Inside The Viral Words That Make You Click - Etymology Nerd - #1086

21:58Adam Aleksic:You want to hit a fine line. I mean, think about like phone calls in movies. They famously never say goodbye. They just finish saying something and they hang up. Because in real life, we do the whole like, all right, I'll see you later. Goodbye. But in a movie, that doesn't really work. So you do actually make it more concise. No way, because it would just waste screen time. We don't need to hear you. Exactly. Yep. Okay. Okay. Well, have a good... Yep. It's fine. Yeah. No worry. Yeah. I'll catch you later. Goodbye. I mean, five seconds that you didn't need in the movie. So it's performing the idea of a phone call while not actually doing phone calls we actually do it.

22:31Adam Aleksic:I never thought about that. Holy shit. But sterilizing language too much, obviously puts it. You did a great TED talk. I did a TEDx talk five, six years ago or something now. And one of the things that I realized as I was getting ready for that and doing the preparation was I actually need to detrain my knowledge of my own talk in a way so that it doesn't sound too contrived so it doesn't sound too performative there's that idea of what a ted talk sounds like i mean there's a great video on youtube of like guy just doing ted talk by saying things that don't mean anything but he's saying in the cadence of a ted talk that's funny um definitely recommend looking that up but yeah there's there's you can you know what i mean when i say there's a cadence of what a ted talk sounds like i think it's kind of dead i think it's in the past and um ted talks are also they've lost a lot of their prestige of what it was and the way people should be doing ted talks now it's just clip farming which is the future the way that people should be doing ted talks now is just clip far so if you get booked for a ted talk you should just try and get clip farmed i think so how would you do that what actually matters like i don't know the audience of ted talk is i guess aspirational speakers themselves or um like it's if you have a real message to say it's probably not the audience that's there it's probably better if you transmit it on the internet because you could reach that audience and that's the idea behind six seven and behind gesture maxing and all that stuff is that distribution matters more than the content itself that you're just saying the thing that goes viral and if we're existing in a age of social media virality the ted talk is kind of a dead format um existing as this quasi online talk which was fantastic in the early days of YouTube when there wasn't enough content going on.

24:20Adam Aleksic:But now the media ecosystem is oversaturated and the TED Talks have way fewer views than they used to because they don't do the same function that they did in the early internet. Well, especially because one video can get, you can write a book and then each sentence can be sold individually. And then even those sentences can be reproduced and reproduced and reproduced and individual productions of those can be reshared. So yeah, you're actually looking for as much distribution as possible when uh what was it called um the hh bomb thing that happened with the guys in the miami club where they played that kanye song and oh yeah in insane bar that was every single second of that video was broken down and shared and reshared and published and republished and commented on and that's a single book just being sold word by word essentially and what that points to is that there is a dangerous misalignment between human preferences like i i can imagine and that most of us don't think that song is good for humanity.

25:16Adam Aleksic:And then what goes viral online? Because online, there are certain emotions that are rewarded more than others. There's anger, fear, awe, humor, things that trigger a state of mental arousal where your brain is more activated. Now, things that don't do that is like contentment. Contentment makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but it doesn't trigger your brain to click a like button. The like button, of course, is more of a metric of how willing you are to click this button than it is whether you like something. And you're more willing to click a button if your brain is activated and your brain's not activated when you feel warm and fuzzy, which means warm and fuzzy ideas are not going to spread online.

25:47Adam Aleksic:The things that are going to spread are rage bait and click bait. That's so fascinating. So if you're a meditation teacher, by design, because you make people feel good and you get them out of that brain mode, you're going to get less engagement, which means that you're going to go less viral, which means there's less of an incentive for you to keep doing your content. Look at the wellness space. The same way movie phone calls perform what it's like to be a phone call, wellness influencers are performing the idea of wellness, but it's this hyper aestheticized, sanitized, clean girl thing where you're on a yoga mat doing Pilates or whatever.

26:18Adam Aleksic:But that doesn't like you're presenting this hyper wellness idea. That's not true wellness. And if you're actually feeling warm and fuzzy, you don't need to prove that to other people. You don't need to play like you're feeling good. Yeah. You're not doing yoga in the living room with your floor to ceiling windows and you're waving sage everywhere. You're sat on the couch, relaxing. Sometimes it's just watching a movie is, you know, sitting on the couch but not sufficiently visually interesting so it wouldn't be compelling for people what about the gay male accent what's going on there yeah 100 there's a lot of research on well emerging research on lesbian accent as well but gay accent um that there is a certain way of talking um that of course will differ between different communities and it's not a monolith um but you know you can recognize when somebody talks in a gay accent um there there's a few sociological things going on I think it's incorrect to say that they talk more like women, but they adopt many strategies that are similar to how women have talked.

27:15Adam Aleksic:They raise certain vowels and they will. Yeah. And it's all kind of the same identity thing. It was historically a way like the gay slang words, which is a lot of our Gen Z slang words also come from gay ballroom speech. What like? Oh, like slay, serve, queen, cooked, ate. cooked is gay yeah i'm pretty sure that comes well there's cooking and cooked which come from different sources cooking is sports slang um yeah yeah yeah playing well yeah yeah unreal so i wonder if there's stuff that even we wouldn't notice that there's little uh identifiers in the gay community like top speak in one way and bottom speak in another or I guess there's guys that present in a much more masculine manner and there's guys that present in a much more feminine manner.

28:06Interesting conversation I had over dinner, probably best to have it over dinner, looking at what it is, the presentation that most straight men notice in gay men and what they notice is what you said, which is, are you coding as female? Not as female, but in a manner that somebody who isn't a part of that culture would identify as feminine.

28:28Adam Aleksic:I'm going to sound like a broken clock, but everything is performing the idea of something and so gay men perform the idea of being gay which is fine straight men perform the idea of being straight and it's also a way to signal to other people like in historically um gay men had to be closeted and they needed ways of signaling other gay men that hey uh i'm chill and i we should hang out you know and uh that's sort of linguistically there are little cues you can drop that hint at i'm a gay man right what like well using certain slang words like uh i'm thinking about like i don't know cottaging in britain but when homosexuality was illegal there's like certain ways of tapping your foot or polari was a whole gay cant like a kind of a micro language created in england that was used specifically by gay people as a way of evading detection by police because police didn't know what was going on and it was a way of signaling a shared identity for themselves and we see sort of gay micro languages emerge everywhere.

29:22Adam Aleksic:In the Philippines, there's one called Swardspeak. There's one in South Africa. Every community, because gay people have been historically kind of marginalized, they need ways to come up with subversion of the traditional norms of language. Do you know what capoeira is? It sounds British. It's a Brazilian martial art. Brazilian is what I mean. So capoeira was a martial art developed in Brazil when they were under a military rule and they weren't allowed to practice fighting because they didn't want there to be a military force that could rise up so this thing if you watch a video of it looks very distinctive very dancy it kind of looks like that i mean it very quickly gets into a fighting art but um that makes me think about gay guys in britain before it was legal having to have a secret language on a brazilian martial art developed by africans taken to the country as slaves that was it so they they weren't allowed to practice fighting and they've got music that goes with it as well, which would be a way to hide what was going on.

