BJKS Podcast

113. Damian Blasi: Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science, linguistic diversity, how to study a language you don't speak

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Damian Blasi is a professor at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. We talk about his article 'Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science', linguistic diversity, how to study across the world's languages, his career path, and much more.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps

0:00:00: Why Damian studied physics

0:06:31: How to deal with small, sparse, incomplete, imbalanced, noisy, and non-independent observational data

0:09:38: Evolutionary advantages of different languages

0:14:01: How Damian started doing research on linguistics

0:20:09: How to study a language you don't speak

0:28:58: Start discussing Damian's paper 'Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science'

0:48:25: What can experimental scientists do about the vast differences between cultures, especially of difficult to reach peoples? And how different are languages and cultures really?

1:10:15: Why is New Guinea so (linguistically) diverse?

1:17:34: Should I learn a common or a rare language? And where?

1:29:09: A book or paper more people should read

1:32:31: Something Damian wishes he'd learnt sooner

1:33:56: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links


Damian's links


Ben's links


References

World Atlas of Languages: https://en.wal.unesco.org/world-atlas-languages

The Andamanese group that's hostile to strangers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

"the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito_surrender_broadcast

Bakker (2022). The sounds of life.

Blasi ... Neubig (2021). Systematic inequalities in language technology performance across the world's languages. arXiv.

Blasi ... Bickel (2019). Human sound systems are shaped by post-Neolithic changes in bite configuration. Science.

Blasi ... Majid (2022). Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science. Trends in cognitive sciences.

Everett (2023). A myriad of tongues.

Floyd ... Enfield (2018). Universals and cultural diversity in the expression of gratitude. Royal Society Open Science.

Gordon (2004). Numerical cognition without words: Evidence from Amazonia. Science.

Hossenfelder (2018). Lost in math.

Koyama & Rubin (2022). How the world became rich.

Nettle (1998). Explaining global patterns of language diversity. Journal of anthropological archaeology.

Pica ... Dehaene (2004). Exact and approximate arithmetic in an Amazonian indigene group. Science.

Skirgård ... Gray (2023). Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss. Science Advances.

[This is an automated transcript that contains many errors]

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [00:00:00] Yeah, it's funny. I think you, um, looking at it, I think you're one of relatively few people who can make me look like I've just never traveled or moved at all academically. It's I don't know whether we'll get into like how exactly all those different things happened. But yeah, I mean, I guess we'll be mainly talking about your paper, Overreliance on English Hinders Cognitive Science. Which actually a fun part is, I guess it took us a while to, you know, actually make this recording happen. And since then it's been cited quite a lot. It seems like a lot of other people also gave it a lot of attention.

Damian Blasi: Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, we are very pleased with the reception of the paper in general. I think that I think the message was latent in the sphere of academics, working with language and culture and human diversity. So I'm happy that it had some impact. It seems.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, so basically before we get to that you know, I like to trace people's careers and weirdly enough I don't know exactly when this was, I think maybe 10 episodes [00:01:00] back. I talked to an Argentinian who studied physics and then came to Europe. So let's maybe do that again. And in your case, I'm particularly curious because you, from, you know, from my side of, like, you know, having studied psychology, linguistics to me is, like, it, it doesn't, there's not an obvious path from physics to linguistics.

Let's put it that way. So yeah, I'm just curious, like, maybe let's start with why did you Why did you study physics? Or is that just the only thing that's available in Argentina? That, because that's my perception right now.

Damian Blasi: that's I think that's a good guess. And I think that explains a lot of why I took that. Similarly unusual, but actually another rare career path. I have to say that I've been always interested in languages and cultures and minds. I always had this encyclopedic bias towards, you know, whatever happens with other populations in the world.

 But It turned out that I got to go to university at the time where we had one of our periodic crisis that was back in 2004 and you know, I come from [00:02:00] a low income household and essentially we ran out of money within the first year of me being in Buenos Aires. So my family is from a city that's four hours away from Buenos Aires.

I was studying philosophy back then, and the reality was that there were very little opportunities for me to carry on in that direction. For historical reasons, the basic undergrad degrees in Argentina used to take between five or six hours if you, five to six years, if you managed to go through the program seamlessly.

So there was no opportunities and there were no jobs as well. There was a huge unemployment rate, so there was no reasonable way for me to to persist in that direction. So my options were either I go back to my hometown. Or, there was this absolutely non canonical, non obvious path, which involved applying for a full fellowship to study physics in the Argentinian Patagonia.

On top of that, [00:03:00] there is a specific experience that I had when I was taking Philosophy 101. In Buenos Aires, which was that the teacher will invite this older professor and he would end every single class, it doesn't really matter what content, what the lecture was about. Could be about moral philosophy, or the Greeks, or Descartes.

Whatever, but he would suffix every lecture with some call out to physics. You know, we'd say something like, well, you know, we'd study epistemology, and we know from physics that the uncertainty is a fundamental feature of the physical world, and because of that, yada yada. So I felt a bit uneasy because it really seemed to me, it felt back then, that the ultimate justification or the ultimate way of legitimizing whatever claims were proposed as legitimate.

We were dealing with in philosophy have to do with physics. Obviously, that wasn't the case, but it really felt like that back then. And I thought, well, you know what, if that's the [00:04:00] case, the ultimate truth resides in physics, then this could be not just a way for me to get a degree, but I could also learn something important about the structure of the universe.

Now, I have to say, I was lucky enough that I managed to get this fellowship. Yeah. I got my undergrad and masters in Argentina, Patagonia, but from moment zero, I when I was able to do some actual research, I was already applying my methods and the techniques I learned from physics to the study of language.

So it was not. Later in life, I discovered I was interested in this, but instead I always had this interest and physics was like the unlikely, but more robust way of me being able to go forward with this interest.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I guess the counterfactual is always difficult, but how do you think you'd be a different scientist now if you'd, you know, continued with philosophy or yeah.

Damian Blasi: [00:05:00] Absolutely. I think that I think that a lot of what might. My scientific career has been, was the the consequence of lack and randomness and historical events, but perhaps I'm excessively optimistic here, but I think that the combinations of skills that went into my education ended up with me being a very different type of scholars from other people who are interested in similar topics than the ones I spent time thinking about.

And again, I don't want to to put a value to this, I'm not saying I'm better or anything like that. I'm just different and I think physics play a huge role in that. I think there's something about physics that has to do with a slight bias towards elegance, but I think I have left behind many years ago, but a permanent, like this constant thinking about how to formalize What is a complex event that you get to observe in nature and the permanent feedback between experiments and models and nature that I think it's [00:06:00] it's extremely important.

There is a bag of tricks actually that come with being a physicist. One of the things I, for instance, one of the things that you do a lot as a physicist is to think about a system in the extremes, right? What happens if you have infinite temperature or no temperature whatsoever, right? When it comes to the social world, that probably is not very relevant.

But I think it's a it's an intellectual tool that makes you good at counterfactual reasoning and me and others have tapped on that a lot beyond the realm of physics. I would say

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, I had this is maybe a little bit of a non sequitur, but somehow it made me think of it. So I'm gonna jump around a little bit and ask a question about something that's on your website. Because I mean, it relates a little bit to like, kind of Data and how you deal with that, and I'm just wondering how that fits in with the, with the kind of, that kind of thinking you mentioned.

So you see, on your research website you say, A substantial portion of my work involves inferences with small, sparse, incomplete, imbalanced, noisy, and non independent observational [00:07:00] data. Which, to me again, sounds quite different from what I, I mean, I never studied physics, but it sounds like that's quite different from what I imagine you would have learned there.

Damian Blasi: it's absolutely correct. I think most of my time analyzing experimental data back when I was in physics involve experiments where you have perfect parametric curves. And, you know, essentially your fits Go through each of the observations that you have, and noise is perfectly Gaussian, everything is beautiful, and then you get to deal with the social world, and I must add, the social and diverse and historical world, and what you get is, you know, if you're a scientist like myself, working with whatever the outcome of human history has been, we have a terrible experiment, like some conditions have been repeated many times through history, and some others are extremely rare, But then you want to make inferences about the overall population of observations that involve humans.

And that means that you have to come up with with makeshift [00:08:00] solutions and with creative ways of approaching what is essentially a terrible experiment. So yeah, that was the whole learning process. That took place after I I finished my education in physics.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So can you give an example of like how you have to, you know, if you only have a bad experiment in that sense um, do you have an example of like something you did where it worked really neatly where you could use like a completely different approach? I mean, unfortunately I haven't read much of your empirical stuff to really know exactly which study I could like ask about here now.

Damian Blasi: I would say like a large proportion of my research involves gathering samples from languages and cultures around the world. And what happens, it's no surprise, is that a few cultural linguistic complexes have spread. With much more success than the other groups, you have, you know, in the European languages, Sino Tibetan languages, Austronesian languages you know, [00:09:00]Austrasiatic languages Bantu languages and all of those.

groups of human populations, cultures, languages spread they're over represented in the overall statistic of languages and cultures of the world. And and, you know, on the one hand, you want to maximize diversity if you're sample to make inferences about humans or languages in general. But it happens that most of the data you have comes from a few of this historical related groups.

So there is a whole Industry of how we observational scientists deal with this overpresentation of this human groups that have been particularly successful in terms of current day representation. I don't know if that's transparent enough, but

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: you know, I was just wondering when you said that is there a. I mean, presumably, I would imagine, is it a coincidence that those language I don't know, families, whatever the right term is, have spread? I mean, presumably, you know, that's just one aspect of culture. So, or is there any kind of inherent advantage?

I mean, I don't know.

Damian Blasi: right? Well, I mean, we [00:10:00] have. We have plenty theories of why these different human groups have been particularly successful. A lot of these stories have to do with development of agriculture or technologies that gave them an edge in relation to other populations or modes of social organization that made them to be particularly successful when it comes to encountering other groups.

Sometimes pathogen resistance, just not dying when being exposed to pathogens or just being close to the place where animals with potential to be domesticated happen to be now I have to stress something that a lot of these developments are either. ecological or cultural in nature.

