That's right, it goes in the religion hole
Humans seem to be born with a hole in our brains where a language should go. Babies are programmed to take to language acquisition like a duck to water. I suspect that humans are also born with a hole in our brains where a religion should go. For most of recorded history, a religion, a pantheon, or perhaps earlier, an belief in something like animism, would arrive and take root there to explain the burning questions that humans perennially demand explanations to. What happens after we die? Why do bad things happen to good people? How will the world end?
But in our enlightened century, many people are born and raised without the influence of a religion, a pantheon, or even an animist belief system. I argue this leaves a religion-shaped hole unfilled, a naturally abhorrent vacuum. It drives people to try to fill it with whatever entirely inappropriate belief system is at hand. We all know people who’ve tried in vain to fill the religion hole with science, which is clearly not religion-shaped! Science tries to explain how and what, but not why. Why is there something instead of nothing? Why are we here? Science remains conspicuously silent.
Other people will search for something more religion-shaped to believe in. Maybe birds aren’t real. Or maybe you find your faith in QAnon, or PETA, or AI safety. Movements that are not conspicuously silent about why we were put here, what your reason for living is, and when it will all end. I’ve seen enough lost-but-seeking people find meaning in these new belief systems to bet there’s some strong force that naturally attracts people to them.
A consulting tip I’ve taken to heart is that when you’re trying not to do something, it’s a lot easier to find something else that’s incompatible with it and do that instead. It takes a lot of effort and willpower to continually not do something. It’s much easier to start doing the incompatible thing once and expend that effort on continuing to do it. For example, if you’re trying not to smoke this afternoon, it’s a lot easier to chew gum all afternoon than it is to not smoke all afternoon.
So a few years ago I searched my beliefs and constructed something religion-shaped from them. And I intentionally tried to fill my religion hole with my construct. And it worked! It worked better than I could have imagined. I was born and raised without the influence of a religion. I’ve never had faith in anything before. But I have faith now, in things I know I believe in, and it’s an incredible source of strength to be able to just believe in them, without the burden of proof. I feel like I now have a solid foundation that will never give way, and it grants me such a feeling of stability that I never knew I was missing and always wanted.
I offer my home-cooked faith as an illustrative example. This creed definitely won’t resonate for you in the same way it does for me. I don’t know that there’s a way to shortcut the introspection and experimentation it took me to get there. Still, you can hopefully see how arbitrarily choosing to define core axioms like these as true could robustly support a belief system.
“People are amazing. Every person has inherent worth and deserves a chance to be happy. When people put their minds to it, they can do anything.”
I think I will cause discord on purpose
I have a secret technique that will cause any group of engaged smart people to start squabbling. I haven’t seen it fail to work yet, with the caveat that I’ve gotten bored with seeing the same patterns of squabbling recur, so I haven’t deployed it much recently.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: is a hot dog a sandwich?
No wait, come back. It’s a meme question because it works. Well. It doesn’t really work any more because now everyone knows everyone knows it’s a meme question. But asking questions of that nature does work. Consider a fictional example:
- Mallory: Does a tuna salad count as a salad?
- Alice: Hmm. I don’t think so, since the tuna’s cooked and salads only contain raw things.
- Mallory: Interesting. So is a beet salad a salad?
- Alice: Only if the beets are raw? That suddenly doesn’t feel right to me.
- Bob: Wait, no. Those are both obviously salads. They have salad in the name.
- Mallory: Huh. Then would you say a fruit salad is a salad?
- Carol: That can’t be a salad! It’s sweet and salads can’t be sweet.
- Alice: What? You’re crazy. That’s definitely a salad.
You can see how it would work. If everyone leans toward accepting, come up with less and less salad-like examples until you uncover an argument. And do the opposite if everyone instead leans toward rejecting. Is a pile of croutons a salad? Is a chicken fajita a salad? Is a salad wrap a salad?
Why does this work so well? I think it has to do with how people tend to deal with the fuzzy boundaries around categories. My current mental model of how most people think about categories is: ask system 1 what feels right, then get system 2 to come up with a post facto justification. This results in inconsistencies and contradictions if you drill down into a specific category with just one person, and results in discord in a group setting.
If you see something like this happening and want to stop it, the most common defense is to categorically reject this kind of categorization question. While this does successfully protect you from my fellow agents of chaos, it does not protect you from FOMO. And, I think we can do better. Categories are useful tools for making sense of the world, and we don’t want to dismiss interrogating their inner workings out of hand.
My current mental model of how to think about categories in a healthy way is informed by semantics, a subfield of linguistics. The theory goes, each category I have easy mental access to is represented by a prototypical element in my brain. So when I think of “sandwich”, I think of a prototypical ham and swiss on sliced white bread with lettuce, tomato, and mustard. When I want to see if something else fits the category of sandwich, I mentally compare it to the prototype and produce a binary yes or no based on its similarity. The individual variation we observe results from how everyone’s internal learned encoding of “similarity” can be very different from each other and still yield the same result for nearly all relevant questions, nearly all of the time.
