Well we’ll have to disagree on that. I have not said that there were no other benefits but that they were nowhere near communication and reading. Saying that those were not very largely the main benefits of language learning simply seems untrue to me and your examples are only comforting this view.
Both are nice things that come with a new language but definitely not something that would motivate the immense majority of people (and people on lesswrong are definitely not normal people) to learn a language if they were the only reason. I’m sure that’s a thing in lesswrong adjacent communities.
I do agree that “many” people benefit from the first example but that is almost always a side effect : what they want first and foremost is access to the content itself. You could not read the sequences in italian 10 years ago so you learned english, had they been translated you would not have learned it.(terrible example but you know what I mean)
Well we’ll have to disagree on that. I have not said that there were no other benefits but that they were nowhere near communication and reading. Saying that those were not very largely the main benefits of language learning simply seems untrue to me and your examples are only comforting this view.
Both are nice things that come with a new language but definitely not something that would motivate the immense majority of people (and people on lesswrong are definitely not normal people) to learn a language if they were the only reason. I’m sure that’s a thing in lesswrong adjacent communities.
I do agree that “many” people benefit from the first example but that is almost always a side effect : what they want first and foremost is access to the content itself. You could not read the sequences in italian 10 years ago so you learned english, had they been translated you would not have learned it.(terrible example but you know what I mean)