But I think that so far I haven't encountered a single clear case where I think has been a linguistic component to the success of a specific human group. I know there has been a, like a, perhaps a running theme in previous centuries you know, why is it there's so many European languages has to be something very special about us in Europeans, but I know of.

No convincing evidence that [00:11:00] there is not even a small effect in the direction of languages being determinant for the success of human groups here and now, or at least within the last six or eight thousand years, which is what essentially covers a lot of recorded history.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, it makes sense. Maybe the, okay, maybe the reverse is something that is kind of, it turns to me, I mean, the potential reverse. So, something where language can kind of get in the way of people. I don't know. But like one thing I think about, so the, the, the, from my research, I guess that like social and numeracy kind of dimensions are probably the most interesting ones.

And so I've never looked a lot into this. But I was just so fascinated when I read about these, I think like the mid 2000s, a couple of papers came out that said like, you know, there's, especially the Amazon rainforest, there's a couple of tribes that don't have specific numbers for like larger than five.

I think was the Munduruku or something like that. And then the Piraeus don't have like precise quantities at all or something like that. So it's all just very approximate. I mean, I guess one difficulty in, [00:12:00] in discerning that a language has. A clear disadvantage is that if it has a clear disadvantage, then, you know, maybe the language doesn't survive, but I was just curious, like, if there, you know, if there are languages that have such, you know, I guess for us, like counting such a basic fact of life, not having, it seems like a disadvantage, but I don't know, maybe in their context also, it isn't,

Damian Blasi: Yeah, I think that the question is what's the causal network here in the sense that You know, why is that? These people didn't develop a generative counting system. So maybe it's the absence of trade. Maybe it's the absence off long term storage off quantifiable units. So one way of thinking about this is that this the problem is that this virtual technology doesn't develop because there is no social need for that.

So we don't know of a case where there is an active need for quantification of population. And the language not having that specific feature so I think we've been [00:13:00] interesting question as a question of what will be the case. You have this specific cognitive technology rooted in language that's counting.

That is absent and whether that will give an edge to people. I think, you know, this might have been the scenario at a very early stages of the evolution of language. Where. story. The canonical language structure was not fixed, and maybe there were a bunch of different experiments going on with different components and different way of structuring linguistic messages.

And that might have been the case that differences in linguistic structure might have given rise to to the dominance of a group over others. But again, when you look at historical times, I don't know of a single case that Where we get good evidence that it was just language and not culture or any other of the media of covariates that might have played a role.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I think that's a good, good response. And it makes me realize I should probably read more anthropology.

Damian Blasi: I think we should all read more anthropology. That's not only about you. I think it's a[00:14:00]

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Anyway, going still curious you know, keeping the kind of, I guess, dual narrative of, of the influence of language on all sorts of things. And your personal biography. So your. Okay. So you just finished physics. But you said you immediately, as soon as you started doing research, it was along those lines.

So was that still done in Argentina or how did that, or what did you do after the degree?

Damian Blasi: No, I moved to Italy to Trieste to work on I was working with Jacques Smeder, who was a very important psycholinguist, and he was mainly interested, he was an old school experimental psychologist, and he was running a laboratory focused on language acquisition. So it was the first time I got to see how people run experiments with babies, the type of inferences they do.

But I have to say, I was never really an experimentalist, and, you know, I got to see how much effort and the type of. Profile that takes being experimentalist. So it was a very [00:15:00] eye opening experience, but I knew back then that it wasn't for me. I'm glad I did it, but it didn't work out. Then I moved to India.

I went to Tamil Nadu and I was working on, I was trying to apply methods from physics to figure out whether the induscript that have characterized which are some of the first urban settlements that we have in history, or at least in that part of the world, whether those there is a collection of bronze tablets with repeated symbols.

And it's still an open question whether those sequences are linguistic in nature or not. That was a very productive time. It was my first experience outside of Western or Western ish worlds. I wouldn't say that Argentina was Western, but you know, it's adjacent to Western. And I think it taught me lots of important things about life.

But again, I also realized that was interesting, but that's not exactly what I wanted to do from there. I moved to, to Germany, to Leipzig, to do my PhD at the Max Planck [00:16:00] the mathematics for for sciences. Formally, my PhD was in computer science, but as, as soon as I started my PhD, I got an affiliation with the Max Planck for Evolution and Anthropology in the Department of Linguistics.

So I spent my whole Ph. D. between the Linguistics Department in the Evolution Anthropology Max Planck and the Mathematics and Sciences Max Planck. And I also had a stint at the Max Planck for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. And that was an amazing time. I got to indulge into things as diverse as primatology and human genetics and human evolution.

A bunch of linguistics, of course. It was it was a very humbling experience because, you know, there's a bit of a stereotype with physicists, and I think that's, they hold a little bit of truth that, you know, physicists have this kind of indolent stance in relation to other fields, and they think you know, we're figuring out the nature of the universe, so how hard can we go wrong?

Yeah. Your field is, you know, we can probably come up with some [00:17:00] analogy based on spins or some field theory or whatever. And and back then, I think that my thinking about language was very simple, not only because of my lack of specific linguistic education, but also because that was my professional bias, right?

As a physicist, I was trying to come up with the smallest number of parameters that could account for whatever is going on. But then, you know, with time I realized that a lot of the stuff that I was leaving out was important stuff, and that Almost all of my intuitions about language were wrong. So I spent the first couple of months sitting there in the Journal Clubs of the Department of Linguistics in Leipzig.

And I was sitting through two hour conversations on whether this language in New Guinea had vowel harmony. Or didn't have vowel harmony or whether this was a a dative marker or it wasn't and I was like, at first I was bored to death, but then when I started reading more grammars and having a [00:18:00] more organic interaction with linguists, I changed my my point of view completely.

I saw like these people, linguists, the comparative linguists, these people have been sitting on a trove of systematic observations about human behavior and cognition, which is amazing. And it's I think it's an underappreciated field, so that changed a lot the way in which I engage with data.

And how much I pay attention to the details. Of course, at the end of the day, a lot of my research has to do with inferences about populations and samples. So some of the details go away. But I think it really changed the way in which I think and I do science. By the end of that period in Germany, I knew I wanted to deepen my understanding of comparative linguistics, so I moved to Zurich so I had a double affiliation between the Department of Comparative Linguistics and Psycholinguistics, so that was also a very productive time, I got to learn quite a lot and after that I thought I had [00:19:00] enough with Europe for the time being, and I moved to the U.

S. So I spent one year in the Radcliffe Institute for Abundant Study in, at Harvard, and which was an expansive year of just reading widely and interacting with people well beyond my field of expertise. And and then I spent three years at the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, working with with Joe Henrich and and I was also affiliated to the Harvard Data Science Initiative.

And now for since November 23 I'm now I'm a professor at the Center for Brain and Cognitive Science in in Barcelona at the UPF. And I know we started this conversation by saying how boring is to, you know, listening to this list of achievements or milestones in someone's CV. I think I just did exactly that.

But I think that should satisfy all of your questions about my academic career, more or less.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We said before we started recording that we're not gonna we're not going to do that, but [00:20:00] mean, I guess in your case, it is also like as I said, like quite a wide circuit in terms of um, yeah, but the, okay. So once you were saying that I had one straightforward question, which is how exactly.

Do you study a language that you, by definition, don't speak because, you know, you study so many languages at the same time, right? So how, how exactly does that on a practical level like do you have people who, you know, specialize in that language and then they take out certain aspects of it or like, how does that work?

Damian Blasi: I have to say, this is one of the most one of the most annoying questions I get when it's, when people realize I work on languages. And the first question is, like, how many languages do you speak? And I have to say, I don't have any special talent for languages. I would say exactly the opposite. I grew up in a Spanish monolingual setup.

My English, when I left Argentina, was pretty rough. I think that colleagues Who know me from back then, they still have all of these jokes about how terrible my pronunciation of a bunch of words was. You [00:21:00] know, I think I, you know, there's a lot of funny stories about me saying something like, uteran instead of utterance or Ian, instead of, and of course I couldn't distinguish between BNV for the longest time with hilarious consequences.

So I'm not very good at learning languages, I have to say. The way which I study languages is that I. Most of the time, I take parameters that have been observed by linguists, like the order of the basic constituency language, or the presence of a given grammatical marker, or the size of the repertoires of speech sounds the language has, and that is the object of my scientific inference.

I think in all the work I do that involves deep intuitions about the structure of languages, there's always linguists who have. with the languages themselves. So there's no statement out there of mine that involves not getting the real experts into play. Just so to say.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But then from what I understand, like [00:22:00] these, as you said, like often it's looking at You know, many languages are from all over the world and seeing kind of similarities and that kind of stuff. So, I mean, do you, is there like this like database? Because I mean, it must be like, especially for like really rare languages, right?

It must be really hard to get people to actually, I would imagine have that kind of data, right? The parameters and all this kind of stuff. If it's some language where you know, I mean, I don't know if it's like one of those, like five million languages from Papua New Guinea, you know, then they have to, well, for example, the person, the people who speak that you like, do they speak English?

Right? Maybe, maybe not. So then there's like another set. So I'm just curious, like, how does it seems like you need like this, like really large world scale kind of like effort to get the data in the first place.

Damian Blasi: Absolutely. I think that my, my approach for at least for the first half of my career has been largely opportunistic. And I think it was the right thing to do in the sense that I started my PhD. Just a decade away from the [00:23:00] development of this amazing resource that was the World Atlas of Languages short name WALS that essentially compiled massive amounts of data for a large number of languages.

The original motivation for this database wasn't necessarily the type of analysis I did, but instead it was just trying to have a normalized database for linguists to do linguistics. So I was very lucky that when I started doing these things, there was still a paucity of studies done with that type of data.

So there was an ecology of databases produced by the department I was in. I would say about 10 to 12 databases ranging from words of language of the world to the patterns of verbs to grammatical information, phonemes, et cetera. And I was just playing around with them, trying to figure out exactly what was going on with languages.