30:21It's just a party. We don't need to worry about that. It's just a party. And yeah, the.

30:25Adam Aleksic:Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Well, if we accept that language is a tool of identity, identity is tied to power. Who's in control as part of your identity. And so we see the English language, which is defined by these white British people in the 1700s or whatever and we're still following the norms yeah but it doesn't represent all the speakers of english and so different speakers try to come up with different ways to subvert that structure that's imposed upon them and so a lot of that has been african-american english speakers who now have come up with a lot of slang words that later bled into mainstream gen z slang or um specifically gay people because these are straight white men uh creating language And so it's a way of subverting, of establishing their own norms of language.

31:10Adam Aleksic:King and queen, for example, like the slang word, what's up, king? You know, like that or what's up, queen? That comes from ballroom slang in New York City in the 1980s, which is this like black, gay, Latino space. Black, gay, Latino space. Black and Latino, you know, gay people in New York City. And it was a way of elevating people in that community. I see you on the status of royalty because we are not seen as that by society. And that even goes back even further to the history of kind of like black people in the United States. A lot of slang goes from black people to gay people and then to like the straight white girlfriends of gay men and then to the mainstream English.

31:49Adam Aleksic:Right. Okay. So there's a pipeline. A four person human centipede with normies at the end and black people at the front. That's pretty much it. Fantastic. Or 4chan is the other end. 4chan, black people, gay people, cool people, normies. Language spreads when it's funny or cool. And it's cool when black people use it. And it's funny when 4chan people use it. It can be considered funny, unfortunately, when black people say things as well, which is a whole genre of hood irony memes, like cap is an example. Or hoz is a recent slang word. What's that? It's like a slang word for hoz, but it comes from like a parody of African-American English.

32:25Adam Aleksic:um or ghiat that was that was also kind of making fun of big ass yeah yeah yeah um but it comes from the the word goddamn pronounced in an exaggerated african-american accent um and of course when i say that there's many different african-american accents in the same way there's many different gay accents and many different internet accents and i really hate to speak of language as a monolith i'm not even sure language exists as like a thing it's just like we all speak separately kind of close to people around us um and there's like a gradient of what language is rather than a monolithic thing.

32:54Adam Aleksic:The monolithic thing is this institutional assumption that there is a dictionary that can capture a snapshot of what language is. So every person has their own language in this regard. Yes. It's called idiolect from the Greek word idios, meaning one's own. And we all speak in a completely unique way, conditioned by our background, our upbringing, our education, the people we hung out with, the words that resonated with us based on just our history of interacting with language. I find that really compelling that you have a linguistic footprint unlike anybody else. That's how they caught the Unabomber.

33:23Yes, his brother found out that he said, eat your cake and have it too, as opposed to have your cake and eat it too, because the one that he used actually makes more sense, but was completely unique.

33:33Adam Aleksic:Exactly. And so we all have these little quirks. Whether you think you do or not, they're there. What about lesbian accents? This is harder to identify. And there are studies showing that speakers can identify a lesbian accent, but there are very mixed results on what defines one. There is, again, indication that they speak a little closer to the idea of a masculine language, and yet at the same time, it would be reductive to say that. So there is certain stuff going on with perhaps lowered vowels and maybe a deeper voice. But again, I would be generalizing to say that we know for sure there definitely is something going on, but the studies aren't there to fully explain it.

34:12It would make sense if you were to think about much of gay fashion compared with straight fashion for men, you would say, well, there's a bit more flair. There's maybe a bit more color. There's more beautification. There's more accessories. Okay. That seems to code somewhat feminine. And if you were to look at gay women compared with straight women, say, well, there's more plaid and jeans and sort of male coded clothes a little bit more loose fitting sometimes uh that would tend to code a bit more male you go okay well it would make sense that if you're presenting outwardly that way that maybe your language would match that but it would also be unique and distinct because gay men aren't trying to be women that would be very bad for the gay men they're trying to attract right and gay women aren't trying to be men because they wouldn't attract any of the gay women that is the idea of

35:03Adam Aleksic:man again, which is maybe closer to a woman than straight man. Performing the idea of being a gay man. All we're doing all the time is performing, LARPing. We're just pretending to be on a podcast right now, but in doing so, we actually are. I need you to dice it. Can you blow that apart for me? It's really cool. I'm not entirely sure what you mean. I think people should all read this guy, Irving Goffman. He's a sociologist from the 1960s. And he comes up with this great book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. And he describes how we all adopt faces or roles in society. There's a front facing role and a back facing.

35:35Adam Aleksic:So when you're on stage or off stage, and when you're on stage right now, we're presenting to the public. We are on stage, we're presenting as ourselves. But as soon as we get off the podcast, we might speak more casually because there's a different way of communicating when you know there's this invisible audience present. In the same way, when you're literally on a stage or you're literally backstage that you'll do the same thing. But if you're talking in front of your parents versus you're talking with your friends, you'll adopt different registers. And it's that kind of the same thing we were describing with different rooms and different platforms and you have an idea of what your environment is and you will mold yourself into the role you see that environment as bringing to you and so we do everything through this idea of a role and all of what we do is a performance to be a man is kind of a performance like we need to keep replicating this idea of manhood we both um like have beards we both uh dress and talk a certain way um and in doing so we're kind of adopting symbols of masculinity and clavicular is doing a great job of that himself i've got it i i've got a take on that which is i think it's uh the most caricatured traits of masculinity uh not necessarily in terms of speech you know because you might say a powerful precise uh educated or a brusque, maybe even.

36:56It was someone who's very curt with the way that they spoke as strong and silent type. But that's because masculinity is couched within 2026. What does it mean for masculinity to be that way? I think visually masculinity has just been going in one direction. If you look at the tracking of Luke Skywalker star action figures over time in the 60s, he was super skinny. And then in the 90s, again, do me a comparison. Just search a chat GPT, Luke Skywalker action figure over time comparison. And yeah, he just, he goes on a very heavy course of testosterone for about six decades.

37:32Adam Aleksic:That's really interesting. And just gets more and more and more and more and more jacked. So I think what's happening is a performance of masculinity. That's the best way to put it. Luke Skywalker looks maxed. Luke Skywalker absolutely moggs, dude. Yeah, he's performing masculinity. It's a male to male visual comparison. and there is always an evolving definition of masculinity too like back in ancient rome being masculine means you could like as long as you could have sex with other men as long as you weren't a bottom that would be like not masculine but that was true that was the definition of masculinity for a certain period in ancient rome you're allowed to fuck just your you you have to fuck if you are caesar was famously offended uh not at the accusation that he was gay but the accusation that he was a bottom uh because that's the roman idea

38:28Adam Aleksic:but it's an evolving idea whether men should have long hair or short hair whether you know we should uh you know what it means to be a man is always a moving target and we're always performing for this target so it just proves how arbitrary it is that right now of course there is a current 2026 idea of a man that we're performing toward but that's a very different idea than back when we were wearing togas that's 1977 1995 heavy course of testosterone dude unbelievable that what and then they've used the uh stats of what it would be like to give the same proportions to a human on either side 37 inch shoulders and a 32 inch waist versus 52 inch shoulders This is a 27-inch waste.

