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This could be done with a few people eg: “The remarkable brain of a nightclub bouncer with the worlds highest IQ.”
The article talks of him like he’s a child. Bouncing around at all the attention. Thrilled to make new friends. Bordering on mockery. Hidden behind wonder, the call goes out: look at you, who are not one of us. A carnival ride for the writer, gather ‘round everyone!
Smart enough to do anything he wants, not smart enough to be normal.
“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.“
I read a lot of the same things, but picked up an aspirational undertone instead of mockery. I definitely didn't see it presenting him like a child. But ymmv.
It’s funny that in the context of an article about a genius of language that I’ll admit there would be better, more accurate words, and ways, to say what I’ve tried to say. May I also clarify that I mean no bad will towards to writer or anyone else involved, it’s only through their honesty that things like what conversation led to his name being brought up can be wondered about. I’d like to take it as a win though that I wasn’t incoherent! Thanks :)
Is it "normal" for Americans to not only not be able to speak a foreign language, but to not even know what the word "polyglot" means, and look at one like you would look at an alien (one from outer space, I mean, not one from another country)?
Is that an attempt at a thinly veiled insult in a form of a question?
Or do you really think that one of the most powerful countries in the world is “normally” somehow full of ignorants? I’ll answer - not any more than where you are from.
It's common for native English speakers to be monolingual. If there's no real need to learn another language, it takes more effort. Being able to speak multiple languages looks like a superpower if you only know one language.
I'm a bilingual American (English and Russian), and I didn't know the word "polyglot" until a year ago. I learned it as part of a software localization project--it has never come up in my life otherwise.
I share the sentiment however the grain of truth here is that it does take a lot of effort to appear normal. The essence of being normal is trying to appear normal which is what most people are engaged in most of the time.
The hidden motivation behind this is fear of other people and the fear of evil which for most people has all but conquered their love of reality, truth, and so on.
If one does have other genuine interests and pursuits (for example foreign languages) then the task of appearing normal is harder. So the implication that he isn't smart enough to be normal is in this sense correct.
Which by the by suggests that motivation is the key to learning, not attention control, repetition, particular books, starting young or the other usual suspects and methods. These are downstream from motivation.
As someone who sometimes wonders if he has autistic traits, I found it refreshing that the article didn't try to be over-inclusive. Okay! The dude doesn't think "neurotypically"! Don't sugarcoat it.
I think they presented it honestly without being derisive.
there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average human being to supply any given army on any given day
and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace
those who preach god, need god those who preach peace do not have peace those who preach peace do not have love
beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average
but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect
like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock
their finest art
Very stimulating. I am reminded of the mending wall by Frost, of meditations by Aurelius, of Cats Cradle, and Feersum Enjinn. And of the old server mantra of accept the traffic of others but watch the traffic you transmit.
Of this lyric “ And I'm no different, I live in conflict and contradiction But it can be so beautiful When I don't reject what lies within It's beautiful the way agony connects us to the living I think of the world when I hurt, and keep on existing in the Now”
Am I on the right path by thinking it talks on the strange symmetry in the hearts of man? (fearing the darkness and scraping away at the edges with fire - Rei Ayanami) waves and troughs, prickles and goo, anxiety is thinking one of them will win (Alan watts). This dastardly act I do only for good reason! (Someone’s ladder?) A seemingly endless cycle of justification?
Give unto Caesar, which bokonon paraphrased as Caesar doesn’t know what’s really going on.
The vine produces fruit and the wild boar has bad breath.
Is it the dangers of being locked in idealised or normative interpretations and advocacy?
I don’t think it’s what it’s trying to talk about but I’ll mention on talk of those best able to murder, those best at warfare, they may preach peace because it is they that do the killing, someone else decides the victim. Your poem maybe is of them trying to keep their monopoly.
And so it is that your poem talks of the other, beware them, do not believe their lies (write it on your Polaroid for when you forget later - memento) but it is really talking of yourself, you aren’t better than them, when you are sure of yourself you have lost, when you are unsure of yourself you have lost. If your aren’t to be fooled by others you need only stop fooling yourself? (Which maybe can’t be done haha)
Not sure how it fits in but I’m also compelled to add from a beautiful mind: you watched a mugging John, that’s weird.
Let me save you said the monkey, putting the fish safely up the tree.
Also, beware them all you like, your still stuck with them.
Gosh, actually I’m lost. I grapple with this a long time, inwards spirals infinitely, outside doesn’t stay still long enough. It’s best not to get involved. Don’t mention that you know Spanish, make friends with strangers at the bus stop.
Is this a quote or something? The takeaway seems to be to beware of everyone.
I didn't immediately understand the line "beware those who are always reading books."
Perhaps the line means that people who read a lot are judgemental and likely to hate others. If that's the case, I don't really buy it, because people who truly read a lot are probably too busy reading to hate people not in the books.
Would be good to credit Monsieur Charles Bukowski.