So to me, it was very pedagogical. That is something that I have tried to contribute in a systematic manner. I've been involved in initiatives that have resulted in digitalized, open, [00:24:00] free databases involving cultures of the world, genetic and linguistic matches around the world, grammatical structures, etc.

And I think this is very productive. And a lot has been published but the things exist in the form of maybe century old grammars that are in some libraries somewhere in the world. So there is a pressure for making those things available to everyone. That said, I think that the, my most recent research lines, they have gone a bit beyond, you know, what the classical descriptors of language structure have been.

A lot of the stuff that we are analyzing comes from conceptualizations that were roughly unchanged for perhaps the last 30, years, right? So there hasn't been huge developments in the way in which we think about word order as a concept over the last 30 years or so, say. But, um, so that means [00:25:00] that we're still dealing with categories that have been there for a long time.

My most recent research lines involve going beyond that type of information and trying to get into stuff that perhaps historically linguists didn't care much about or they didn't care to capture in a systematic manner.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Final question about the kind of how to do this research before we get to the, to the, to the main article which is how do you it's largely observational data, how do you ensure that you don't just, you know, overfit to the data that's in front of you? Do you use the classic, like, you know don't use 20 percent of your data and then see whether the stuff you, you know, the theory created for 80 percent works on the rest?

Or like, how, how does, how do you make, how do you do that?

Damian Blasi: I think my favorite approach to these things is consilience. It's if I'm making a causal claim saying this happened because of this set of factors, then I want to make sure that is observed across a number of independent data sets. Of presumable related phenomena. And of course, I tried to argue as much as I can for the [00:26:00] soundness of a given causal pathway.

And we try to to make use of contemporary approaches to causal inference. But again, I think that in the end, the only thing that convinces me that there's something going on when it comes to this patterns are largely historical is conciliants. If you're saying that certain type of what order precedes some other type of phenomenon, then I want to see not only that those two things seem to be associated in contemporary data, but also that as far as we can go back in history, there is, you know, inscriptions that show this transition to place or that there is a cognitive bias.

That is consistent with this type of phenomenon, et cetera. So that's the type of of guarantee that we are on on a solid ground. That said, it is also the case that a lot of the things we want to say something about, we just don't have independent data sets. And we have to just rely on our, I wouldn't say intuition, but our educated guesses to say, well, you know, if you want to move forward [00:27:00] And you want to make inferences about, I don't know what happened with the diversity of languages 20, 000 years ago, then there isn't a lot of evidence that has survived since then.

So you need to use proxies. Whether you believe those proxies, I think it has to do with your experience with different fields. Your familiarity with the type of data, et cetera. At any point we get to a situation where we say we have proved anything beyond doubt and that's independent from how rigorous we are with the statistics as such.

I think

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But so you do base your initial theory on all the data, or is it like on the contemporary stuff, and then you go back in history to see if it also works there, or? Mm

Damian Blasi: It's I still spend quite a lot of time thinking about what's the concept of conception of these ideas. Like, how is that you're drawn into one specific idea or hypothesis? And I think the starting point could be anything. It could be a a pattern that keeps showing up across different [00:28:00]domains.

It could be just almost a meme like observation. I mean, we have this paper from 2019 where we look at the relation between the presence of libidentals. Sounds like F and V around the world. and the bite that has characterized different human groups through history. And when we started looking at those those patterns we thought, okay, there's nothing here, there's no chance that a change in bite or diet has had any impact on language, and we were damn wrong.

And and then in other circumstances. There is we get our motivation from cognitive science, so we get to see that there's a behavioral pattern in experimental conditions that shows up again and again. I don't know, for instance, certain type of propensities that people have with dealing with animate reference in language versus inanimate reference.

And you can start, take that as a starting point to think, well, maybe there's something here that should show up in languages. But as a matter of fact, I would say it's fairly unsystematic. At this point what is the starting point for the questions that we ask?

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: hmm. Okay, so to, to the [00:29:00] main paper, ever reliance do you want to maybe give a brief kind of verbal abstract in that sense, and then we'll take it from there?

Damian Blasi: Yeah, so there's this paper that we published in 2022. It's called World Reliance in English Hinders Cognitive Science, and it's pretty self explanatory. The main point of the paper is that if we really want to have a human wide theory of cognition and cognitive processes, then we cannot rely exclusively or almost exclusively on speakers of English.

And the reason why is that so is because They have been pretty independent and substantive research lines showing that there is a causal influence of the languages you speak or sign and a myriad of different cognitive phenomena ranging from social cognition to perception and basic conceptualization.

So what we do in the paper is to say, well, this is going on. And then we go over a number of different domains [00:30:00] when we essentially summarize a bunch of studies that we feel are very compelling, showing the effect of different languages on whatever humans do or think.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Maybe as a As an example, one thing that I thought was kind of a very specific kind of thing that I was surprised by is the chapala. I don't know how you pronounce that. But the group in Ecuador that doesn't say thank you. So what is the what is the effect of that on compared to English maybe but also like the what does that kind of tell us about social interactions, social norms.

Damian Blasi: In fact, that's a paper by Floyd and collaborators. And what they do is to look at naturalistic of interactions between individuals. And they look at the satisfaction of requests. Let's say that someone asks something to someone else, and then that person complies, they do whatever has been requested, and the question is, what is that the first person, the one who [00:31:00] requested, does?

And what you would expect is that politeness expectations in most Western societies and languages would suggest that you should You know, display gratitude, say something nice say thanks, minimally speaking. And what they have found is that there is a, in about 15 percent of of the instances that they have captured in English, and I think Italian as well, that's what people do.

They explicitly acknowledge the fact that their request has been satisfied. But then, they look at a bunch of other languages and societies around the world. I think they look into Siwu in West Africa, Lao in Southeast Asia Russian and Chapala in Ecuador. And they found that they do this only in less than 5 percent of the systems.

In the case of Chapala, There's no single instance of someone saying something nice or acknowledging that the other person has satisfied this request. And I think that's important because We think that gratitude, for [00:32:00] instance, it's such a fundamental piece of pairwise social interactions. But then we get to see societies that are, you know, display harmony and cooperation and altruism.

But they don't do this. There is no verbal token. of immediate satisfaction of requests. So I guess those things push us to think more widely about ways in which language might play a role in instantiating this type of social relations.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Do they have in that particular group? Do you know whether they have any? I mean, I know this is new research, but do you know whether they have any other way to display gratitude? Is it just like that they just lack the specific word just like sound for it? Or do they do like other kinds of things that signal a kind of like, you know, gratitude and appreciation?

Or is it actually that the entire, like cooperation works completely without the concept of gratitude?

Damian Blasi: Right, I don't remember details of this case, so we should ask Simon Floyd, first author of the, who is also the person who wrote the data from Chapala. [00:33:00] But I think there's a number of alternatives. For instance, you might have delayed reciprocity. In the sense that, you know, if you do something for me, there's a higher chance that in the future, I'm going to reciprocate and do something for you without the need of having explicit linguistic marker.

You know, if you know that, I guess that's what happens. I'm thinking about just having my own experience that would happen with like close friends or family. You can ask them to do something for you. And you don't have to be very effusive because you know, you know what the deal is. There is implicit contract and language.

There doesn't seem to play a huge role in whether, you know, the whatever satisfaction of requests will be more likely to be satisfying in the future.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I still say thank you to my family though.

Damian Blasi: well, I guess that's your British heritage. I think that's an British and German. So

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Exactly. Even in German.

Damian Blasi: you. Exactly.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, actually I had one thing that I found kind of funny. I think you wrote somewhere in the article that English [00:34:00] is a direct language compared to other languages. And, you know, as you said, as I mean, I grew up in Germany and in England. And for me, English was always.

It took me, I think because I'm too German in a sense, it took me quite a while to realize that, you know, when my father wants something, he doesn't say that he wants it. He, he expresses that it would be nice, like whether I would be interested to do things or whether, you know, like this to me, English was always incredibly indirect.

And so I was just curious whether you could comment a little bit more on that, because from my perspective, it's just like, wait, you can be even more indirect than in English.

Damian Blasi: Absolutely. I'm not an expert in pragmatics, but there is huge differences in the way in which different languages and societies instantiate of so called face saving strategies, right? Where you don't, what essentially those things do is to make a rejection less painful or to have less consequences to social capital and social credits in social interactions.

I have to say that things can go much deeper than that. One thing that struck me, and this is purely [00:35:00] anecdotal, so I'm sure there is serious research on this, is that I was doing fieldwork last year with so called pygmy people in the rainforests of Cameroon. Very interesting languages and super interesting societies and very nice people.

And they had very salient patterns of gaze avoidance. Right. You try to have a direct conversation with them and they just will not look at your eye, which to me was consistent with this idea that it's just a non threatening situation. You don't, it's like a lowest level of engagement in terms of social interaction, if you want to put it like that.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So the indirectness, it's not exactly that in the language that I like, why I think I've heard like, also, like, for example, one thing I've heard is that like Japanese that it's, they have this incredibly indirect way of also stating facts or something like that, I think wasn't the This might be completely wrong, it might be an internet myth, but like that when, when they basically, you know, World War II, when they capitulated, they, the [00:36:00] announcement or something was something like the war did not go to our advantage or something along those lines.

But, so you didn't actually mean necessarily that the, the way people express their things is more indirect, but more the general kind of social interaction is more indirect than in english speaking countries generally

Damian Blasi: So I would say in that regards, I don't think the English is particularly exceptional in any of extremes of languages. But again, this is pragmatics, which is not a field I research actively on. Still super interesting, though.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay had another point that I wrote down and unfortunately, I didn't I should have written more context I only wrote down theory of mind in spanish What was I referring to there in my note?

Damian Blasi: Well, yeah, I can fill in the blank. There is this interesting observation that there is a a milestone in the development of human cognition that has to do with the age at which a child passes the task of false belief which is essentially a probe for a human being able to deploy a theory of [00:37:00]mind.