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40:24That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. What about emojis? Because they're kind of like language and picture, I guess. They feel like modern hieroglyphics.

40:38Adam Aleksic:Yeah, well, there's a few different functions of emojis. You can use it to substitute a word. Like we see this with ICE protests. People want to censor the word ICE because they think the algorithm is like gonna hamper their video. So they'll just sub it out with the ice cube emoji. That's a substitute of emoji. Then you have emojis that are more para-language meant to augment your sentence. So if I say something and then I comment, or I have a sentence, and then at the end of the sentence, There's like a laughing emoji or a sneezing emoji or a crying emoji that serves as a sort of a tone tag telling you what the emotional form of my sentence is.

41:11Adam Aleksic:And then there's a few other separate ways you can send them individually. You could use them as reactions. There's a lot of things going on, but they absolutely are linguistic in the sense of they carry meaning and they communicate something from one person to another. I saw a court case where they were trying to determine what this emoji meant. Was it the farmer in Canada? What was this one? Okay, so there's a great court case where there was a farmer who had a contract for grain shipments. And he would occasionally, like they did month by month, and they would sign off with a yes or whatever.

41:51Adam Aleksic:and then one month the farmer signs off with an okay emoji just like thumbs up okay and the grain supplier doesn't deliver the grain or something like that and then the farmer sues the grain supplier maybe i'm getting the other way around but the point is the court case was about whether the thumbs up emoji legally constituted an affirmation of this agreement occurring um one person said this could be acknowledgement and the other person said this is a direct agreement and I think the court case ruled in favor of thumbs up being an agreement, but it was kind of based on previous context, right?

42:24Adam Aleksic:Because previous context was a long established history of emojis and court cases. Right. Well, there's a few things going on. Yeah. What was the one you were thinking of? There was a murder case and it was about intent. It was about whether or not this person had intended to kill somebody or not. And it's an interpretation of what this emoji means. And it's so funny because it's a single thing. right it's there's no intonation i guess it's couched in what has been said before and after but if you just take it on its own uh there is no different way to say there is no different way to spell it and it's only been around for 15 less than 15 years something like that probably okay so the definition of it hasn't had enough time to really cement itself and become established well that's the thing that's so fluid emoji definitions are also constantly changing like the crying emoji once meant literally crying and then it meant laughing and then And it also, the laughing emoji is now seen as like ironic by something.

43:21Yeah, you shouldn't use the laughing emoji. Right. Yeah, that's kind of cringe.

43:24Adam Aleksic:Unless you're trying to like signal Boomer. Correct. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the horseshoe has come all the way back around again. You can post ironically use it, I think. Okay. Yeah. We're in the post cry laughing face world. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. What's the direction of etymology? It feels like there's sort of an entropy to words that they move in a direction. Are they always getting simpler and shorter over time? Is there an arrow of motion when it comes to word development? I think language, more than anything, is a reflection of who we are as people right now. The word etymology comes from Greek etymos, meaning truth.

44:02Adam Aleksic:There's a truth to the word that we look at. And it tells us something about humanity, about who we are as people, because again, this is a tool of identity. and so less of there being a direction and more of it just reflecting who we are right now what we're feeling it's language is our way to categorize what we think is going on i'll use words to describe my reality and then i'll use that to communicate it to you so it's describing reality and then it's communicating that reality if our reality changes yeah language will change as a result uh because now we have to describe something different so we have we're using fewer words to describe different types of plants than we were in the 1800s because we're interacting with fewer plants.

44:42Adam Aleksic:That's kind of sad. Oh, okay. And what about when, what's the term for when a word gets broken down to be made shorter? So goodbye is a good example. God be with you. And then, yeah, contracted to goodbye. And then eventually you can truncate it to just bye. Yeah. What's that called? That's a contraction? Abbreviation contraction. There are different ways of doing this. You can make words shorter and you can also make portmanteaus where you combine different words. And yeah, we're making new words all the time. Gesture maxing is a great evidence of that. We're combining new words in new ways. But that sort of reflects our new reality.

45:20Adam Aleksic:And so if reality adjusts, we will both come up with new words and we'll lose old ones because language is a moving, living thing. You mentioned black people, gay people, cool people, normal people. young people how much did they drive language forward because young people are almost always seen as being cool but they're also the ones that have got the least uh cemented history with regards to their linguistic use yeah exactly they're the ones that are the earliest to adopt new words because older people have this cemented idea of what language is younger people are both more flexible with that and they're trying to build a shared identity for themselves and i know i keep bringing identity into it, but that's what language is.

45:58Adam Aleksic:It's a way of, you know, figuring out who you are and what kind of words you want to use. And you don't want to sound like your mother. You want to sound like your peers. Yeah. How much of the changes in language is just because kids want to differentiate themselves from their parents? That's a huge part of it. Most of language change, I would say, is driven by people like right now, honestly, middle schoolers, but historically people between the ages of like 10 and 25 are the ones coming up with slang. Now, of course there's different types of how language gets adopted there's institutional words so like iphone is a new word but it's not a slang word uh podcast a shortening of ipod plus broadcast um that's sort of new but that these things come from more institutional avenues uh that's another route or mechanism of language change but for the slang which is this kind of lower status feeling of language that eventually can become just real language um that comes from younger people so all the video game terms we see in uh bleeding into mainstream english um npc skill issue that kind of stuff um or all the yeah the the black people uh or the uh incel language um all of that's kind of the driven by young people right now how effective are institutions at top down dictating language and linguistic use because when i think about and this might just be because I'm terminally online, when I think about most of the language that I see.

47:23Yeah, you're right with podcasts, but they're usually categories. They're not the sort of thing that people are using as an important identifier of the way that they're put together. And it doesn't really seem to be shaping culture. Maybe it represents something that shapes culture, but the words itself won't. So how easy is it for people in power to top down dictate the way that language

47:45Adam Aleksic:is used? If it feels like a word is intentionally being forced upon you, we actually often feel a resistance to it there's a in the movie mean girls gretchen famously couldn't make the word fetch happen she was trying to stop trying to make fetch yeah yeah um and that's because it felt forced so if you feel like someone is pushing a word onto you might actually not want to adopt it there is a difference with institutional acceptance so if you see a word in a dictionary uh that's just like this is accepted as language um even though of course there's just an idea of language um but you might point to that now and you'll see news outlets only use words that are the dictionary or books in academic publishing and all this stuff will use this standard idea of language, which is filtered through the institutions.