The way I cut this particular Gordian knot is that I reject your sandwich binary. I instead think of that ham and swiss as 1.0 a sandwich, a BEC bagel as .9 a sandwich, a taco as .6 a sandwich, a salad as .2 a sandwich, and so on. It’s our old friend cosine similarity, modeled in our own organic brains. Then you can set your cutoff for whether something is a sandwich based on what the question is asking about. You can even re-weight each property of sandwichness depending on what the question is. Sometimes you care more about whether the maybe-sandwich is edible and sometimes you care more about whether the maybe-sandwich will come apart if you throw it. I will not be taking further questions at this time.
And now you know the secret. Please don’t actually cause discord on purpose, unless you really want to, or it would be really funny.
Why histories of words?
ID: Colorful diagram of each letter of the alphabet and its ancestors through Latin, Greek, Phoenician, and Proto-Sinaitic.
So, why histories of words? What unusual circumstances conspired to drive me to select this one extremely specific niche as my creative outlet?
Between histories and words, words are more straightforward to explain. I love words. I read myself into myopia by the age of six. I’d read anything and everything, which my parents gladly encouraged, as their (totally fine) spoken English was far better than their written English. I relayed the contents of parenting advice pamphlets to my parents when I was ten. They’d drop me off at the library on weekends. The library is not childcare! But I appreciated the childcare it provided me. Growing up in the 1900s, I stumbled upon Jed Hartman’s delightful language blog, sparking a lifelong love of wordplay. Rare words get stuck in my head the way people get songs stuck in their head, a mental quirk I find annoying just as much as I find it useful.
My interest in histories began less directly. As a child, I read widely enough to absorb the advice that childlike wonder was precious and worth preserving. So I dutifully tried to preserve it. I’m happy to report that I still regularly experience childlike wonder, however diminished, in the form of an ambient impulse of “Huh, why is that there? What is its purpose? Who keeps it working? When did we start doing things like that?” The impulse still evokes surprise and awe at all the stuff we managed to do across hundreds of lifetimes. Decades of this eventually got me asking second-degree questions to sustain the same joy of discovery, then third-degree questions. And I came to appreciate that not only does everything have a story, the components of its story also each have their own stories, and the components of those stories can all somehow eventually be determined to be Plato’s fault.
I credit David Crystal’s The Story of English in 100 Words as the inspiration for my particular format. Because my burning question is “why this thing”, I favor detailed histories of specific things over general overviews. Crystal’s book showed me that you can use those specific histories to tell a larger, compelling story that lets you take in the overall arc of history through osmosis, even as it focuses on the details. I aspire to someday publish my own general history told through the medium of histories of words, specifically focused on the history of technology.
If my work has a core thesis, it’s that we made it all up. Dollars to donuts, crimes and punishments, weekends and holidays, we made it all up! That’s awe-inspiring and wonderful, and that also means we can change these things if we can get enough people to agree to. I don’t want to be obtusely postmodern here; there’s clearly a base reality underlying it all that we did not make up. But 99% of the stuff we see, interact with, and think about on a daily basis is human-made, artificial, and of our own laborious construction. And that means we can change them, and make more things like them.
neapolitan
The ice cream flavor neapolitan first begins appearing in 1868. Today, neapolitan ice cream almost universally implies vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, but the three composing flavors were initially not standardized and would vary. One common trinity was pistachio, vanilla, and cherry, which resembled the newly-established (1861) Italian flag. And so the flavor came to be named after Naples, despite its actual origin in Prussia. Admittedly, quality ice cream did also have strong associations with Italy and its gelaterian legacy at the time.
As noted, neapolitan ice cream was actually invented by the royal chef of Prussia, Louis Ferdinand Jungius. In 1839, Louis published a book of experimental recipes he’d prepared for King Frederick William III of Hohenzollern at his Berlin estate. He described a Pückler as vertically layered ice cream flavored with strawberries, raspberries, greengages, cherries, and apricots. It was named after Prussian nobleman Hermann Pückler, a name we can all agree to be glad did not stick. By 1862, his suggested Pückler recipe instead had layers of apricots, quinces, strawberries, and raspberries. By 1903, the standard recipe called for the now familiar vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate flavors. They were still arranged like a layer cake, rather than our familiar horizontal sections. Why those three flavors? At the time, they were the three most popular ice cream flavors in the US, a fact that remains true today.
Why is the adjective form of Naples Neapolitan in the first place? Naples was founded in the 700s BCE as the Greek colony of Παρθενόπη (Parthenope). Two hundred years later, it was renamed Νεάπολις (Neápolis). By around 1000 CE, the systematic sound changes that distinguished Vulgar Latin from modern Italian had altered the city name to its contemporary Napoli. Meanwhile, different systematic sound changes over in France rendered the city name as Napples, then Naples by the 1400s, which is when the city name was first borrowed into English. So the English name of the city is directly borrowed from French, while its English adjective form is based on its Classical Greek name.