Just to unpack a little bit this notion, the idea is that at some point you grow or you develop the ability. to simulate whatever the content of other human minds is. And that's not something you're born with necessarily, but something that develops. And one pro for that ability is this false relief task, right?

There's many ways in which this can be instantiated. Some are verbal, some are not verbal. But the basic thing that happens is that you set up a situation where you get to observe someone behaving in a given way. Let's see, that You know, there's a person coming into a room and leaving their keys on top of the table.

You are sitting in that room. The person leaves, then someone else comes in, and they take those keys and put them in the desk, right? Now, when the first person comes back to the room, what your expectation is? Are they going to look into the table where they left the keys? Or are they going to look into the new place where they are, which is the desk?

So the idea is that if you are able to simulate the fact that the person [00:38:00] who originally left the keys on the table haven't Don't have the understanding that this change has taken place and you expect they're going to come here and look into the table. So when there is behavioral evidence that you are able to do that, to simulate someone else's belief on something is false in this case that the keys are on the table, then we say that they passed the false belief task.

And

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, and as context, I mean, this is also like, you know, as someone who studied psychology, this is like textbook like developmental psychology, year one introduction that, well, I think initially they thought kids got it from the age of four. But I think if you ask it differently, it can actually be a bit younger.

So like, this is a completely standard thing that we would expect every like, young child to have developed here.

Damian Blasi: absolutely. I think there's a number of things to be said about this task. There's excellent work by Clark Barrett, for instance, discussing the possibility that there are more precise non verbal approach to this that might have, might change the age at which we think this takes place. And there is excellent work by my colleagues, Helen Davis [00:39:00] and Ivan Krupin looking into the success of unschooled individuals with this task.

So there seems to be something very weird going on with it. I'm not going to spend much time discussing this, but. You know, in case you can go and look for those names, I think that there is an interesting discussion going on there. What happens is that, again, in basic textbooks of psychology, you're going to encounter that we expect that around age 4 children develop disability, right?

And it's sometimes put forward as a human universal. But, it happens that in languages like Spanish, And say Mandarin Chinese and other languages, they seem to be a slight. They seem to have a slight advantage over languages like English and you know, first guess as well. Maybe there's something societal going on.

Maybe the way in which Children are socialized different. And, of course, that There is an interesting hypothesis that there might be a lexical culprit, there might be some responsibility taking them in the vocabulary, in particular the presence of verbs that [00:40:00] explain, that entail false belief. What I mean with this, well, in some varieties of Spanish, for instance, you can say that someone believes something you know, José cree que, statement X José believes that X.

But then we also have expressions for instance, using the reflexive marker, José cree. José cree. José cree. José cree. falsely believes that X that exactly condensate and pack this notion of falsely believing something within a fixed construction, right? So a language like Spanish or many varieties of Spanish have this resource, whereas most varieties of English don't.

Now, the the causal story here is that. By because your language has this label or packs this notion within a lexical item or a cons, a construction that is fixed and given, then you're able to process a number of instances [00:41:00] where someone holds a false, both false belief in a way that the language itself is flagging, that this is a false belief.

So in a way it's conducted observation, right? Every time you're a child in a language like Spanish or Chinese and someone uses this verb, then you have a specific observation when you're being told that someone believes something and that belief is not true. So the idea is that by being exposed to this targeted or more narrow observations of the social world, then you get to develop.

A theory of mind, a set of abilities earlier.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: It's interesting, because whilst we were talking, I was I mean, so first, What, what, you know, I was just going through a second. What would the German equivalent be? And because to me, like the Spanish and English were in a wave. fairly similar in that sense, right? That you just add, I mean, the sir is just like referring to like, he has the belief himself kind of thing, right?

But in English, you actually state explicitly that it's he falsely believes, right? And then it was like, in German, actually, [00:42:00] unless I'm completely lanking on something obvious, you can't actually say like that at all. Like, you'd have to say like, Well, you can say, okay, you can say here beautiful German word uh, but I think you actually more likely to say he believes it, but it's not true.

And I'm just curious, isn't, but isn't that in a way like a more obvious kind of way of stating that you can have a false belief. So in a way, shouldn't you almost. Like in Spanish, it seems like it's a little bit hidden, you know so it almost makes me think the reverse should be true. Like when because it's, yeah, it's, it can go a little bit more noticed maybe than the German where you have to like kind of state it fairly explicitly.

Damian Blasi: I think there's different ways of seeing this. One is that the the expression in this variety of Spanish is quite compact and very frequent. Right? And the question is, what comes before? Is it usage that makes this expression to be very short? Or is it the fact that, you know, you happen to have a short [00:43:00] expression that makes it particularly easy to deploy in interactions.

So without needed, without the need of solving that, I think there's something about the ease of usage that, of course, you're going to have a whole. phrasal description of this. You can say someone falsely and without fundamentation believes that this happens to be true. But you know, we're also dealing with Children.

So I wonder to what extent they're able to process this complex predications on states of mind in an efficient manner. So I think one way of thinking about this is that from the point of view of the developing mind, you have a recurring marker. That probably you're not analyzing in terms of a reflexive marker, plus the verb thinking, but something that is associated with something in the world that has certain characteristics, namely that.

You know, someone believes that someone else believes something that doesn't happen to be true. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And just how do you test, like, how do you test that kind of thing robustly? I mean, you know, nice, nice hypothesis, but like.

Damian Blasi: yeah, I [00:44:00] think one way we're getting into very interesting area where we have large data off individuals through relatively long developmental periods. There is a large consortium on people working on the Lena So essentially, these people have access to massive amounts of data that is provided to children in a large number of societies.

I know that most of this research involves not looking to the contents of the data. We just look at the intensity and rates of different aspects of linguistic behavior. But in principle, if you have access, so for instance, if the question was If your hypothesis was spelled out in terms of the frequency with which you encounter explicit behavioral tokens.

Signaling. Okay, there's something happening and that is the fault belief. Then you would expect to see differential outcomes in different households. Right? You could have an estimate of the relative frequency of occurrence of this verbs in different households, and you control on a thousand [00:45:00]different covariates.

And you get to see that once you do that, there's still a difference in the age in which they're able to pass this test successfully. Of course, I don't think we have. Currently the means for doing that, but the experiment as such, it's not so that hard to to conceive.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, yeah, but you're not gonna do that. That's too much too much. Too much hassle.

Damian Blasi: Yeah. So as I was saying before, I'm not an experimentalist. I hope others will.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, it's always nice as a non expertise when you can suggest studies that are like, really labor intensive to do.

Damian Blasi: Right? It's so cheap. I can just sit here on my comfy Barcelona office and tell people what to do.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I have a another kind of question which is which goes a little bit back to what I asked earlier about the societies, or whatever the correct word is, that don't have, or have severely limited numerous, like specific terms for numbers and quantities. 

So [00:46:00] one thing I find interesting, again, like I'd heard of these two cases that are both from, from the Brazilian rainforest, I believe and I think in your paper, you also cite an example like that, the Tzimane or something like that which is in Bolivia, so also in South America, I'm just, I mean, obviously South America is a big place, but I'm just curious, number one, are there other societies like outside of South America that do this?

And if not I mean, again, going back a little bit to like what other Cognitive requirements of the place you're in or whatever is there any particular reason why that area would lead, you know, groups to not? Is it, is it just the trade thing? Oh, yeah.

Damian Blasi: I think, historically, the notion is that societies have depended on hunting and gathering subsistence patterns, most of which are in Australia. But there's a few of them in South America or societies that have had mixed subsistence patterns that didn't involve, as I was saying before, the long term accumulation of discrete elements [00:47:00] like You know, grains or or any other units that might come from harvest then and societies that are not engaged in active trade, then those are more likely to not display a productive numeral system.

Every time we get to see that a hierarchical polity unit takes place. When there is a culture, for instance, in all of those cases, we get to see that the language is endowed with a generative or a powerful numeral system, in particular available for counting. So it's essentially that.

It's the type of subsistence and whether the society is engaged in trade or not. That's a received wisdom.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, so there are others also outside of those three.

Damian Blasi: Yes. Outside of those three, what, sorry.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So, I meant like the, I mean, again, I have no idea whether Munduruku, Piraia, and

Damian Blasi: Yeah,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Are there.

Damian Blasi: yeah, there's a bunch of cases in South America in particular in Lowland [00:48:00]Chackal, Amazon but they're also in Australia. That's where most of the cases I'm aware of come from.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just interesting to me because I do like, you know, financial decision making and not, you know, which relies obviously heavily on how you think about quantities. So it was always fascinating to me that like Any theory I come up with is probably vaguely wrong in those kinds of societies, but I mean, maybe, okay, maybe just taking this as a jumping off point to kind of slightly broader discussion you know, what am I supposed to do about that as a scientist, you know, because I can't just go to I mean, I guess I can check whether someone already collected data that's relevant for me, but you know, on, on for, let's say 99 percent of people, You know, not going to, you know, I mean, it will also, if you deal with like the Pirahia, which are like a tiny population they would, they would do nothing else other than like do science for people all day.

Basically, like how, how am I supposed to kind of in, let's say, my line of research or anyone's line of research [00:49:00] kind of deal with the kind of problems you address? Yeah,

Damian Blasi: Well, I'll start by being a bit more optimistic about this than what you seem to be in the sense that there is a lot of people doing very interesting research involving those societies and languages. And a lot of them are open to collaboration. And in many cases you have. Actual people with indigenous roots working on those societies and languages, which is even better.

So we always try to to avoid doing parachutes science, right? We want to make sure that there is a conversation going on with the communities themselves, which is a done study as something just as a distant non human object. So I would say that there's a lot of people there doing really cool work.

on those societies. It's just that maybe they get to publish in different venues, so we are not that aware that work happens. I mean, to me, it's still very interesting that still today, you can have a very successful career working on, I don't know, working memory or a social cognition or [00:50:00] a, you know, a rational theory of morality without ever having to deal with any experimental observation that involves non English speaking individuals.