48:28Adam Aleksic:So they're not forcing the word. They're merely once a word has been used around for long enough, they legitimize it. Lots of people have got issues with the word like, you know, what are some of the older versions of filler words? Because it can't have just been now that filler words were brought in. Yeah, well, there have always been filler words. And um might be one of the most universal words. There's across different languages that mid-central vowel, uh, shows up in a lot of when people are thinking. I know Spanish speakers use like eh, uh, or it's some kind of vowel that's close to the center often that's used when you're, ah, you just, I said it, that's used when you're thinking about something.

49:13Adam Aleksic:And that's a universal constant that we think about things and we need time to say things. It's a holding pattern. Yeah, it's the floor holding thing again. I think it's stigmatized because it's associated with not thinking through things. Like especially is associated with like the valley girls and those women are stigmatized just because they're not seen as speaking standard English, even though there's nothing inherently wrong. And actually like has a lot of different applications. There's the quotative like where you can say something you can quote someone directly i said this or you can adopt an affect i was like this and that actually serves a different linguistic function that's actually a really beautiful thing that you can adopt a persona in the middle of speech instead of directly claiming to quote something like implies it doesn't have to be 100 accurate but it's a self-analogy it's a self-simile i was like it's a self-simile yeah yeah uh yeah one of the things someone brought this up i can't remember who I was speaking to.

50:16The Etymologicon, who wrote that? Mark Forsyth. Mark Forsyth.

50:20Adam Aleksic:Yeah, that's the book that got me into etymology. No fucking way. I read that in 2016 and I was like, this shit is gas. And I just started reading more etymology books, started a little blog for myself. I don't think anybody read it, but then I studied linguistics in college and ended up becoming a linguistics influencer, but it started because of that book. No way. Did you read Elements of Eloquence as well? Yeah, yeah. Bro, so Mark's great. And I brought up the holding pattern-like stuff. He had this great take, which is if you just roll back to your grandparents' generation, a lot of the time sentences would begin with, well, you know, it's this sort of, there would be almost a bloviating approach to it.

51:03I have this guy that I bring on all the time, Rory Sutherland. He's kind of like my mad uncle. And every time that he speaks, there's precision and then there's these parentheses of noise but it's not like it's still filler to some degrees it's padding and it's nice it actually provides a little bit of breathing room because he speaks quite quickly too so having a ah i know this is coming into land um the same as getting off the phone okay yep yep no worries i've got that it's that it's foreplay

51:36Adam Aleksic:in post-coital talking talk. Exactly. No, I think we talked about floor holding, but you got to take the floor in the first place. And you were describing that, you know is a great example. You are signaling that you're taking the conversational turn. There is an influencer space as people start videos with, no, because, no, because why did this happen? And it's just like a, it doesn't mean anything really. Falling halfway through a sentence. It does that. It feels as if - In media's res feeling that you want to, we resonate more with the video when we feel like we're already in the middle of it rather than having to deal with this whole introduction.

52:08Adam Aleksic:So, but it does still serve to grab your attention and continue from the middle of the thought. What are some of the other powerful linguistic tricks that creators either are using a lot of or you think that more creators should be using in order to, that's interesting. I didn't think about, no, because, and you go, hang on, I didn't see what happened before. I guess I'm in this now. what else is yeah what else are some good keyholes in the brain that you can latch into uh i'm trying less to provide advice to creators and more just get people aware of what creators are already doing to you oh okay you're like you're like a public public service announcement for creators yeah psa yeah everybody's doing everything for your attention yeah the platforms have monetized your attention they are commodifying your data and your information and they're trying to sell you ads everything's based around your attention they create incentive structures now for influencers to replicate, where the attention economy, famously, just runs around what will grab your attention.

53:06Adam Aleksic:And so that means our language will all serve that end primarily. And then there's maybe a secondary purpose of I want to sound like I'm, I know what I'm talking about, or I want to sound relatable. But it starts with attention and we'll use keywords. Like all words are keywords at this point. Metadata used to be like their search engine optimization terms that you would put in a website description to make sure it ranks higher. every single term now is a search engine optimization term because the algorithm is looking at every single word you use and it's using that to create a cluster representation of what your video is in this mathematical space and it uses that to push out a video and so by using a word you are creating a signal for the algorithm that this video should be distributed in a certain way and then you are also creating signals for the viewers that you should look at the video a certain way there's several meta layers to everything we're saying I feel like you're a guy that went away for a decade to some mountaintop kung fu retreat and learned a bunch of really dangerous martial arts where you can kill a guy with one touch.

54:09And I'm now asking, okay, so how do I kill guys with one touch? And you're saying, well, what I'm here to do is I'm here to warn people about the one touch death move. That's exactly what it feels like.

54:18Adam Aleksic:I think we should be immensely critical of these platforms. And I'm a big believer that the medium is the message, that the way we consume media strongly affects everything we understand, that algorithms are uniquely constraining our language to this bottleneck we've described, that they are shaping our expression. And if they're doing it to our language, that's one thing, because I do think language, again, is this tool that's sort of neutral. But they're also doing it to our ideas, our discussion, our greater sense of reality. There are certain biases that get coded into the algorithm that get perpetuated.

54:45Adam Aleksic:We see the same thing happening with AI. There's a bottleneck again there. What kind of language goes in, what kind of language is reinforced into the model, and then what kind of language goes out. Nothing is neutral when it's happening through a tech intermediary that's trying to make money off of you. Okay, talk to me about what AI is doing to language. You know about the word Delve? Delve, to sort of jump into. Yeah. So we have studies indicating that since ChatGPT came out, usage of the word Delve has spiked a thousand percent since before 2022. Why does ChatGPT like Delve? So Chachipiti uses the word delve 10 times more than regular because there is a bias in the reinforcement learning process, which is when the words get trained into the model.

55:26Adam Aleksic:So one, there's a few things going on here. One, the reinforcement workers are in Nigeria and Kenya where they do actually say delve at higher rates, but still not that high. And that's partially their rewarding words that they're familiar with. Two, delve is a Latin word. And we know that Chachipiti exhibits a Latin based bias over Germanic words. It's Latin supremacy. It's prestige. It's like you think Latin sounds fancier than Germanic words. Like Germanic words are basic ones like the, but, and, whatever. And then Latin words, or dig in is a Germanic word versus delve is a Latin derived word.

55:55Adam Aleksic:Right. And it sounds fancier to say the Latin word. And because these models are trained to sound like they know what they're talking about, they're going to use more of the romance language stuff. They're trained to sound confident and incisive and sycophantic. And they will use certain words that perpetuate that. And then that gets reinforced into the model. So all this stuff happens. And when you're a reinforcement worker clicking through what kind of words are okay and not okay, you don't really catch a small discrepancy like that. That delve is showing up a little bit more. So it accidentally gets reinforced into the model.

