right, but don't know if a head-on attack of left/right would be redundant. Then again, redundancy is one of the top 5 rules of marketing.
? what is with your compass?
And your new theory of reference frame of light ?
Canceled?
If you watched the end of my last science video, I talked about how the next video is going to take a while. It's going to be a BIG jump forward and I am working on research and potential experiments with some other people who have jumped in to help.
My initial videos did what I intended: got the attention of some experienced scientists and engineers. So I have a lot more to work with than I did before.
It is still my #1 priority, but I have so many things I want to do videos on. So I am doing these while I work on the other.
It will be worth the wait.
Oh yeah... If you think this series has nothing to do with other, you might want to give it another look. You might be surprised when they crossover (like they already did with "Time")
@@ChrisTheBrain I wait for it. I'm very interested in your thoughts and research about this.
Please, hurry up. ;)
Please!
'in', not 'if'. Torpedoed again by autocorrect.
4:50 fruits are vegetables
Taxonomical vs. Botanical - but glad you are paying attention. I could have gone far enough as to call it a "berry" - but that would detract from the point.