Not because there isn't research. Another human societies and languages, but just that there is a whole circuit that has gotten into specific journals that just it's autonomous from those observations and research lines. So I think, you know, I understand that the resources and time skills of.

Being engaged with people who actually do field work and get those observations might not be available to everyone. I think the minimum, the bare minimum we can do is first try to be aware of, you know, observations of this nature that might have happened elsewhere, you know, the languages and cultures and will be surprised.

It's just. Probably we should look outside of the regular places just going outside of our academic comfort zone in terms of journals and maybe even languages. There is a trove of amazing science that has [00:51:00] been produced in languages other than English. You know, I can think there is a lot of, for instance, amazing science published in Portuguese on Amazonian societies or there is a lot of stuff published in Russian.

When it comes to the specificities of the languages and the behavior of of societies within the ex Soviet Union super interesting, but there is something much more concrete that we can do. And so sometime back, I was working on the, fairness of language technologies across the world's languages, right?

And I was asking a number of basic questions like why is it some languages get a lot of development in language technologies in comparison to others, right? And the basic hypothesis is, well, maybe there's just more money for developing those. And that turned out to be the case. The more money associated with the more the higher the GDP associated with users of a given language, the more likely is that you'll get to see more research and development on those languages.

And there's no surprises there, right? There's a [00:52:00] capitalist logic going on, you know, nothing really strange. But something that really surprised me is well, yeah. I mean, we probably cannot change the world in that regard, at least as, as modest scientists that we are. But there's something else that we can do, which is, you know, we are endowed with academic credit, which is a capital that matters for careers, as you're well aware.

And one question that we had in that paper and project was whether the number of languages your paper deals with ends up with more cumulative citations over time. And the answer was a resounding no. No, it doesn't matter. All those things being equal. It doesn't matter how many languages you're dealing with and you're trying to expand technologies to that's not going to determine the number of citations you get.

And I guess something very similar happens here. A lot of the most cited observations about the human mind and human behavior, they are based on English speaking populations, and we don't spend much time looking [00:53:00] for or citing research that involves other populations and I think that's something that we can easily do, which is try to have this social responsibility with our discipline and saying, well, you know, it's hard, you know, we recognize that it's very complicated getting samples from those places and trying to do, to give credit where credit's due.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, I mean, not to brag, but I've, you know, collected data in German and English. So, you know,

Damian Blasi: There you go. That's a world of difference.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: actually, and French, technically. So there you go.

Damian Blasi: would say that's much better than 90 percent of all research that takes place with any aspect of human behavior or English or conditions. So kudos to you.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, but to be fair, like, in most cases, I mean, maybe this is a question, but like, my assumption is that in most cases, it doesn't really make a difference. Or is that just a very naive assumption? Assumption based on the my limited knowledge of like European

Damian Blasi: Well, I think that might be the case in the sense that when. When sometimes people think of counterexamples of the [00:54:00] things, they might think of, well, you know, people have looked into this phenomenon, contrasting English with German, and they didn't find any difference. Maybe this is universal. And the, obviously what's going on here is that the expected difference between those societies and languages is much smaller than what you could find with other human societies.

So a lot of our intuitions about things being so robust that they don't depend on language may be buttressed on contrasts that are not that linguistically interesting. If we take language as a starting point of a divergence in patterns of human cognition. Another example is you know, when it comes to cross cultural psychology, for instance a champion in comparison is U.

S. versus China, and this is, this buttresses the contrast between the West and the East, which is, of course, a bit exaggerated, but and, you know, it might seem like Chinese and American societies are very different, but when it comes to language, you know, these languages have a number of things in common for instance, the [00:55:00] basic.

Structure of the sentence is subject and verb and object. They tend to have very little morphology, for instance. And a number, when it comes to the lexical classes, they seem to be fairly comparable. So there's a number of things that that make these languages much more similar than many other contrasts that you can carry on around the world.

So I think it's just a matter of calibrating our expectations on what could be playing a role in a human cognition. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I mean, I think part of my naivety there is probably because I have this, you know, quote, unquote, international upbringing, you know, as I mentioned before, so growing up, you know, half an hour away from, from French speakers and Dutch speakers, even though I didn't speak this language, right. But the thing to me was always like, especially knowing English and German so well is that pretty much the same.

And obviously, there's differences, there are differences, but like in the grand scheme of things, it's I mean, they're also both Germanic languages, obviously, but there's a I think, I think sometimes, yeah, I think I have like [00:56:00] a, my upbringing seems way more international in a way that it was because this is like a fairly small area of the world where I mean, French is not a Germanic language, but you know, still

Damian Blasi: It's the most Germanic language of all the Romance languages. So you're correct. But I must say that you might be right. I mean, there is no I don't think the starting point should be that every single linguistic difference would matter. And a lot of the phenomena that we bring up in our paper, and a lot of the phenomena that's been actively, that I've been actively studying in this regard, do not yield huge differences.

Huge effect sizes. You know, there's no reason why to expect that, that languages are perfectly projected into different cognitive profiles in any way that really matters. But I think that what we wanted to push for is this idea that actually the space for the influence of language and cognition, it's much wider than what has been historically accepted or regarded.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Just because you mentioned, you know, similarities, for example, between English and Chinese in terms of [00:57:00] language. I'm just curious because basically what is a language that's completely different and like, how can a language be different? I mean, especially asking because I mean, I had Latin in school, right?

That's a slightly different structure a lot more flexibility in terms of like how you order the words. But again, it's pretty much the same thing. And so like, you know, again, like it feels like I've seen like a bunch of different languages, but they're all very, very similar. So I'm just curious, like, how can the language be like, do you have any example of like language that's just like, doesn't follow any of these rules or.

Yeah,

Damian Blasi: let's start by saying that about 40 percent of the world's languages haven't been described with the level of detail that isn't implied by having a full fledged grammar, right? a matter of fact, we don't know all of what's so there. You know, there are languages like sign languages that, that do a lot of things very differently from the spoken language we have access to.

Then there's some haptic languages that have as one modality. For instance, there is an [00:58:00]amazing DeafBlind community and they have an haptic system of communication and modality seems to play a huge role in the type of, in the nature of the grammar that you deal with. Now, if we go back to spoken languages, I think the answer depends a lot on the parametrization of language.

How do you decide to describe languages? For instance, in 2020. In 2023, we published a paper in Science Advances where we released this database called Grambank that had information on about 2, 000 languages where we have from anything from 100 to 200 linguistic features coded for a bunch of different languages.

And there we asked the question, which languages seem to be the more Exotic from the point of view of this database, right? Meaning that this is our presentation of languages, which is by no means complete. And what we got there is that so Northern African Afro Asiatic languages seem to be the ones that are the most The farthest apart in this space of description of the other languages, but again, use a different [00:59:00] metric and you might come out with a different bunch of languages or you narrow down into specific domain like phonology and you're going to see that there's certain parts of the world for instance, in case of phonology, South and Africa, where I don't know, there's huge phonological inventories with up to South Africa, where I don't know, there's huge phonological inventories with up to A hundred something different speech sounds that are being packed in a systematic manner in the language.

Whereas you go to the Austronesian world and you get to see systems that have as few as like 10 or 12 different speech sounds. So depending on the dimension you want to look into. And one more thing to say about this is that there might be also descriptive bias in the sense that a lot of the technologies of description that we use to to project and to formalize That's the nature of a whole language.

Obviously, they were first developed for the description of Western languages, mostly European languages and the old world languages. You know, it might be the case that we are missing that's for sure the case that we are missing a lot of [01:00:00] interesting patterns that have not been particularly interesting from the point of view of description of European languages.

So there is a bias there in the description that makes all languages more similar than what they actually are.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, I mean, if you, you know, as you said, if you're not, it's not like you learned every language to, to do this job and I can take this question out if, if you don't know the answer to it, but I was just curious, like, for example, you mentioned the, you know, noun, verb, object or whatever kind of exact order you can have.

I mean, do. Do most or other languages that don't even have like the concept of noun objects or like, is there again, or is that like a framing, like that you can technically frame anything as a noun and an object and it's, it's,

Damian Blasi: This is a fascinating question, and I think it's still an ongoing discussion whether lexical categories are associated in all of the world's languages. For instance one of the textbook examples involve the presence of a noun class in Tagalog. which is a major language spoken in the [01:01:00]Philippines.

And again, a lot of these arguments are more formal in nature. And there seems to be a tension because, again, I don't want to get into technical weeds that probably are going to bore out people. But there's a tension between formal arguments in terms of how a given class would behave in the context of sentences.

But at the end, a lot of these arguments resort to some type of Referential and functional content in the sense that, you know, if you're calling something a noun at the end, you would expect that class will refer to something that has a consistency in the world in the form of an object or a process or, you know, something you can point to on again.

That might sound naive, but that's the way in which we go when it comes to description of languages. Most of the time and there seems to be some correlation between the structural features of elements and the content they're packing. But there is a mismatch. I have to say they've had to summarize what I think my feeling is of this.

State of the art across different linguistic [01:02:00] schools, et cetera. I would say that most people would say that categories like noun and verb, they're usually instantiated in ways that are fairly different and consistent across languages. Although sometimes you might have, like in case of some North American languages, you might have a lot of fluidity between the two.

I mean, you can think of languages like English where you can it is essentially something that can be for the context of memory in which you're looking for things like memory and memory and networks object so I think it's a very loose distinction between nouns and verbs. But I would say most languages of the world.

seem to have a distinction. Now, it's much less clear when it comes to other parts of speech. Adjectives, for instance. There are many languages that do carry on the same function that adjectives have in European languages by by means of other types of predication. For instance, by using verbs.

Instead of saying that something is [01:03:00] big, you say that, that thing is in a state of being big or something like that. Yeah, I don't know if that, that over explains or under explains your question.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, I guess, yeah. That last example is difficult to do in English yet um, yeah, isn't it even the case that in. I think in English and in German, I'm not sure. That most nouns start off as verbs. And then I thought there

Damian Blasi: again that most nouns, what?