56:24Adam Aleksic:And then Chachapiti starts spitting out the word delve more. And now we have evidence in the past few years that humans in our spontaneous spoken conversation are also starting to use the word delve more. So the creature that programmed the AI is being programmed by the AI. We are now being trained by ChatGPT to use different language. In other news, Shopify powers 10 % of all e-commerce companies in the US. They are the driving force behind Gymshark and Skims and Aloe and Nutonic, which is why I partnered with them, because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class.

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57:31Right now, you can sign up for a$1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom. Wasn't there a study done on British politicians and what they'd been saying?

57:48Adam Aleksic:Yes, and the House of Chambers are now saying, I rise to speak instead of, I don't know what the norm was before, but they're using a US colloquial term, which is clearly indicating that their speeches are written by ChachiBT. we've seen academic research papers that probably 13 % of all research abstracts are written, aided by some kind of large language model. You can't trust any source, whether you think it's, so it's not even you're being directly influenced by the AI. It's you're being influenced by somebody else who was influenced by AI. You're reading a text that you don't know was written by AI.

58:16Adam Aleksic:Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. LinkedIn is already like, I can't tell whether it's AI or these people genuinely think like this, but that you speak in the bullet points that it's not just X, it's Y, that's the negative parallelism, which also sounds again, it's things that sound incisive are reinforced into the model. And then they end up affecting our actual speech patterns. But what it also does is it means that you need to counter signal away from it. So I'm going to draw an analogy to Ozempic. Ozempic at the moment means that people can more easily lose weight. That means that losing weight naturally becomes less high status.

58:45Something, remember when Adele lost weight in the before times, prehistoric, just did it with calorie deficit and cardio or whatever she did. You lose weight now, whether you did use Ozempic or not, you're going to be accused of having used it. so we are now already seeing counter signaling away from the double dash a little tasteful chub is back in yeah yeah yeah it will be soon aha it's nice a natural i see right um what's the double dash thing that chat gpt got the m dash m dash no one can use so i have a couple of friends i'm gonna hold on to it as a writer well i think you have a competitive advantage because

59:20Adam Aleksic:no one's going to assume that you well there's also using there is a way that chat gpt uses the emdash to segment thoughts in those negative parallelisms and so on and there's a way that a good writer can use an emdash because chachipati speaks predictably and a good writer will speak unpredictably yeah i'm friends with some very good writers and they love the use of the emdash and now they feel like they need to count the signal away from it nobody wants to use the word i go to imagine i don't use the word delve we're gonna feel or we're gonna see the word delve drop off because people are going to be terrified that even if that was the word i wanted to dig in here's the thing delve is merely the poster child for a much broader phenomenon

1:00:03Adam Aleksic:we got commendable we got meticulous crucial potential significant all these words all kind of latin derived are also increasing with chat gpt but we're only pointing to delve in the m dash because those are the easiest things to pick up on there's so many smaller things and i'm more concerned about the insidious things again not linguistically i think language should serve as a signal for this broader thing that's happening if it's a reflection of our reality that means our reality is being shaped by chat gpt and i don't think there's anything inherently harmful to the word commendable or meticulous but the fact that we are also proven to be saying those words more after chat gpt has been proven to say those words more means that its reality is influencing our reality and i'm now concerned what if there's a political bias a gender bias of whatever racial but like all this stuff gets coded into the model and i mean elon musk doesn't even hide that he like tweaks grok to like align with his political preferences so he's being obvious about it.

1:00:52Adam Aleksic:The other platforms aren't being obvious about it. Maybe Anthropica is doing a better job than OpenAI, but they're all kind of still trying to make money at the end of the day. And they're all doing something that's not aligned with human priorities. Well, I had Tristan Harris, Center for Humane Technology. He was set there yesterday. And he brought up this great point about Anthropic, which is from the outside, you know, doing things that seem from an optics perspective to be really great. But every single platform has the exact same outcome desire, which is the models need to be trained very quickly as fast as possible to become as good as possible.

1:01:32And if they're not, then we're going to fall behind. So window dress it however you want. The big mover is what's the alignment problem looking like? What's the level of safety?

1:01:42Adam Aleksic:I do think we should at least praise Anthropic for thinking more about alignment and safety than other platforms, but that does not mean we should become complacent. And we should always be questioning who is the intermediary between us and our speech, because there is something affecting when you go through a medium, something is constrained. That's why I say the medium is the message. Okay, is there going to be linguistic chaos then as AI begins to kick off more and more? We're just kind of going to get a little more homogenized probably, but then hopefully we'll see a new outlook. more homogenized, you said, through social media.

1:02:14Adam Aleksic:We have a language dying out every two weeks. That's the stat. There's 7 ,000 languages in the world, and it's predicted that most of them are going to die out by the end of the century. It's a mass extinction event. It is. It is. And so we're losing all this beautiful stuff, all these ways of expression. I love this book, Braiding Sweetgrass. In it, there's the Potawatomi expression to be a Saturday. It expresses Saturday as a verb, that you could embody a Saturday as a verb. And this is not a concept that we really think about or express in English. And I'm not saying it's impossible to imagine this, but it's a way of expressing the world that is lost when a language dies out.

1:02:45Adam Aleksic:And you have all these languages dying out that homogenizes and constrains the creative potential for expression. Not saying that we couldn't think of these thoughts, but the options, the affordances are less there than they otherwise would be. Why do some languages seem to have words that represent much more niche, long sentence descriptions than others? So for instance, schadenfreude is like an obvious example but uh what is the german word that describes the sensation of migratory birds when they are stopped from migrating do you know this one no that's incredible it's it's a kind of restless a desire to fly and the restriction from being allowed to fly that is felt by a migratory bird sounds like a human instinct as well i very much so very much so yeah god i should be adventuring or traveling or something and i'm being restricted from doing it kind of like wanderlust but to a degree well so there's there's a difference between uh agglutinative languages and inflection languages where um an agglutinative language like turkish and german does this by just tacking words together you can just add things on to other things and then there's inflection where you change the form of the word so english like You can, I guess, add S to the end of a word, but a lot of stuff, I don't know, changes based on the form of the word.

1:04:05Adam Aleksic:In Latin, in French, you'll conjugate. You'll do all these things where you're changing the form rather than adding on. But there's different ways you can do language. Are you more concerned about social media or AI for what it's doing to linguistics? Social media, for sure. Because whatever's happening with AI, it then just immediately gets captured by social media. And what I'm concerned about here is that they replicate the natural way that ideas diffuse through populations. Idea is kind of like a virus. It starts in a host. It can infect other hosts. You had Malcolm Gladwell on, I think, talk about this.

1:04:38Adam Aleksic:It's a little reductive to just say that, but I think it's a good model for understanding the way information scatters is kind of like in a virus network. Like it's sort of like a disease. and algorithms have created a replication of natural human social networks that operates faster that connects more nodes than ever before which means these ideas can spread faster than ever before what that means is also misinformation can spread faster than ever before more information is not necessarily always a good thing because now you can be flooded with information and uh it's called flooding the zone where you you lose track of what's the real information among all the false information um you are being bombarded with ideas from people who have an agenda there are mean coin traders and poly market traders who are trying to make a quick buck off of pushing certain words or ideas because now we're betting on ideas and we're betting on uh their coins attached to which idea goes viral so if an idea goes more viral you make money off of it so now there's a financial incentive to push certain ideas and so i think we should remain highly skeptical of everything maybe we should touch grass more but at the very least we should be highly inquisitive of what the medium is doing to us and how it's affecting our communication.

