The classy label for the paint on the swatch card is [“Whiter Shade of Pale”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI8d36w_ijw)
(Disregard the fact that’s a song by a white guy covered by a black musician)
And apparently [one of Thomas Pynchon's faves](https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Smoking_Dope_with_Thomas_Pynchon) back in the day.
I should really re-read Vineland, great book, unfairly maligned for being too much fun.
(Although I still prefer the King Curtis version, plus it’s just a great album overall: Memphis Soul Stew is the musician’s musician take on soul)
Intelligence need not equate to language-learning ability; the
assumption it should is dangerous in that it conflates different
intellectual processes into one basket labelled ‘intelligence’ without
considering if there are very different things happening between
e.g. language learning and ability to understand maths.
They also seem to be OK with suppressing minority languages “because
that’s what the smart people do” , preferably if said languages belong
to nonwhite people.
There’s a general undergist in the “rationalist sphere” that
languages are ranked in a hierarchy as such: lojban/esperanto >
english > other european languages/east asian languages >
“nonwhite languages”
The Americentrism of the movement and “English is the language of
science/modernity” thing I posted about certainly contributes to such
attitudes
” Snarky answer: The smart people figured out early on that having
everyone speak the same one or maybe two standard languages is more
efficient than having everybody try to learn many languages, and then
the smart people invented A: television and B: economies that could give
every family a television set so that they could be exposed to the same
1-2 standard languages in early childhood. “- a rationalist
Which is kind of hilarious, because Lojban and English are about as far apart from each other as is possible. Lojban is supposed to be super regular and rational, it is a research language after all, and English is the exact opposite.
Also, approximately nobody speaks Lojban, while English is super popular.
It’s almost as if language success is largely a process of nation building and violence, and not a result of any inherent superiority of the language. Romance languages are everywhere not because Latin was the best, but because for a while Roman *armies* were the best, and armies bring languages with them.
Note that Esperanto does not even approximate *English* phonology well (never mind Spanish) with loads of extra consonants (and subsequently odd diakritiks), annoyingly agglutinative morphology etc
So many people, speaking with so much certainty, about so many things, about which they clearly know *nothing*. It's a massive Dunning-Kruger circle-jerk. It's amazing how being a self-identified rationalist apparently excuses one from doing any actual research on empirical questions and gives full license to self-fellating armchair musings.
How sheltered white American do you have to be to think up these takes?
sooooooo close
They also seem to be OK with suppressing minority languages “because that’s what the smart people do” , preferably if said languages belong to nonwhite people.
There’s a general undergist in the “rationalist sphere” that languages are ranked in a hierarchy as such: lojban/esperanto > english > other european languages/east asian languages > “nonwhite languages”
The Americentrism of the movement and “English is the language of science/modernity” thing I posted about certainly contributes to such attitudes
” Snarky answer: The smart people figured out early on that having everyone speak the same one or maybe two standard languages is more efficient than having everybody try to learn many languages, and then the smart people invented A: television and B: economies that could give every family a television set so that they could be exposed to the same 1-2 standard languages in early childhood. “- a rationalist
“I assume ‘politics’ includes culture war topics, which certainly includes comparative discussions involving population-level IQ.”
Speaks for itself.