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: thought most nouns, or lots and lots of nouns start out as verbs.

And then you use that, or is it the other way around? They start off as nouns and then they become more and more a verb over time. I thought it was something like that.

Damian Blasi: Well, it's, that's a very interesting question that, that gets into the field of grammaticalization, which is what is the usual pathway of of different components of of language. There's some that seem to be very trite and very frequently observed in the history of languages. For instance, there seem to be a a tendency of verbs becoming functional, close components of language, [01:04:00] say prepositions or postpositions.

That's a very observed pathway. But instead, we don't have a lot of evidence of the opposite happening. The preposition becomes a verb. And also within within individual classes, they seem to be different tendencies, depending on semantics, for instance for instance, body parts across the world's languages seem to be particularly reuse in as markers for grammatical information in sentences more than, I don't know, words for animals, say.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Should I have an example of that? 

Damian Blasi: For instance there is amazing work by Ambita Abhi, she, she's been working on the great Andamanese language, if I recall correctly, in, in the Andamanese island in India. And one very cool thing about this language is that a lot of the grammatical

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: just briefly, that's not the island where they, like, shoot everyone with a bow and arrow if they come too close, right?

Damian Blasi: Yeah, that's that's the case. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Wait, but how do you study a society that kills anyone who gets close to them? [01:05:00] Mmm.

Damian Blasi: So I don't think there's any ongoing research with those languages right now. They're isolated for good reasons. And they have been exposed to pathogens and they suffer greatly with the tsunami that took place back in 2007, I think.

But anyhow, leaving those things aside, that language is described as being particularly rich in Grammatical markers that are clearly diachronically, namely historically related to body parts you know, I don't recall specific examples, but you can think of like the marker of possession, like the apostrophe s in English, being naturally descended from the word for hand, something along those lines.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Okay. I have one question that might just be overthinking this completely, but I wonder whether it's actually an interesting dilemma, which is when you're interacting with. There are a couple of tribes in particular. Well, I don't know whether tribes is the right word. But a couple of groups at least that I've seen [01:06:00] people, that a couple of people have worked with, right, to study how they do things, how they perceive things, all that kind of stuff.

 For sure, I can't remember. I think one is like Namibia or something that I used quite a lot. I can't remember. Anyway. And I'm just curious, isn't there a kind of public goods dilemma going on there where basically, the more people come in to do science to see how they study, by interacting more and more and more with people from the outside.

Their, you know, the, the, the, their culture, for lack of a better term, becomes slightly, you know, slightly over time, a little bit more like, or less than it was before, something like that. So I'm just, especially if you have like a very small group that people want to interact with a lot, at some point it just changes the actual way that the group behaves, right?

So I'm just curious how Am I overthinking this or is that actually like an actual

Damian Blasi: think I think you're correct. I mean, there's different layers [01:07:00] off of this problem. I think that when it comes to exoteric behaviors, things that one could easily see and do, then there is a chance that just by observing different societies, you might, there is a chance that. Spread those. That's certainly risk.

I think there is a bunch of more esoteric aspects of human behavior and cognition that are very hard to To influence by just showing up and, you know, hanging out with people for a limited amount of time. Of course, I think that the most concerning questions have to do not with this pieces of behavior, but instead with the presence of pathogens or, a recurring concern, right? Now, and I think this is usually framing a much broader framework, which is why don't we leave these populations alone? And just in particular, there's a bunch of uncontacted populations in the world, mostly New Guinea and the Amazon. And the argument is, well, we should just let them be.

[01:08:00] And it doesn't matter for the most part. For science, it's just not enough justification for us to interfere with their businesses. And but again, I'm not, you know, I'm never so far. I haven't been involved with such a type with that type of research when there is such an ethical dilemma going on. But the harsh reality is that the fact that researchers and another People with similar professions are involved with interact with this population doesn't mean that others don't interact with them.

Like in the case of the Amazon, for instance, like it's I think it's widely known that you know, there's a lot of illegal stuff happening in the jungle that make use off of these people because it essentially no state presence. So the. You know, in the ethical approach of leaving them alone, they're also completely defenseless against all their organized groups that might just make use of them.

And I think that to me, this was a very eye opening. It was a very eye opening [01:09:00] experience. I was last year in West Africa, and I think that. You know, I care about the science. I think that the thing that motivated me to get into this was this being marble at the fact that we humans are able to do so many different things and to pack cultural and linguistic patterns in such different ways.

That's what always motivated me. But being now engaged in this type of field research, I think That it's useful that you have a bunch of eyes looking at what's going on because sometimes you might be able to be the voice that might result in a healthier time intervention in case things don't work out.

And I apologize if I'm being a big vague right now. Just don't want to want to spill the beans with these things. But I think that. In many cases, it's, it might be a good thing that that we can keep international eyes on some of these populations and make sure that some things don't take place.

And again, apologies for [01:10:00] not being that explicit, but I think you would understand.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, you don't want to give people ideas for crimes they

Damian Blasi: Yeah, exactly. No.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: you never know who's listening.

Damian Blasi: those type of ideas are very well distributed around the world. So.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, um Very generic random question, but like why is New Guinea so special? so like from what i've heard they have like enormous amounts of languages and you said like on, on Contacted Tribes and all this kind of stuff.

Is it just because they're geographically remote? But then also, like, why is there so much diversity there? It, it seems to me that, like, Yeah, it's unusual in that regard, right?

Damian Blasi: So I guess that if you ever want to get a comparative linguist to be engaged and be excited and worked out about something, you should ask exactly that question. And I think there is a very interesting literature that has seen some of the best minds in the field of linguistic ethnicity thinking about this.

I would say that. Two popular narratives about what's going on in New Guinea. And I think we think that there is, depending on how you count, there is between 800 to 1, 000 languages in New Guinea right now. [01:11:00] Two not excluding narratives about what happens in this island. The first one involves this notion of ecological risk.

And I think one of the champions of the idea was Daniel Nettle. And what he proposed is that you have this situation in New Guinea where people were able to develop an agricultural subsistence very successfully. Where you have access to certain crops and certain domesticated animals with high nutritious yields in such a way.

That you don't depend on in a way predictable way, such that you don't depend on your neighbors for that. So that means that groups can remain fairly independent over time. And, you know, if you don't speak with your neighbor, that in principle speeds up the diversification rate. If you don't interact with them, then you're becoming less and less similar to each other over time.

Whereas if you had a A need for frequent interaction, perhaps because things change from year to year and one year you might not [01:12:00] have food and you need to request them for food, or there is a huge difference in type of resources that you find in different locations, then you are forced to talk with them that might end up with you know, gene exchange with more frequent interactions that will slow down diversification.

That's one possibility. The other possibility has to do with the prevalence of certain pathogens. For instance, malaria, it's a big thing in lowland New Guinea. So what might happen is that if there's this huge pathogen influence then groups tend to be very close knit and separated from each other.

They tend To develop. I think this is a comparative observation is that pathogen stress associated with distrust of mistrust. Sorry. Mistrust of of non group members. So and again, that ends up with the same dynamics, which is you're isolated. You don't hang out much with the other people. And that ends up with a more rapid diversification.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Hmm. But it's still crazy to me, like, Oh, I guess it is a [01:13:00] very big island, right? It's not, like, you know, this tiny place. But it's still, like

Damian Blasi: Yeah. And I think

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: the density, I guess, of it,

Damian Blasi: absolutely. Well, it's also the the time depth of the occupancy of the island. I mean, Like one of the things that people usually compare is South America with New Guinea and the question is like why you have so many languages in New Guinea and one possible answer as well that, again, doesn't necessarily overlap with the previous two that I have presented has to do with just how much time you have had, right, if you managed to made it to this island, I think that perhaps the first evidence of human occupancy of New Guinea maybe goes back to 80, 000 years ago or something like that.

And and you get into this island, there has been a long amount of time, so you can diversify and be different. But contrast that with South America, and we think that perhaps the first occupancy of South America goes back to anything between 15, 000 to maybe 20, 000 years ago. And it's relatively recent [01:14:00] event.

Demographic occupancy. So essentially these people managed to made it there and it hasn't been enough time for them to display significant differences to be completely different languages. And of course, then the conquest took place and 90 percent of population was obliterated by the Europeans and their pathogens.

So we'd really get to see what would have happened, right?

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I guess it's just something like, it just seems like this very exotic place where like, but I don't know, I don't think I have an intelligible question here,

Damian Blasi: Well,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: or like an intelligible comment.

Damian Blasi: People like Nick Evans would say that New Guinea, as a matter of fact, might have been a good proxy to what was the world until the rise of large urbanization centers, urban centers, and cities, and more hierarchically structured polities. Yeah, they might come across as very uncharacteristic, but maybe the world was a huge New Guinea back in the past.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I mean, I guess one [01:15:00] thing that for example, I have no idea whether Spanish has this at all. That, for example, in German, there's, I mean, As you know, in Zürich, not easy to learn high German in Zürich, right? Uh, Because the natives don't speak it. They speak Swiss German, which is just about intelligible to me if it's Zürich Deutsch.

But if it's from Bern or whatever, it gets even harder. But the thing is, like in Germany that used to be also the case. At least, like maybe, I don't know whether it was the case everywhere in Germany, but it was definitely I mean, I think my grandparents, for example, I think, grew up speaking Plattdeutsch.

So they didn't actually, I think, when they were in their twenties, they decided, okay, now we're just going to speak high German. Just that in, you know, in Switzerland, they maintain it, and in Germany, it's just dying out, basically, completely. So I guess, like, even in Europe, like, 200 years ago, I guess, it would have been, or in Germany 200 years ago, you would have had, it's dialects, yes, not, not languages.

But I guess, give it a bit more time.

Damian Blasi: Absolutely. I mean, I mean, suddenly you have this extremely efficient states that have the monopoly [01:16:00] of education and and there's a lot of nice research looking in specifically the case of France where you get to see that a myriad of dialectal differences either die out or they disappear from certain environments that were restricted to households because of the rise of schooling.

