Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

There must be some sort of misunderstanding here.

> If we were to bet on whether a person is black or white, freckled or not, has epicanthic fold or not, etc, I don't need no special "data collected" to know what people born in Lagos vs Dublin would look like for example.

Yes you do. In order to make an educated guess, you'd have to know, given where they were born, whether that place is more likely to produce certain traits or not. You could then use that information to make your guess about how likely they are to possess those certain traits, having been born there. But without any information on how likely those traits actually are for people born there, knowing where they were born grants you nothing.

> It's common knowledge.

It's not common knowledge what my Human Design type would be given only when and where I was born. That's the whole point I'm trying to make. Astrology or not, the entire idea of giving me an answer solely based on when and where I was born, will always be bogus.

Now, if they had an actual dataset of the Human Design types of people from all around the world, and wanted to correlate me with that, then maybe I'd be inclined to give it a try, just out of curiosity.

But I'm not even the slightest bit curious about bogus astrology (or any other types of divination). I'd be glad to take a personality test, for example, because they ask actually relevant questions. Just not this.

> And in some cases where this changes over time, the data of birth would also come in handy. E.g. in the tendency of a random London citizen to have say South Asian features in 2024 vs 1950.

I'm not arguing against correlating this with other data. The entire point is that one needs to correlate it with other data in order for my answer to be at all useful, and what I have a problem with is that correlation is not being done. The alignment of the planets alone is not going to reveal my personality type, and not even when combined with my location.

In college I was struck by a housemate's law books. They only contained text with no pictures, drawings, diagrams, tables, graphs, formulae, or any of the other tools for organizing information common to engineering. They looked to be extremely tedious and boring.

Later, another former housemate, a math major who was developing software, went to law school for a JD. It was his opinion that many of the tools from computer science were useful for deciphering the more complex laws and regulations.

How you think may be a significant factor in whether you are a good match to certain occupations.

"Seven at One Blow" is certainly not a proverb that everyone knows in English; it's the name of the fairytale in English, but not something that people use to mean "bamboozle".

It's simply the case that Chinese relies far more on literary/historical allusions (chengyu) than English does. We might talk about someone's "Achilles heel" or a "Trojan horse", but these literary/historical allusions are simply nowhere near as common as chengyu in Chinese.

Disclaimer: I do not know, really, what role language plays in a thought process. I just want to point why your takes are not enough to make me to believe that language is a necessary prerequisite for a thought.

1. Rubber duck maybe just help with attention issues. All the studies I heard of do not try to untangle the mechanism. People tend to use language for a multi-brain thinking, and in this mode people do not think their thoughts fully, they propose ideas allowing other to support them or dismiss them. In this way they've got combined knowledge and experience to do the work, simplifying the early rejection of bad ideas. And I'm sure this mode of thinking shapes mind and in particular attention processes. You need to track which bits of information you told already and which you didn't, and you trained for that. Rubber duck can be just a trigger for that mode of attention.

2. I didn't hear about externalities, but to my mind what really helps to remember it is a number of associated details. I believe that ideas extracted from the memory when some of these details is popped up in your thought. It serves like a key in an associative map. When you name a concept with a word, and then use this word in different combinations with other words building associations, then sometimes your mind just like LLM will suggest the first word when you used words associated with it. It seems like externalities you talk about. Language plays its role with this, but you can achieve the same result without a language but thinking about all connected concepts of a concept you are trying to remember. You can build associations this way.

Karma aside, "having connections"/being "well-connected" is pretty much the equivalent in English. It's not bastardised at all; terms don't need to have the exact same cultural implications to be basically equivalent.