1:05:46Is there a science to meme language?

1:05:49Adam Aleksic:It's called memetics, yeah. But there definitely are people studying how these networks work. And then presumably reverse engineering it. I mean, I have to wonder, it would take a long time. There was an interesting, successful attempt by Gymshark to do a grassroots social media campaign promoting Francis Ngannou. So they used a burner account on Reddit, on maybe the UFC subreddit, to post a video supposedly of CCTV of Francis Ngannou trying to get into maybe a dry cleaners. And the door was locked and he goes like this and goes, and the whole door just smashes and breaks. The entire thing was constructed.

1:06:35The whole thing was constructed. it. They filmed it. It wasn't CCTV. It was fake glass. Francis Ngannou was wearing a Gymshark logo here. Burner account on Reddit, nothing. Just left it. Just completely set ablaze. So I wonder, okay, that's people that are quite close to the ground floor, but they don't have the resources of a country. If you did, the ability to shape language, to think, what sort of words do we want people using we can't podcast it top down because people are going to push back if they feel like they're being we've watched too much of adam's stuff we know that people are going to push back if they feel like this word's being forced on them how can we maybe we need to get on fortune

1:07:17Adam Aleksic:maybe we can start to definitely don't no i i think um get offline as much as possible while remaining aware and appraised of what's happening online because i do think we should like be aware that even if we are offline this stuff will still affect us to some degree like the if your friends are adopting ideas that come from the algorithm and you're offline and you're interacting with your friends, you're still going to be adopting the algorithm ideas without even knowing it. So we should be highly media literate, knowing that our information is probably being manipulated by these actors who have vested interests in giving us bad information.

1:07:47Adam Aleksic:And this effect is only going to be amplified as more and more people figure out how to exploit the information ecosystem. If I'm giving you a warning, it's this one. It's that I see in real time how our language is being shaped by malicious actors. There are companies and foreign governments with dashboards on tracking populations and how clusters of similar ideas are represented in the social media space. And they know how to seed ideas in ways that spread better. And they're trying to do that. And maybe they're not being fully successful, but there are active information warfare campaigns occurring as we speak.

1:08:20How does living inside of these algorithmic constraint systems change what type of thoughts we can easily express? Because this isn't just the language that we're using. The whole point of 1984, sorry to go to, there's no way we're going to be able to get through this podcast without talking about 1984. Yeah, we had to get there. Feeding back up into your capacity to think.

1:08:42Adam Aleksic:Yeah, it's a controversial question in linguistics. It's generally accepted that language is not the only thing determining thought, right? But it might have an influence on it. That's called linguistic relativism. I don't think we're going to end up in a 1984 scenario if anything i think people should pay more attention to brave new world the aldous huxley novel where we're entertaining ourselves and don't aren't even aware that we're in a dictatorship because we're too busy consuming content and drugs um but i don't think language can truly be constrained i i wrote my book on algo speak on how um words emerge in response to censorship the stuff i said about the ice emoji or just words like on a live where you can't say kill we come up with ways we are incredibly tenacious as human beings to express ourselves and say what we want to say that does not mean that some things aren't harder to say that certain ideas aren't more constrained and there's a idea called the overton window which is the range of acceptable discourse in a society that right back in the day like gay marriage was unthinkable right and then the overton window moved and all of a sudden it was okay um and that was a maybe i think a positive change but there's also the overton window is moving toward looks maxing.

1:09:51Adam Aleksic:There's way more interest in this stuff right now. So, but the, this window moves with the amount of represented discourse that we think it's a consensus reality. It's what we think other people are thinking and what is acceptable. So if a certain kind of discourse, like back in the day, more and more people started saying there was the gay liberation movement, more and more people started saying maybe gay people should have rights that moved the window in the direction of gay marriage. Now there's more and more people saying like, replicating these alt-right ideas, replicating that idea that looks maxing is a good way to, you know, maybe you should be on a Zempig, all this stuff.

1:10:22Adam Aleksic:And that moves the window toward that range of discourse. So while your thoughts are not necessarily being constrained and everybody still can think for themselves and can still find ways to express themselves, the consensus reality is kind of moving. And that's something maybe I'm concerned about apart from the linguistic level. if you had to give a steel man argument that gen z is really different what do you think it would be and in the context of how every generation thinks that the kids are destroying the concept of a gen z yes every generation thinks that kids are um destroying language and somehow the older people die out and the kids grow up and then now we're pissed at the younger kids and we run it back is there is there a steel man argument for how gen z could be different i don't think gen z exist i don't think generations exist um these are weird social constructs that we believe exist this is your one touch death move like fucking it's like trying to catch smoke here come the fuck i'm not denying that there's older and younger people that there's familial generations right that there's uh but we only started this idea of a broad social cohort like a generation with the lost generation after world war one really and then we had the silent generation with the gi generation of the world two then we have baby boomers and then we're like all right we don't know what to call the next people so gen x x means we don't know um lazy and then it's like okay millennial is good enough and then it's like well we're two after gen x we'll call it gen z well we ran out of the alphabet we'll call it gen alpha that's literally it's all made up and it started in the early 1900s but it's become more and more salient and i this is if anything a new category that can be used to sell you as a consumer demographic that can commodify you that they uh have manufactured gen z as a concept that now we're also performing what it means to be gen z whereas a person in the 1800s wouldn't perform for their social cohort because there was no social cohort.

1:12:06Adam Aleksic:It's simply you are the age that you are. And now I'm supposed to, as an older Gen Z person, have more in touch with a younger Gen Z person than a younger millennial. But really, I feel much more in common with younger millennials. It's all made up. And yet, there's this idea now of being Gen Z that is forced upon us and is part of this broader social media tendency to label every part of us as human beings and put us into buckets that actually do not describe us perfectly. The self-branding is constraining because it's giving you another role to perform to. A label is kind of a violent thing to impose on someone because now it's you either have to identify with or against the label.

1:12:43Adam Aleksic:Once it's out there, it's out there. And now I need to choose whether I feel more like Gen Z or not like Gen Z. And now I need to choose whether I'm cottagecore or not cottagecore, whether I'm a Swifty or not a Swifty and all these things kind of combine. And now I'm all of a sudden I'm a cottagecore, Swifty, Gen Z, whatever. Me too. But really, at the end of the day, I'm just every person is a unique human being in the same way that we have a unique idiolect a unique dialect that is our own way of speaking we have a unique identity as a linguist i have one word tattooed on my body it's the word umwelt it means the world as it is perceived by a particular person and i really like this idea that we all really see the world in a completely unique way and yet when we put ourselves into buckets and when we pretend that we are it's nice to feel like we are like other people and it's a useful thing to have a category to kind of signal toward your identity but you are completely unique And what social media wants to do is put you into small buckets, yes, but buckets that really make you interchangeable with other people.