 Perhaps our intuition off a few languages being the norm in terms of demographic density is just an artifact off a very recent development in the world.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Do you know how that's changing in New Guinea? Is that also happening there? I mean, it probably is, I would imagine to some extent, but is it happening to the point where you know, these things are completely falling apart or is it?

Damian Blasi: One of the things that we know is that. This is just an empirical observation that economical development seem to be negatively correlated with linguistic diversity and that's what seemed to be the case is that it's just that public schooling in the national quote unquote language is not being enforced [01:17:00] and That is pretty much the case in New Guinea right now, right?

The state has a presence that it's it's more notable in certain parts of the island, in particular in the capital in Port Moresby, but in other parts of the island it's very weak, so I don't follow New Guinea. Politics very closely, so I cannot update you on the latest developments there.

But it seems that if things were like they were 20 years or 10 years ago, then that linguistic divest is not going anywhere.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: That's pretty cool. I have one question and I'm curious what what you what you would say about this because so basically one thing I, I kind of might want to do at some point is do a sabbatical where I go to, you know, a place where I just don't speak the language completely like, you know, do a proper sabbatical, not like a sabbatical where I just do research, but like one where I actually do something completely different.

And I've considered, I don't know when exactly this would happen, right. But in the not too distant future, let's say like [01:18:00] in the next 10 years, let's say. And you know, the goal would be to. Go to a different place where I just basically know very little about the place and you know really learn the language and the culture and these kind of things and So then there's the question which one and you know, there's lots and lots of considerations here Generally speaking, I think because I'm probably gonna spend most of my life in northern Europe, maybe being somewhere warm for once Yes, I don't have to go and learn Finnish, you know but 

maybe it will never happen, but like, I'm very open to this. And for example, one question I had once with so I had a guest Laura Olibert, who's, I mean, she grew up in Germany, but half her family's Catalan. So she's grew up bilingual Catalan and Spanish. And we talked, for example, a little bit about like, you know, would I, if I, if I were to say to go to Spain, would I learn Catalan or Spanish or?

You know, go completely crazy and learn Basque. But I'm curious as a, as a general point here, as a general [01:19:00] question is there's, to me, it seems there's a bit of a trade off between learning languages that are quote unquote more useful because more people speak them. Spanish would be the perfect example, right?

Where like across continents, you could, you could speak with lots and lots of people, right? And that has an obvious utility to it. Whereas learning something. Very specific from a small place where few people speak it and, you know, foreigners maybe don't as often learn it has its own kind of advantage because it makes it so much more unique, right?

Like, you know, learning Basque, like who does that, right? So I'm just curious, like from, from your perspective what's kind of, what would you advise me? Should I go very unique and weird and specific or, or broad?

Damian Blasi: I think that's a very personal choice. And I think I. You know, what I would favor access to moderate access to the largest number of societies. So perhaps this macro languages like you know, mother in Chinese or Russian or [01:20:00] French or Arabic or Indonesian, those would be very handy when it comes to travel around the world.

And I think there's so much diversity to see that it seems that settling down for one specific culture and language seems I don't know. Seems like a lot of such a huge commitment. But that said, you know, my experience with language is very limited. I, you know, I speak Spanish. That's it. I can babble in English and maybe Italian, and my French is terrible, but there is a non zero amount of French.

And I also learned, well, I actually spent seven years in the German speaking world, and for different reasons, I didn't get to learn the language. I can understand a bit, but my pronounced German is not great, and there's no way you get to see that. But then, you know, I learned a little bit of Bislama, Ibanuatu, and I have more.

Detailed knowledge of a few more languages, but I think that even considering the contrast between Spanish and English. I can, you know, I can totally feel how conceptualizations [01:21:00] are markedly different, at least in some domains when it comes to emotions, for instance, and narratives. And I'm sure it must be amazing getting the time and the energy to get deep into a different language and culture such that you end up with linguistic resources and discourse.

Resources are so different from the cultures you you grew up in. Yeah, I don't know about the feasibility. I think that they've put a lot of commitment into that. You can get somewhere but I really don't know. I would say, though, that if you're uncertain about this, then choosing a place with good food and good temperature and weather and uh, it's not, it's not, it's not terrible.

So Catalonia it's an amazing place in case you're still deciding on options. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm completely open, right. It's, it's basically, I've had this idea like, I don't know, a year or two ago. And since then I've been like occasionally, you know, there's a couple of like, I mean, so yeah, a couple of things I'm interested in. So when I meet [01:22:00]people from certain regions, I'm asked them a little bit about it, but no, I mean, there's also like, you know, obviously the, the.

Completely orthogonal question to that, but which also doesn't track with it, which is how easy it is to learn language. And for example, I think Spanish would be, maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I would say that would be pretty easy for me to get very good in a year. Because also, I mean, I had one set in my bachelor set, so again, I said, like, I mean, Latin was actually my first foreign language in school.

And I was never particularly good at it, to be honest, but I remember once in my undergraduate, I came across this art research article in Spanish and you know what I got, I mean, this was like before translates and all this thing, right? I got through it. Like, I mean, maybe I got a completely misunderstood, misunderstood it, but I was like, I can kind of follow this.

Like this is not.

Damian Blasi: Absolutely. I think it will be relatively easy given your linguistic background to get a hold on Spanish relatively rapidly, which to me is very frustrating because I love this idea of having a secret language where I can communicate with really, you know, [01:23:00] Close people and you know, you're in the market somewhere and you want to you know, negotiate something or you're in a meeting and you want to have, but everyone seems to know some degree of Spanish, which it feels very weird.

I mean, I think probably this experience has been worse with English speaking people, like there's few places in the world you travel and there's. No English speaking folk around. So I guess you can always resort to German, right?

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you'd be surprised how often people understand me in English, but that's yeah, for somehow, for some reason, certain English accents seem to be hard for some people to understand compared to, I mean, it's probably just exposure but , it's, yeah, again, it's just, it's this, I mean, in a way it's, it does sound to me like you're arguing against linguistic diversity in the world.

I should learn the language that the most people speak because that's where, that's where this is going.

Damian Blasi: that's a very personal argument. I think that my [01:24:00] my mission or my interest is in just getting access to as many populations as possible and get to see with my own eyes. You know, different ways of being human. And for that, there's some languages that come very handy.

And I am very far from speaking all of them. If I had one year, one sabbatical year for doing this, and again that's an excellent idea.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: what would you do if you,

Damian Blasi: Well, I think that I probably, I would spend it in the kinetic world or in the

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: the what, what?

Damian Blasi: In the kinetic world in the area of influence of China.

And I'd maybe try to get Mandarin Chinese, perhaps or or Indonesian or Arabic, as I was saying. Those will be my options, I think. At some point I should learn Catalan as well, I have to say. But I

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Well, yeah, you have to, yeah.

Damian Blasi: I'm living here, so it should come naturally at some point.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. As we said like it's obviously a personal choice and I didn't, you know, it would be a bit weird if you said you have to learn this one. But the, yeah, for some reason, for example, I've never really been interested in Asian languages or cultures even.

Like, [01:25:00] I don't know why, it's just never been a particular interest to me, so that would, yeah, that's for example not something I'm really considering.

Damian Blasi: Have you, Have you traveled to Asia at all? Have you ever been to Asia?

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: no, I've just never had an interest. I mean, I've some, some Japanese things I like I guess like Yeah, I don't know. It's just always been something that I've just It's just there's never been like a particular thing that made it really made me want to like Look into it and like really Yeah, you know, like we, I guess like, you know, a lot of exploration happens via some random hobby that you get really interested in.

And I guess I just never really, again, Japan a little bit, but not really. But I guess it's a bit of a chicken egg situation, right? If I don't know anything about it, then I also don't have anything that I would find interesting about it.

Damian Blasi: suggestion, is that you go on a world tour to the places you haven't been to before, spend a couple of weeks, try to get impressed by your percepts and observations, and then we talk again and see how you feel about those places.[01:26:00]

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Kind of final question here is because, One thing I thought would be kind of interesting would be a big city in South America. And uh, so speaking of where you lived, Buenos Aires, is that, is that, I mean, it's a silly question. Is that worth going to, but

Damian Blasi: I I really love Buenos Aires for for a number of reasons. I I try to be objective in terms of quality of life and the access to certain type of services and stuff like that. But I have to say that there, there are many other amazing cities in South America. If I'm thinking in terms of experience, I would say that, I don't know, Medellin in Colombia it's amazing. If the, like Cusco in Peru it's an amazing city. You get to be in the capital of the Inca Empire, and you still get to see the greatness of that empire around you. It's amazing. And then of course, Rio de Janeiro, for instance, in Brazil it's an amazing place.

So if I would, if I never visit, if it was my first time in, in South America, I wouldn't go [01:27:00]necessarily to Buenos Aires. I'll perhaps go to Cusco, Medellín, Rio de Janeiro, and then maybe Buenos Aires. And there is, I mean, I can go on. There is for instance, this summer I spent about a week and a half in Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia.

It was an amazing city very warm people and a super interesting history and environment. You know, to me, South America is this, even if I was born there, there's still a lot to be discovered. And obviously I'm biased. I think it's great. And if you have a chance to visit, you should.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. And I'm not saying this because, because you're here, but I genuinely think, I don't know. We're not having had that much exposure to Spanish. I do like the Argentinian Spanish. For some reason, a lot more than the others. I don't know why but

Damian Blasi: That's interesting. I was told that some people prefer Argentinian Spanish over others, but I think that being in Spain now, I feel like I think it's the first time in my life that I feel like, you know, I've been always this foreigner and I've been treated as such [01:28:00] over the years in different countries, in Germany, in Switzerland, the U.

S. But this is the first time where I see that people treat me according to my nationality because of my accent. And there's a lot of Argentinians and there's always this feeling that, oh, you know, you guys come here and get our jobs kind of situation. So,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: A German in Switzerland, so yeah, I know what you mean, yeah.

