This is fascinating. My internal voice is full of words, words, words. Words are everywhere and cheap.
But there is a point in learning to actively speak a foreign language where my native language is suppressed, hard, in order to allow the new language a chance to take over as the language of thought. And while the new language is weak enough, I can see the shapes of my wordless thoughts. But I cannot describe them, because I temporarily lack words.
With time and practice, enough words return that the wordless thoughts are harder to see.
This is followed by another strange phenomenon. There will come a time where, if I speak my new language exclusively for a day or so, suddenly switching back to my native language will then result in me translating thoughts from my new language into my native one. This is a frustratingly imprecise process, because I choose my words carefully, and because some of them translate into my native language with a different nuance than I want. Once the language switch finishes, 15-30 minutes later, I resume picking words precisely in my native language and no long feel the frustration of [back translation].”
The one other time that my wordless thoughts become visible is in collaborative professional work, especially with people new to the field. I will occasionally catch myself trying to boil down decades of experience: “That will not fit well here, because it’s an [untranslatable].” Some random examples include [error-masking-retry-system], [budgeted-capacity-system-that-will-increase-complexity-costs-to-cheat-queuing-theory-badly], [charmingly-naive-ai-plan-that-even-the-smartest-people-in-the-world-all-fell-for-too-until-they-tried-it], and even [personal-version-of-second-system-effect-from-talented-juniors-who-have-been-burned-by-lack-of-structure-but-not-yet-lack-of-simplicity]. Many of these can be unpacked into words, but those words do not necessarily create corresponding structures in the listener’s mind, not unless I unpack the atomic thoughts into an entire essay.
Now that I think about it, it seems that much of Less Wrong is people writing essays to unpack bits of atomic mental vocabulary for others. So thank you for identifying this pattern.
This is fascinating. My internal voice is full of words, words, words. Words are everywhere and cheap.
But there is a point in learning to actively speak a foreign language where my native language is suppressed, hard, in order to allow the new language a chance to take over as the language of thought. And while the new language is weak enough, I can see the shapes of my wordless thoughts. But I cannot describe them, because I temporarily lack words.
With time and practice, enough words return that the wordless thoughts are harder to see.
This is followed by another strange phenomenon. There will come a time where, if I speak my new language exclusively for a day or so, suddenly switching back to my native language will then result in me translating thoughts from my new language into my native one. This is a frustratingly imprecise process, because I choose my words carefully, and because some of them translate into my native language with a different nuance than I want. Once the language switch finishes, 15-30 minutes later, I resume picking words precisely in my native language and no long feel the frustration of [back translation].”
The one other time that my wordless thoughts become visible is in collaborative professional work, especially with people new to the field. I will occasionally catch myself trying to boil down decades of experience: “That will not fit well here, because it’s an [untranslatable].” Some random examples include [error-masking-retry-system], [budgeted-capacity-system-that-will-increase-complexity-costs-to-cheat-queuing-theory-badly], [charmingly-naive-ai-plan-that-even-the-smartest-people-in-the-world-all-fell-for-too-until-they-tried-it], and even [personal-version-of-second-system-effect-from-talented-juniors-who-have-been-burned-by-lack-of-structure-but-not-yet-lack-of-simplicity]. Many of these can be unpacked into words, but those words do not necessarily create corresponding structures in the listener’s mind, not unless I unpack the atomic thoughts into an entire essay.
Now that I think about it, it seems that much of Less Wrong is people writing essays to unpack bits of atomic mental vocabulary for others. So thank you for identifying this pattern.