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1:14:41It's a strange tension because on one hand, we all want to be individuals, but on another hand, we all want to belong. Classic, yeah, take that out of me. Yeah, and I can see - Two wolves inside of you. Yeah, of course. And there's a really interesting bit of evolutionary anthropology that's looking at the desire for autonomy and the desire for support and kinship. And this is what you see. A good way to look at this would be a child's life cycle. So unbelievable need for kinship up until 11, 12. Then you start to get a bit rebellious. And then by 13, 14, 15, you don't want anything to do with your parents.

1:15:21Adam Aleksic:that's also when you're coming up with new slang well of course it's also the most you know the memory bump effect you familiar with this? I think it's the reminiscence effect which is the language the music and movies that you grow up listening to between the ages of about 12 and 16 tend to be locked in as what you like for the rest of your life very formative

1:15:47Adam Aleksic:not to say that we can't keep developing new tastes of course people find new stuff new bands new movies that it does affect you in that umwelt sense that this made a huge impression on you at this particular and you can't ever separate that from who you will be in the future super formative yeah and to think okay well what's going on at 13 14 15 well sexuality is coming online what is the one thing that you really really really do not want to do have sex with someone that's part of your family so my family's gonna suck i'm gonna stay away i want i want my own independence i didn't expect that to go in the end yeah i mean it's it's incest avoidance i think uh well i mean that's one framework i always i tend to think that uh any one framework is always like reductive but it is like part like in the same way like i think for example freud he was kind of cooking with some stuff but you think about the world just in a freudian lens or uh honestly the looks maxes are kind of right that attractiveness matters but if you're looking at it just through that one lens the framework now constrains you now you're looking at the world reductively we should adopt as many frameworks as possible sorry i went on a tangent but if you have too many frameworks it becomes chaotic right and that that also becomes i think difficult sometimes to amalgamate together my general worldview i think is characterized by trying to understand as many frameworks as possible and they all kind of point in a framework maximalist maybe maybe because they all point at this indescribable hole um we can never know you know what unnamed dow or whatever the middle thing is that we're trying to figure out what reality yeah uh but everything else is signaling or pointing at it and if you broaden your worldview view as much as possible and consume as many different forms of media as possible.

1:17:18Adam Aleksic:I do think maybe we should be on algorithms a little bit. We should also be reading regular news and we should also remember that's biased and we should remember we should be consuming as many different forms of media as possible. And we should be consuming as many different ideas and perspectives as possible because that helps us better understand what's really going on rather than this biased. We're always looking at the world through like a confirmation bias, sampling bias, like everything's filtered through the algorithm. Everything's filtered through AI. And if you try to just consume your worldview through that, you're going to be limited.

1:17:48Adam Aleksic:So consume other things as well, touch grass, you know, and then maybe we can build a better picture of what the real world is. Poly consumption, poly framework approach. Yeah. I like it and I agree. For me to say the Westermark effect, which is what we do for incest avoidance and the fact that sexuality is coming online, you don't want to be around. No, it's interesting. I'm not saying that that is the one ring to rule them all. But what I do mean, and I totally agree, is that there's another incentive that exists online, which is if someone plants a flag in the ground and says, I have a single explanatory framework that solves all of the questions that you've got, that person sounds, that level of conviction is so sexy.

1:18:33And I wonder whether it takes an awful lot of conscious detraining to look at someone that's ardent and completely unforgiving in their worldview and say, huh, I don't know if I'm that confident about anything. I don't know if I'm that confident about my own birth date. So how is this person about this really, well, we know why the war in Ukraine started. We know why the war in Ukraine started. We know exactly what's going on there. Every war has like a hundred different reasons behind it. And all those reasons could be equal, well, valid, you know, but we know what's going on with the Luxemaxing community.

1:19:06Oh, that's interesting. And what you state as an absolute fact that is incontrovertible and unidimensionally explained has a completely opposing guy with the opposite perspective, which is also unidimensionally explained. Weird how that happens. Comport those two for me, because both of you are saying that you are completely right and that the other person is therefore implicitly completely wrong.

1:19:30Adam Aleksic:yeah no i think it's it's reductive to look at the world through one set of glasses um and sexiness the sexiness of the conviction the human brain thinks in terms of simple stories we like connecting the dots from point a to point b like for etymology we want to think that a word comes from an older word and evolved into a newer word really it was evolving through an aesthetic lens it was evolving through a social context there was another maybe a word c that affected the trajectory of word a as it involved in a word b um it's never one simple story i see this with language but also the world is this hugely complex interrelated thing and to recall one framework the framework is ignoring all the different ways the world could exist ignoring the fact that a saturday could be a verb instead of a noun i feel like a saturday sometimes you're quite you're quite a saturday guy a big big saturday guy all right i want to play uh surprising word histories with you have you with it okay muscle it comes from the latin word for mouse little mouse musculus why it like looks like a mouse when it moves under your skin right hey they call me the etymology nerd for a reason no i'm gonna flop the rest of them i can't wait this is gonna be so good salary salary is uh the latin word for salt they would pay wages and uh salt saw all right next one uh assassin uh that comes from arabic hashishin it meant marijuana a hashish consumer yeah because uh they would like it was a you're scaring you're scaring me it was a sect in like persia that would just like get high and like uh kill people i don't know what they were doing but that was kind of the nizari ismail ismaili sect all right you're terrifying candidate uh from latin candidus uh white robed so uh candidate that was uh like white was associated with purity so it was like you were vying for a pure noble office if you were white okay uh did the girl did the word girl originally mean a young woman or did it once mean something completely different it was like a gender neutral term it could mean boy um correct and any young person yeah yeah yeah uh how did silly go from meaning blessed to meaning stupid well in the same sense that like awful and awesome both share that root awe like when something has just an emotional valence to it like a quality to it it can move easily between different boundaries but what did you have there uh the old english of salig meant blessed or fortunate and over centuries it drifted through innocent naive and then yeah foolish it's a semantic drift is uh yeah how words all over time and it is like terrible again uh and all the like words that describe this shaking feeling you get can really range easily between uh the same word is terrific terrible and terrifying so it can quickly move between different types of emotions because how do we even describe what's going on here you know yeah with difficulty yeah ancient aztec word for avocado what else did it mean and uh it had a secondary definition of testicle um nightmare is there anything interesting about nightmare is that mare like horse is there there's like the idea of like uh incubus horse that attacked people but i'm not sure if that's the what the germanic demon yeah it was a mare that sat on sleeper's chest yeah so it was a horse yes okay but it was the mare came from a germanic demon.

1:22:59So mare was a Germanic. So it might have actually been a demon in the night, a demon that then became the name for a horse and the night horse.

