[HN Gopher] The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks ...
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The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages
Author : NaOH
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-04-05 15:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| rectang wrote:
| > _The way Vaughn describes it, any time he reads something in a
| book, he can remember it almost perfectly. When he returned to
| school, he had even more to say, and more that he could
| understand._
|
| Giant caudate nucleus at work?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpTCZ-hO6iI&t=700s
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Can we grow it?
| bradhe wrote:
| Fuck paywalls.
| masturbayeser wrote:
| how brave of you
| regpertom wrote:
| This could be done with a few people eg: "The remarkable brain of
| a nightclub bouncer with the worlds highest IQ."
|
| The article talks of him like he's a child. Bouncing around at
| all the attention. Thrilled to make new friends. Bordering on
| mockery. Hidden behind wonder, the call goes out: look at you,
| who are not one of us. A carnival ride for the writer, gather
| 'round everyone!
|
| Smart enough to do anything he wants, not smart enough to be
| normal.
|
| "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered
| mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production.
| Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I wonder if he'd have a natural aptitude for programming
| languages also
| kzrdude wrote:
| Programming languages are nothing like natural languages
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| The skills that make you good at picking up your third+
| natural language should be similar to the skills that make
| you good at picking up your third+ programming language.
| (With extra programming languages being much easier to pick
| up than extra natural languages, in my experience)
|
| The guy might struggle with picking up programming to begin
| with though, it is indeed a completely different thing from
| human language.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| You think? There's syntax, grammar, and idioms. Of course
| there are significant differences, but there's significant
| overlap too. As someone not linguistically inclined, I also
| notice myself looking for the name of the built-in method of
| a programming language I've used for 5 years. One might
| imagine a person with a better memory for vocabulary would be
| more capable of remembering the word/method name without
| needing to look it up.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| "Does having an aptitude for spoken languages mean you'll
| have an aptitude for programming languages" is a different
| question from "are programming languages languages" even if
| the answer to both questions is the same.
|
| But linguists have approached this question from time to
| time! The main stumbling block is highly literate people
| are inclined to think of writing as language but it's not,
| quite. You can have multiple writing systems for the same
| spoken language, or be fluent but illiterate. But you can't
| comprehend a writing system for a language you can't speak,
| barring disability.
|
| So programming languages do have grammar, but not the other
| components of a language. Idioms in programming are a
| metaphor referencing linguistic idioms but structurally
| they aren't the same. Programming languages are more
| similar to writing systems, and a lot of linguistics
| findings do apply to them when taken in that context.
|
| You can play around with this idea if you want. Try to
| convey meaning to someone using only a programming language
| and nothing else. This is tricky because they embed our
| other writing systems, so you need to be careful not to
| accidentally convey meaning with eg variable names. Might
| be best to use something like brainfuck or piet that
| prevents that entirely. If it's a language in the "human
| languages" sense, you'll be able to convey _any arbitrary
| meaning_ to another person who knows that programming
| language, even if you don 't share a spoken one.
|
| What ends up happening is you can only do this if you
| reference a shared spoken language. So you can warp a PL
| into a writing system, but you can't use it alone to
| communicate.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| That's exactly why I'd be interested to see if he could pick
| them up too. They're much more procedural, less meaning and
| more grammar. It might make it easier to see what's improved
| in his brain.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| i wondered the same, and then thought programming languages and
| their ecosystems go through different evolutionary pressures
| than natural language.
|
| and then i realized i still have no intuition as to the answer.
|
| just it's a great question. glad you wrote it down.
| Ir0nMan wrote:
| https://archive.ph/fRyEl
| ars wrote:
| "but after a bout of depression"
|
| And now I know why he's not working another job. Depression is
| the life killer.
| blunte wrote:
| It sounds in several places in the article like he has a severe
| case of impostor syndrome.
|
| Fortunately (spoiler) at the end of the article, after his time
| at the MIT research lab, he sees that some traditionally super
| smart people value him and see him as intellectually special.
| neovive wrote:
| Amazing! Almost like a real-life "Good Will Hunting" story.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Heartwarming story
| dvh wrote:
| First 5 languages are the hardest ;)
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| Meh. Can hack my way out of a wet paperbag in 5 or 6 european
| languages, puzzle out Greek/Cyrillic if desperate. Once knew a
| few katakana characters.
|
| Totally dumb and illiterate in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Thai,
| whatever. No prospects of improvement.
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(page generated 2022-04-06 23:00 UTC)