Aside from the proliferation of acronyms, which I've covered before, what are some other pretty clear signs that modern societies select for a personality that's quite further in the systematizing Aspie direction than it was for all of pre-modern existence? Here are a few others that come to mind.
- Top Ten lists
- Numerical ratings where only vague qualitative information is given. E.g., rating cultural products as however many stars out of 5, rather than using words like terrible, not very good, OK, pretty good, and excellent.
- Complete collections. This is where someone aims to collect, e.g., every video game released for a certain system, every action figure released for a certain toy line, or every pressing / issue of a certain band's entire discography. The reward is not the item in itself, although it may also be worth something on its own to the person, but rather to coming one step closer to completing their collection.
As far as I know, it was never a hobby to aim to collect, say, one leaf from every tree (perhaps just of a certain species) within your village, or all the leaves or nuts that a particular tree produced.
- Nearly constant use of "that's my opinion," etc., when expressing your opinion. Well no shit. Autistics fail the "false belief task," so statements of fact and opinion are much less separable in their minds. Communication between Aspies and non-Aspies thus requires more of these stupid qualifications just to make sure both understand that only opinions are being discussed.
These are true differences between the modern and pre-modern mindset because they are just as easily implemented in both types of society, as long as the people are of that mindset. Obviously "computer programming" can't count since pre-modern societies didn't even have computers. But any pre-modern society could have made a list of the Top Ten best songs or animals or reasons why a woman is like a ____.
What else is there? The traits of online fanboys, no matter what they're fans of, is the easiest place to start for clues. They're the extreme right tail of the systematizing distribution, so they're easy to spot, and they do tell us something about the average being higher than it used to be.
What is the "false belief task"?
ReplyDeleteRe:"Nearly constant use of "that's my opinion," etc., when expressing your opinion. Well no shit. Autistics fail the "false belief task," so statements of fact and opinion are much less separable in their minds. Communication between Aspies and non-Aspies thus requires more of these stupid qualifications just to make sure both understand that only opinions are being discussed."
ReplyDeleteThis seems to be part of a wider trend towards minimizing ambiguity (or of tuning your language to the lowest common denominator, and not assuming that your interlocutor has any sense).
The example of this which always grinds on my nerves the most is the use of "you guys" instead of just plain "you." The assumption here is that the person or people addressed may get a little confused by the English language's lack of marking of plurals in the second person. Which I find insults my intelligence.
This overcautious fumbling may be down to a desire to minimize conflict or possible "loss of face" - stemming from a fear of doing anything to stand out. That would perhaps tie in with your oft stated assertion that kids these days have gone soft.
On the other paw it may be a result of the increased likelihood of speaking to a non-native speaker of English, especially when 'talking' online - who knows how limited your reader's English skills will be? Or indeed the convention in some languages seems to be to always mark opinions as such, rather than simply leaving it to the listener to work this out for themselves. So there could be some cross socio-cultural-linguistic contamination going on here.
And our meek millenials wouldn't want to offend anyone - or more likely, leave themselves open to criticism.
"Who would win in a fight? Darth Vader or Sephiroth?" That's pretty much happening on Gamespot right now.
ReplyDelete"This seems to be part of a wider trend towards minimizing ambiguity"
ReplyDeleteBe interesting to ask a sociolinguist whether English is trending more to becoming a "pro drop" language like Chinese or Japanese (in actual use) where parts of sentence that are assumed to make sense are dropped out (from an English language perspective). I expect they'd just say that it's impossible to tell from the records we have though.
I can see disambiguation as both Aspie or non-Aspie - on the one hand you could be disambiguating because you literally have no theory of mind conception of what the other person is thinking, but on the other hand, we can all imagine a guy who has so little conception of what other people know and don't know that he assumes they know stuff they don't and so leaves it out (the stock Hollywood/Dr Who-ish genius who goes "Oh. I'm sorry, you didn't get that?" after blurting out a stream of non-sequiturs.)
Top Ten Lists
ReplyDeleteHeh. Reminds me of the Chinese penchant for numbering everything into groups like "The Three Beasts Bred For Food" and "The Four Great Culinary Traditions".
Reminds me of the Chinese penchant for numbering everything into groups like "The Three Beasts Bred For Food"
ReplyDeleteCat, dog, rat ...?
Peter