I didnt get the same feeling. I saw it as another opportunity to show how much science and experts "dont understand". For instance, there is no way that any kind of C.A.T., M.R.I, E.K.G, E.E.G, LMNOP scan could show enough about it to duplicate it. Why even bother. Just try to understand how -if its important enough to you- he accomplished it. It looks like he can because he wanted to. He got fascinated by language and set himself to learn, "LEARN" as many as he could. So the attention isnt created by him. He was found out to be who he is and gained attention, possibly unwanted. So, I think that you may feel like mocking the event. I appreciate it as he doesn't seem to be a savant. Just an ordinary guy that set himself to be able to speak to whomsoever he came across. As a carpet cleaner, I bet it comes in handy.
True. Please allow me to expand my interpretation, not trying to discount yours.
One thing would be a talk by Temple Grandin, who had her brain scanned in some way (I’m not sure between mri cat ekg eeg etc but I think fmri). Iirc and very loose summary it showed a mid section of her brain to be different, and therefore an explanation of the symptoms of her autism was her brain rewireing around this difference by relying more on other parts. I think she does compare it to others who have suffered brain trauma to see how the brain can do amazing things, as well as there might be some physical thing to autism. So I’d say rather interesting and a reason to bother with those kinds of things. Otoh have you ever been so different that people want to study you? An autist can miss this and think they’ve made a new friend but the crushing realisation is that it’s a bit more like a freak show.
And so, mentioned at the bottom of the article is that he shows signs of autism. If you assume that to be true and read between the lines of his history, throw in a leap here and there, in an attempt to understand why, it can look as though he learnt the languages because he decided to and did, but why is that he wanted to connect with someone, anyone, from childhood being a constant outsider. Like Forrest Gump learning ping pong. Like Forrest Gump only ever being treated like a person from damaged people. It also explains why he didn’t want attention, associating all attention with bad, since early childhood. Iirc, to be specific, he found novelty in how different words sound in his mouth and enjoys seeing people be happy that he can speak to them. Those people being outsiders as well, from a certain perspective. I feel as though these are all quite common autistic experiences. Another one is being paraded around as a novelty by people only long enough until you annoy them and then you are tossed aside again, not knowing why, todays puppy being tomorrows embarrassment/responsibility. Which talks of another autistic trait: be useful.
So please forgive me for portraying that I am mocking the event, you are correct in that I may have been too sensitive, but I feel as though the writer writes off as him just being brown, something quite different: the lengths some autists, and generally, some outsiders, will go to to fit in or to avoid or cope with the anxiety of not fitting in. To have a normal experience in a normal way.
So to stress again, I appreciate the story and everyone involved. I’m aware there’s a lot of contention and hot button issues nearby but I’d like to avoid it. I’ll leave you with a scene from almost famous: https://youtu.be/WzY2pWrXB_0
My kids are natively bilingual, with their mother speaking to them in Spanish¹ and me in English from infancy. They're about to be 8 and are curious about other languages (my son wants to learn French, my daughter Japanese). It's interesting to see how they have fairly different personalities depending on their linguistic context. In English, my daughter is more extroverted, my son more introverted, the reverse is the case in Spanish. I don't think it's a matter of comfort in the languages—my son has had a strong attention to gradations of meaning between words in both languages. I’m looking forward to seeing how their linguistic skills develop as they get older. If it weren’t for Covid, they would have started French classes on weekends last year, but maybe we’ll get there in the next year or so. Otherwise, they may have to pick up French from visits with their Mexican/Belgian cousins.
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1. My wife is a native speaker of Spanish. Her English is accentless² and she has above-average reading/speaking/writing skills in English. She also speaks French.³
2. Mostly. Schwas still trip her up from time to time.
3. Most of her family is at least trilingual, speaking English, Spanish and one other language. I think her cousin with the most languages has five: English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic. At his sister's wedding, he gave a toast in French with a flawless accent⁴ that blew me away. I often joke that I almost speak one language, but I haven't learned all the words in English yet. I'm semi-functional in Spanish, but my kids are quick to point out that my accent is “horrible” and with my hearing loss, it’s a challenge to participate in conversations. There are a few languages I can read with a dictionary, but I don’t know that I can claim any facility in them.⁵
4. I suspected that his accent was good, but I verified it with the francophones at his sister’s wedding (she married a quadrilingual Belgian).
5. One thing I’ve found is that in general, Americans tend to overestimate their linguistic abilities and non-Americans to underestimate their skills. It’s typical that someone who took a couple years of French in high school ten years ago and hasn’t used it since will claim that they speak French. A European who says that they speak “a little” Italian will be able to function just fine in a conversation with an Italian.
Interesting. I've had an interest in other langauges, can understand a few words, but terrible at speaking it.
> Her English is accentless
I don't mean to pick on you, but every English speaker has an accent. It might be some kind of American accent, but it's still an accent.
This is fairly useless nitpicking in this context – he's talking about a non-native English speaker, who has learned English to the point that her accent is nearly indistinguishable from some native English accent. This is a very common, and very well understood use of accentless (in the context of non-native speakers).