Damian Blasi: right. That was very bizarre to me to see for the first time in my life that Germans were in this apex citizens in a place.

That was weird.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: don't think it's particularly popular. But I mean, I get it, there's, there's lots of Germans here. Like, it's, it's, it's maybe a bit too much, but hey, I'm contributing to it. So, okay.

Damian Blasi: You're not helping. Yes,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I'm not, I'm not helping. I guess I can, I mean I have a, I have a British passport. I can just say I'm English, but I'm not sure that's much better either.

Anyway I mean lots of things we could talk about but otherwise I just, unless you have anything else you want to add to this, I'd go to the recurring questions.

Damian Blasi: I think that's fine. This was a lot of fun and I'm [01:29:00] sure we have many more things to talk about. But yeah, I had a great time. This is fun.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, great. So At the end of each interview, I ask my guests the same three questions. The first one is, what's a book or paper you think more people should read? It can be old or famous old or famous. That's not a, the kind of distinction I meant. Old or new, famous or unknown. Just something that you think people should read.

Damian Blasi: I don't think this. So I was thinking about this question. It's I thought of a number of answers, but perhaps a more unbiased way of answering this is to go over the last audiobooks I consume. So I was thinking about the last four were all systematically. Very good. So the last book I actually got to listen was, is the how the World Became Rich by Koyama and Ruben which is a summary of this long dore way of thinking about.

How human societies end up being the way they are because of events that have taken place back in the past so the book Discusses topics as diverse as colonization or role of women in job [01:30:00] markets. So super interesting Very engaging and very up to date to a lot of the research that is sites is less than 20 years old.

So very cool. Then this is this book that I read last year, Lost in Math by Sabine Hosenfelder. It's an amazing book. It's, it discusses how the bias favoring beauty and elegance and simplicity has actually shaped the way in which we research fundamental physics. And how this is sometimes an arbitrary discovery path.

Like, why do we think that the universe has to be beautiful and elegant in its mathematical expression? And obviously this applies more directly to to fundamental physics. But I think that the general criticism, which is that scientists have a bias. And they prefer set the depth of explanations. It really holds much more widely in academia.

Then, there's the book by by the late Karen Baker The [01:31:00] Sounds of Life. It's a beautiful synthetic book that covers late, the latest developments on how we understand, capture, record, and understand sounds in nature. So it discusses everything from the latest developments in how we record bird songs and to coral reefs being a huge source of sub aquatic sounds and how is sound is preferred medium of communication in many different species.

It's really engaging, beautifully written and and all around great book. And finally I can mention in case people who are listening to this are interested in linguistic diversity, I would say that the best contemporary trade book in linguistic diversity has to be my colleague and friend Caleb Everett's Immediate of Tongues.

What he does is to summarize a lot of research that has taken place over the last 10 years, mostly, that describes the ways in which different languages differ. So it's making a lot of emphasis on the diversity [01:32:00] part and not so much in the linguistic part. Universal aspect of language that I think that component has dominated a lot of The public science that we have seen in relation to language, say the language incident by Steve Pinker.

It's all about what languages all share in common. Now, this book is about the ways in which they differ. I think it's an amazing book. And uh, and it will be, it would work as a good introduction to someone who doesn't know much about linguistic diversity in general.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Nice. So that's, that's for me. Thank you. Um, Second question is what's something you wish you'd learned sooner? This can be from work life, from private life, whatever you want. Yeah. Choose whatever you want. If you have more than one thing. Um,

Damian Blasi: So many things. Look, the thing is that I when it comes to my cognitive phenotype, I worry that things are very path dependent, right? So even if I can think of a million different ways in which I could have been Different better in terms of my [01:33:00] ability to do science. I'm just happy with the outcome that I have had so far.

Now, of course, if we're talking more broadly about things that which I wish I had learned, there's a lot of useful information about finances and nourishment and exercise that I think I have had a very I didn't pay much attention to my well being in general for the longest time, and I'm not just learning a bunch of things that Too many people seem to be basic, right?

They need to take some time off, but you need to be very healthy when it comes to choosing foods. So I wish I had known that back in my early twenties, say, but you know, it's never too late. I hope,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I mean, I don't know how much, you know, lasting damage you did, but assuming it's not too much that yeah, good.

Damian Blasi: yeah, I have two herniated discs and, uh. and my, my general physical shape is not amazing, but I'm working on it.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: That's nice. That's good. Yeah. And final question is I wonder how long I can still keep [01:34:00] this submission in. Cause I, it's basically, you know, basically advice for people like me and I call it people would like late PhD student only postdocs. I guess I can at least keep it in until the end of my first year of postdoc.

Maybe then I'll switch it, but yeah, any advice to people kind of on this, on this border.

Damian Blasi: Yeah. So I have to say, first of all, I feel you and it's it's a really tough time in your career. Lots of uncertainty. It's not a secret that the job market for people who decide to to continue on the academic pathway. It's complicated and full of uncertainties. And, you know, we're talking about this before.

You know, I've been in the job market for the longest time. And if you ask me, what do you learn? I would say that, not much, like sometimes the departments are looking for a person that can fulfill some teaching obligations. Some other times people love you, but there's one person who doesn't like some aspect of your research or you work with someone they don't like and that's, [01:35:00] that's the end of it.

Or or just chance. Maybe that day you weren't particularly bright and your presentation wasn't amazing or there's some politics that you ignore. You know, try not to get that worked up about those things. And in the end, unfortunately, this is a persistence game. It's very arbitrary. Just try to work for your best science.

Ask around for handshakes and advice. You're going to hear a thousand, you're going to ask a thousand people, you're going to get a thousand different opinions, but none of those are going to be false or not useful. So I think it's just a matter of, if you really decide to persist, then It's just hold on until it happens.

Would I advise people to do that? I don't know. I think it depends on your mental health state on how much you really want to make it and many other things. And I think that academia has this. There's this [01:36:00] collective discourse that, that, you know, you're part of it, right? And when you're inside of academia, you think that anything else is unworthy.

But then all of my colleagues and friends who left academia, they're doing something else. They seem to be much healthier and much happier than when they were back in science. Now, of course, this could be an effect of self selection. Maybe the people who left science, they were already.

prone to be happier in other contexts. So it's hard to tell. You know, I always tell people that I have one of the weirdest success rates when I was still in Zurich. I applied to a bunch of, I was getting desperate. I wasn't getting, I wasn't being invited to interviews or job talks or anything.

I was not getting any grants. I had one year, I think it was 2018 where I got 0 percent success rate. I applied to positions in as diverse places as I think it was Germany, Switzerland, South Korea, the U. S. Nothing came out. I didn't get a single thing. I didn't make it into the next stage in any of the things I applied, [01:37:00] and I applied to a lot.

Then I moved to Harvard which is, you know, it's perhaps not a completely you know, there might be a role being played by that. And I applied to exactly the same things, minus the positions, and I got everything. 100 percent success rate. Did anything change in me in my ability to write the proposal or did I publish any, you know, groundbreaking paper or something like that?

And the answer is no. So it's just absurd. And and it's really hard. And as a scientist, you put so much of yourself in the outcome of those processes, but it's hard not to feel like a complete fraud if you keep failing. You know, I was very close to moving to industry, even if my whole life I wanted to do science and I was as passionate as the very first time, the very first moment I started doing this, I felt well, this is going to destroy me because clearly I'm not good enough.

So yeah, it's if possible, trying not to take it that seriously. And I think that's the most [01:38:00] hard earned piece of advice I can share with postdocs. Hang in there. You're great. I'm sure you're doing something that's really cool, even if people can't tell right now. And I wish you the best.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And I'm not sure whether it's reassuring or worrying that someone with your background and publications was struggling so much. I guess it's nice to see that lots of people struggle, but I mean, when I look at your publications, it's you, I wouldn't imagine that you would have struggled a lot.

Let's put it this way.

Damian Blasi: I think there's a lot

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: like you tick, you tick the boxes you're supposed to tick, right?

Damian Blasi: I think there's a lot of stigma associated with talking about these things. It's you know, you have to play it cool and have this Successful display on that it was all part of a plan. I think in my case, there's a number of things that explain. Why why had struggled so much.

And that is the fact that I don't have a publicly obvious scientific identity in terms [01:39:00] of any of the categories that we are all aware of. Like I'm a cognitive scientist. Yeah, in some regards, but not very typical one. I'm. Am I a applied physicist to culture and language? Well, not really. But if you look at my education, you might think that's the case.

Am I an anthropologist, a linguist? And I think there is a case to be made for all of those things. But, you know, went through all these different departments and groups. I don't have an esoteric identity. And also, and that perhaps my second piece of advice is like. I wasn't very systematic when it comes to attending conferences that are identity building, right?

That's very important. If you're in a discipline, there's usually a bunch of conferences that you don't want to miss, either because those are highly prized by people who review your CV, or because that's a place where you get to meet the other big players. And I didn't do that. You know, one, one year I would go to a Linguistics conference, then Anthropology, and then Archaeology, and then Applied Math, and I wasn't a [01:40:00] member of any academic clan, and I was, I think I was punished for that.

I mean, the other reason, it's much, much more straightforward, which is that talent and good people, it's not in shortage. There's a lot of extremely good people out there. There's a lot of extremely smart, productive, creative folk. You're competing against. Then, and and it's hard because there's no correspondence between how far you managed to make it into the academic career and your qualities, your capacities.

So yeah, if you're struggling there to whoever that impersonal individual is, then, you know, I send you a hug and all of my love and I wish you the best.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, that's a nice, nice note to end on. You just, you just about, you know, put it out, you know, you've turned it around again just at the end. Uh, Yeah. So, yeah. Um, Yeah. Thank you very much.

Damian Blasi: Thanks to you, Ben. And again, you're doing great [01:41:00] work here. I look forward to see how you where you take this and I really hope you get to stay in academia because I think you have lots of interesting things to say. So.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: You. Thank you.