You can use the concept of criticality to revise and revive the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
In the blunt form: language limits what we can say; Sapir-Whorf runs contrary to every-day experience. Sure, if ones native language contains le mos juste, it is easy to speak ones mind. But if not, the burden is not great. One must speak at greater length, using more words, and forming the intersections and unions of their meanings, to obtain the exact nuance that you intend. This is the routine craftsmanship of every wordsmith.
Early in the essay Kevin Simler posses a challenge "Here's an SIS network to play around with. Can you find its critical threshold?" What is most interesting is not the numerical value, lets just call it x. What is most interesting is that it is fairly sharply defined. If two idea are both fairly hard to transmit, and hence both close to x, we could easily have a situation in which the burden imposed by a missing mos juste makes all the difference. One idea has a transmissibility just above x and becomes an established staple of the culture. The other idea has a transmissibility just below x so it crops up from time to time but always dies out.
One looks around, admiring the cultural landscape. One idea is present, one absent. Why? Language! While it is wrong to claim that "a person's native language determines how he or she thinks", we have to take account of network criticality.
The much weakened Whorf-style claim that "a person's native language burdens their communications with trivial inconveniences" is plausible and unimportant at the individual level. But we may never-the-less find that "a social network's native language determines which thoughts die out and which ones take over most of the network."
Honestly, weak form of Sapir-Whorf absolutely does reflect my every-day experience; I figured it out way before reading about it, by pondering my "inner dialogue" - I run it bilingually, switching from English to Polish and back on sub-sentence level, always using the language that makes it easier to think a particular thought.
> But if not, the burden is not great. One must speak at greater length, using more words, and forming the intersections and unions of their meanings, to obtain the exact nuance that you intend. This is the routine craftsmanship of every wordsmith.
This is a nice way of putting it, but I question how "easy" and "routine" it is. People can do this, which is why strong form of Sapir-Whorf sounds too strong, but it's not free - and like "Trivial Inconveniences" article shows, that's enough for it to not be done, especially if alternatives like "picking up a similar but not-quite-right word" or "not thinking the thought at all" exists.
I feel this could be especially impactful on imagination (the problem-solving kind), which can be viewed as a randomized reverse-lookup[0]. The brain suggests you things connected to what you're thinking about, and - at least in my experience - they usually come up as words or phrases. If you don't have a word for a concept, you may not think of that concept, and concepts related to it. Not that you couldn't think of it, just you usually and initially won't.
One could think of language as a cache of those "intersections and unions of meanings" that have proven themselves to be useful. Viewed like this it's an optimization trick, but we observe that everything we do and think is time and energy-constrained, so such optimizations can be the difference (especially on a population level) between how precisely you think a thought before you accept it as "good enough".
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[0] - Meta: the way I figured out this idea actually involved the brain suggesting me the word "reverse-lookup", and me going out from there. My native Polish language doesn't have a word for "lookup", and especially "reverse lookup", so I wonder what would I came up with if I didn't know English?
Sapir-Whorf may run even deeper; Simler's book [0] argues persuasively that social signaling is the primary motivator not only of language, but of cognition itself. So perhaps Sapir-Whorf puts the cart before the horse: we actually think in networks, based on our predictions of what will be socially tractable, and the language/vocabulary is merely an evolving toolkit to that end (with occasional innovation of a viral metaphor/portmanteau/etc).
In the blunt form: language limits what we can say; Sapir-Whorf runs contrary to every-day experience. Sure, if ones native language contains le mos juste, it is easy to speak ones mind. But if not, the burden is not great. One must speak at greater length, using more words, and forming the intersections and unions of their meanings, to obtain the exact nuance that you intend. This is the routine craftsmanship of every wordsmith.
Early in the essay Kevin Simler posses a challenge "Here's an SIS network to play around with. Can you find its critical threshold?" What is most interesting is not the numerical value, lets just call it x. What is most interesting is that it is fairly sharply defined. If two idea are both fairly hard to transmit, and hence both close to x, we could easily have a situation in which the burden imposed by a missing mos juste makes all the difference. One idea has a transmissibility just above x and becomes an established staple of the culture. The other idea has a transmissibility just below x so it crops up from time to time but always dies out.
One looks around, admiring the cultural landscape. One idea is present, one absent. Why? Language! While it is wrong to claim that "a person's native language determines how he or she thinks", we have to take account of network criticality.
The much weakened Whorf-style claim that "a person's native language burdens their communications with trivial inconveniences" is plausible and unimportant at the individual level. But we may never-the-less find that "a social network's native language determines which thoughts die out and which ones take over most of the network."
Compare and contrast with Beware Trivial Inconveniences https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri..., which claims that trivial inconviences have real world potency without needing the leverage provided by network effects.