5. Is true for British people as well. (I am British and I have realised that I only speak a little French)
Languages need a lot of upkeep in order to be fluent. For a single language you are talking about over 10000 vocabulary words and hundreds of grammatical patterns not to mention learning the normal way to say things like what verbs typically go with a noun. And then there's also deeper learning the correct way to pronounce everything let alone the mannerism and body language you should use while speaking it. You have to do all of this without losing competency with any of the other languages you know and without mixing up anything between them.
In order to reach these crazy high number of languages you will have to make compromises.
Roughly 2000 words are enough for a basic level. Because some of these languages are related, their vocabulary and grammatical patterns overlap.
You are underestimating the capability of some people to memorize certain information. Sometimes it is called "eidetic" memory. The best chess players just don't forget any chess position they ever see. Similar reports in music. Most of them are useless when memorizing any other form of "data". The carpet cleaner in question probably has that facility for words, phonemes and grammar. He just doesn't forget that stuff.
> The way Vaughn describes it, any time he reads something in a book, he can remember it almost perfectly. When he returned to school, he had even more to say, and more that he could understand.
Giant caudate nucleus at work?
Can we grow it?
First 5 languages are the hardest ;)
Rather, as with programming languages, the first five paradigms are the hardest. ;)
As a native Scandinavian, I understand most Scandinavian (except Finnish) without having spent more than fifty hours with various Scandinavians, and without having attempted to learn much. (It's mostly deciphering dialects, remapping certain words.) Having unwillingly learned German as a child, I can enjoy German television and navigate German cities as a confident, talkative tourist. Having learned fluent Esperanto, I can decipher a bunch of words in French and Italian, but can't follow conversation.
As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. (https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-is-to-learn-Japanese-...)
Learning Ruby if you know Python is kind of learning another European language, if you already know one.
Learning Haskell or Prolog is kind of learning Chinese if you only know imperative languages.
Even among Germanic/Northern Germanic languages you'd need some formal learning and practice to actually have some competency. Mutual intelligibility doesn't really cut it for "having learnt a language". I'd never say I speak danish or Swedish even though I can understand it somewhat.
The languages the man from the article has learned are considerably different from each other. Not all of them, of course. Still, even going from Spanish or French to Catalan and Portoguese is no picnic. Same for slavic languages. Flexibility with Grammar and already having the mental infrastructure can help, of course!
> As a native Scandinavian...
> As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time.
That's not a statement about how difficult it is to learn Japanese. It's a statement about your approach to learning Chinese.
Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish.
Meh. Can hack my way out of a wet paperbag in 5 or 6 european languages, puzzle out Greek/Cyrillic if desperate. Once knew a few katakana characters.
Totally dumb and illiterate in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Thai, whatever. No prospects of improvement.
I assume those 5 or 6 are all PIE variants and you don't know Basque/Finnish/Hungarian?
"but after a bout of depression"
And now I know why he's not working another job. Depression is the life killer.
It sounds in several places in the article like he has a severe case of impostor syndrome.
Fortunately (spoiler) at the end of the article, after his time at the MIT research lab, he sees that some traditionally super smart people value him and see him as intellectually special.
Amazing! Almost like a real-life "Good Will Hunting" story.
Well, he seems to have diagnosed himself with autism as well, possibly accurately.
Heartwarming story
I wonder if he'd have a natural aptitude for programming languages also
No, he wouldn’t. Programming languages have virtually no vocabulary, compared to natural languages. The differences between two programming languages aren’t the same kind of thing as the differences between two natural languages. Developers already pick up new programming languages easily, and talent there comes from being able to absorb its documentation rapidly.
If we know he has a good memory and doesn’t forget stuff, that is generally an advantage, but the connection that it is a “language” is not the reason.
I agree, someone speaking multiple languages will not suddenly become good at programming.
But there is a study that showed, that talent for languages matters more for programming skills than talent for mathematics.
Programming languages are nothing like natural languages
i wondered the same, and then thought programming languages and their ecosystems go through different evolutionary pressures than natural language.
and then i realized i still have no intuition as to the answer.
just it's a great question. glad you wrote it down.
They should be related at least due to the association of both programming and language acquisition to general mental ability.
My natural aptitude for reading programming languages has never helped me out speaking languages. After 20 years, I still only speak 3 words of French. Inability to pronounce or hear certain phonemes is a real phenomenon.
For me I'm modestly good at both.
I thought I'm quite good with my about 7 foreign languages with basic competency. I only ever became really fluent in English though. My latest addition was Arabic, and the Duolingo course wasn't exactly deep.
Interesting. The end implies he doesn't want to clean carpets any more. I hope he can find a job translating in a capacity that makes him happy to use his language skills he clearly finds so much joy from.
I'd hope someone hires him.
He probably doesn't have the skills for a traditional translating job, just as the average bilingual person hasn't. There are jobs for "unskilled" translators, not sure how much and in what contexts. Not sure if there is a job description out there for "hyper-polyglot genius". Niche-skill at best, unfortunately.
Maybe as a tester for multilingual software?
My experience with these guys(usually kids) is they speak English well and can say a couple of phrases out of the other languages. The trick is they confidently copy the intonation of the language they're "speaking" in to fool those who dont speak it.