Parthenope is a Classical Greek name that’s a straightforward compound of παρθένος (parthénos), meaning “virgin”, and ὄψ (óps), meaning “voice”. In Greek mythology, one of the Sirens bears the name, specifically the daughter of muse of dance Terpsichore and river god Achelous. In 1850, the eleventh asteroid ever discovered, 11 Parthenope, was named after the mythological siren. This fit the pattern of the first ten asteroids, all named for women in Greek and Roman mythology. The first ten women were actually all specifically gods, so perhaps its discoverer, Annibale de Gasparis, chose to honor a demigod instead because he was an astronomer at the University of Naples.
Neápolis is interesting to me precisely because of how uninteresting it is. It’s an even more straightforward compound of νέα (néa), meaning “new”, and πόλις (pólis), meaning “city”. The major city’s name for the past two thousand five hundred years has been the maximally uninspired “New City”. This phenomenon is hardly unique, as New City and its linguistic equivalents is one of the most common city names in the world. It’s also an illustrative example of how place names seem to defy their original meaning. Just look at some of the English new cities and how strange it feels to do a surface analysis of their names: Newcastle, Newton, Newport, New Haven.
Most cities originally named New City get renamed if they become important and well-known, so I enjoy marveling at the ones that never did. Но́вгород (Novgorod) is Russian for Newtown. Villanova is Italian for New Village. 𐤒𐤓𐤕-𐤇𐤃𐤔𐤕 (qrt-ḥdšt), romanized as Carthage, is Phoenician for New City. เชียงใหม่ (Chiiang Mai) is Thai for New City.
I also learned that while Kota Bharu is Malay for New City and Nevşehir is Turkish for New City, despite their significance and population, I had never encountered either name before.
If you enjoyed this exploration, you may also enjoy my much briefer history of pizza (1931).
On truth
My mother is a pathological liar. As you might imagine, this made growing up really confusing and weird sometimes. As an adult, I love her, but I don’t trust a single thing she says. This is absolutely exhausting to deal with. So I learned to rely on evidence that things actually happened the way she claimed. And I learned that when evidence is hard to come by, the next best approach is getting multiple outside perspectives to make it more likely I’ll notice any contradictions.
I hope I’m pretty well-adjusted by now, but I definitely didn’t escape unscathed. My sister and I both independently adopted a different maladaptive pattern in early adulthood. We refused to lie. We both knew firsthand how much it sucked to be lied to and were determined never to inflict that on anyone else. As you might also imagine, adding this constraint to our stereotypically dramatic teenage social lives made them that much harder.
Some advice I’ve seen repeated is that telling the truth is freeing and you should do it more. My current understanding is that this is good advice because most people tell the truth something like 98% of the time. If that’s the case, telling the truth 99% of the time probably will make your life significantly better. But I can personally report that going from telling the truth 100% of the time to telling the truth 99% of the time makes life so much easier that I can’t even begin to compare it.
All of this is to say that, at first through circumstance, then later through affinity and profession, I highly value truth-seeking. As with many deeply held personal values, it took me a while to learn that not everyone shares this value. It took me longer still to learn that sometimes there’s a lot of wisdom in not saying things that are nonetheless true and relevant to the current situation.
I’ve been an engineer and a consultant. One factor being effective in both fields has in common is that important decisions should be based on ground truth. And ground truth is not straightforward to get. On the engineering side, you can see shades of this in successful companies’ push toward data-driven decision making in the early 2010s. Each profession involved in a business has its own accumulated knowledge — this particular copy improves conversions, sales are about relationships, don’t write incriminating things in emails — all based on prior experience, and often in conflict. Part of the reason behind the conflicts is that what’s actually true changes over time. That is, while the laws of physics are the same regardless of whether Aristotle or Galileo are inferring them, the laws of society change over time. Slavery is bad. Kids should stay in school. Women should be able to vote and own property. Especially in the last 200 years, what people know and how people act has been a moving target, and accumulated wisdom can easily become invalidated without anyone noticing. The best way I know to counteract this tendency is to measure thoughtfully and carefully, then trust and doubt your measurements in equal measure.
On the consulting side, the problem is even worse, because people have an vested interest in misrepresenting the truth. If you’re a manager, you can walk the floor and see for yourself what customers and employees are doing and saying. But most managers lean on their reports’ testimony. If you’re a director, that’s a lot harder. It’s much easier to just ask your managers what’s true and mentally average it out. And if you’re an executive, it’s harder still. All that you have to work with is multiple levels of direct reports selectively reporting just the parts of the truth that make them look good. One of the most effective things you can do as a management consultant is convince your clients that they’re not getting the full truth and it’s making their decisions worse, then suggest ways for them to get closer to it.
Galileo is legendary for recanting his heretical belief in heliocentrism under penalty of inquisition, only revealing his true belief on his deathbed. Obviously the Earth doesn’t move; anyone can see that. His last words were reportedly “e pur si muove”, typically translated as “and yet it moves”. As with George Washington and the cherry tree, which was supposedly only three hundred years ago, this was a legendary event. It’s probably not true. But it can nevertheless be a source of inspiration. Fiction is often better at this than fact. It certainly inspires me. When times seem tough and I can’t see a clear path forward, I remember: e pur si muove. And yet it moves. You can declare me a heretic and imprison me. And it may take a hundred years or more. But the truth will out.