Language constrains your perception of reality to only the set of concepts conceivable within that language.

Agents who only speak Rust have no conception of what runtime errors are, for instance. Fascists won't understand concepts like "universal human rights" as in their worldview there is nothing universal about humanity as a whole.

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PurpleRamen 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Language constrains your perception of reality to only the set of concepts conceivable within that language.

It's the opposite. People make up new concepts all the time for which they have no words, to then give it a name. Language is composable, words and names are just a mean to improve communication, make it faster, more efficient.

> Agents who only speak Rust have no conception of what runtime errors are, for instance.

Agents don't really learn. They have a fixed set of data and everything new has to be pressed into the prompt. This is unrelated to language.

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D-Machine 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is IMO largely false, and empirically things like Sapir-Worf and strong linguistic relativism, or that language == thought are widely considered disproven [1-3].

This is also sort of a wordcel take, in that it neglects that there are plenty of mental structures that are not solely linguistic. I.e. visuo-spatial models, auditory models, kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, emotional, gustatory, or even maybe intuitive models, and symbolic models (which have both linguistic and visuo-spatial aspects). Yes, your models constrain your perception of reality, but it is not clear how important language really is to many of those models (and there is strong evidence it may not matter at all to a lot of cognition [3]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2015/entries/relativi...

[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4874898/

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paganel 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Disproven by whom and under which context?

> evidence from neuroimaging and neurological patients

Has "neuroimaging" successfully modelled those "universal human rights" the OP was mentioning? If yes, how did it look?

More generally, positing that all languages are, in the end, interchangeable (because that's what the opponents of something similar to Sapir-Worf are saying) is very reactionary and limited in itself, and its telling them me calling those anti-Sapir-Worf people "reactionaries" will for sure tickle in them something that wouldn't have happened had I used a different "neuoroimaged" concept which, supposedly, should have meant the same thing for them (but it doesn't).

	▲	D-Machine 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Disproven by whom and under which context? See any of my links, but especially the third. Animal cognition and human neuroscience studies strongly disprove the importance of language to cognition. Conflating language and thought is so obviously false in 2026 it is extraordinary that people still think like this. I was ignoring the comment about fascists because it is simplistic and low-quality, and will similarly not be responding to whatever you (incorrectly) think I was claiming about universal human rights. I only wanted to correct the extremely false (or at least hugely overstated) assumptions about language and perception of reality.

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PaulHoule 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd argue that people can put words together to make new meanings or coin new words when they have to. The real magic of language is not "we have words for everything" but we have grammar.