1:23:07Adam Aleksic:Wow. No, I have to look into the mare thing. That's fascinating. Yeah. Goodbye. Would God be with you? Penguin. Why does the word penguin probably mean white head, even though penguins don't have white heads? I don't know penguin. Please educate me. Okay. So there's a Welsh word, which is pen, P-E-N G - w-y-n penguin right which yeah looks fucking welsh as shit no way would i've expected that to be welsh uh i mean like it's a weird ass word i believe and it originally referred to the great orc it's it wasn't referring to penguins yeah but it obviously got repurposed um orange uh well it comes from the sanskrit word for orange tree but it moved through um like arabic naranja same as like the spanish word um and then uh i think people kept saying n orange and the n got cut off because it turned into like a a n orange versus n orange yes dude you won whatever the fuck that was you won you won yeah yeah yeah a n orange right to an orange yeah bro unbelievable Yeah, I am.

1:24:22Look, between you and Mark Forsyth, it is so fucking fun. You must have so much fun doing this stuff. I think it's great. I got into etymology for the fun facts.

1:24:31Adam Aleksic:That was the, and then, you know, I came to see this. Terrifying on a quiz team. Terrifying on a quiz team. You played with inventing languages. Yeah. What did you learn? So the whole thing I was saying about languages being a different way to express reality, I think a really fun way to play with that is building your own language. So we see this in movies, like there's a Dothraki language and a Klingon language and people have made fictional languages before. This is a practice called conlanging, constructed language. Um, and you know, Esperanto is another famous one where they tried to make that a global language and didn't really work out, but they built it from scratch and were like trying to make this a thing.

1:25:05Sort of an evidence-based language that was going to be more precise and easy to use. I think maybe you're thinking about if Quill or something, or maybe Esperanto is,

1:25:14Adam Aleksic:is just meant to be like an easier language to use. That was the idea. Of course that, what that means is like a strange concept um and it's still like there are languages that have more and less linear rules around it different types of rules but there's always a complexity to it because i mean humans got to express themselves in many different ways um i i think it's really hard to make a claim about one language is more complex than another or something like that um but you can talk about one dimensional language you can adopt one framework and then talk about it um anyway um i uh i dabbled in conlanging first in what what conlanging which is constructed language uh creation okay thank you uh sorry um and then i studied that linguistics in college and i took a conlanging class at mit actually that kind of got me into it um but i was sort of dabbling before that for the conlanging dabbler yeah i've dabbled and then a little more professionally um i uh uh for the conlanging class at mit i built a dolphin language and that was my first like moment going viral on TikTok was me presenting my dolphin language where like the word for shark, for example, is and but the idea is what if you can create a language out of just whistles and clicks?

1:26:24Adam Aleksic:And that's kind of cool to play around with the phonological format. So I played around with a lot of other animal languages. I made a bird language that's just whistled. There are actual whistled registers of languages. I saw didn't AI reverse engineer what birds are saying did you see this i mean i don't know what that means at all animal communication is just like not a decodable thing in the way human communication is so supposedly i i'm probably wrong but i'm pretty sure that i saw um ai has analyzed tens of thousands of birdsong sounds and have decoded some of the communication another thing i don't know if this is true or not i remember hearing that most birdsong is actually just territorial marking so it's basically birds saying fuck off at varying, oh here we are no 100 % there's stuff being done with, Cornell's doing amazing bird stuff, they have a bird tracking app that they actually use to follow bird migrations and there's cool stuff being done with language but the thing is when we talk about animal language there's good research being done with whale communication too the people who are talking about this, if you're a linguist talking about it you don't understand how the whales work and if you're a whale research talking about it you don't understand how language works or you might have an idea but I don't think it's correct to really talk about animals having language as much as communication.

1:27:39Adam Aleksic:And of course, they have communication, their own way of signaling things. But when you're a whale, you're also using things like your body rolling over in water. Dolphins have sonar, like bats have echo. This is crazy that they have all this stuff going on that humans don't. And this can all be a part of the communicative context. And it's not like maybe the language has an abstract meaning in the way that humans do. maybe it simply signals a presence and a certain emotional intent in a moment in time but it's also contextual and the other bird might have a different interpretation i like i don't know language is a very difficult thing that i'm not even sure how to define it uh anybody who do says after a decade of study i'm so glad to hear you say that anybody who says they know what language is is telling you a framework right it's uh do you know the story of how the qwerty keyboard came to be well weren't the typewriters jamming with uh they had the abc like and they tried it out and didn't uh they tried the dvorak keyboard um but qwerty was the one that prevented the typewriters from from jamming together bingo yeah yeah so they put the most used letters out on the edges so that they weren't next to each other so that you wouldn't trigger them because both of them would fire at the same time but that is purposefully built to be slow qwerty keyboard is designed to be inefficient well once we get attuned to it and like like it does move quickly i think But there are...

1:28:54Adam Aleksic:It was slow relative to when we thought the alphabet had to show up in an order on a keyboard. But like for like, if you train people on other keyboard arrangements, they can be up to 30 % to 50 % faster. So I wondered, as you were talking about, they tried to put Esperanza in, that didn't work, so on and so forth. If there was a world in which you could design a language from scratch to be as... The only goal of language, unlike with typing, which is an intermediary process between things that are not being changed is not just to be efficient, right? It's to be beautiful. It's to be illustrative.

1:29:29It's to communicate sentiment.

1:29:30Adam Aleksic:I think that is a big flaw of how people talk about language. And that's how the algorithms want you to talk about language, that it's just information bits transferred for a second. And that there's a certain amount of information that's communicated. That's the goal of language to just get information across. That's something that can now be categorized and commodified. I think language is also this ritualistic bonding thing between people. Small talk, for example, like when you say the goodbye at the end of a phone call, why are you doing that? You're not communicating anything. You could just hang up.

1:29:55Adam Aleksic:I'm going to go. I'm going to. All my phone calls are going to be done movie style now. All right. But you do it because it helps establish social ties with the other person. And that's kind of a beautiful thing. Courtesy. Yeah. You're building this thing with another person. And there is an element of humanity in the small talk and in the saying goodbye at the end of the phone call, which may be not good for an algorithm. Maybe you don't like end an algorithmic video by saying goodbye, whatever. But it does add something importantly human to communication. Anyway, that being said, I think what you were getting at is can different languages have different information transferred?

1:30:29Adam Aleksic:As humans, we have a certain maybe capacity for processing information. And what's funny is that even a language like Japanese has way more syllables per second than Thai. And yet they will still transfer about the same bits per second as each other. Because Thai is a more inflectional language. As I mentioned, they have more tones. They build on the individual syllable more. And Japan is more likely to add syllables. But at the end of the day, they'll speak slowly in Thai and they'll drag out their word more, but they're saying the exact same thing that a Japanese speaker is saying with three syllables.

1:31:01Unbelievable. I wonder what it would be like to try and design a very efficient language. It'd be so interesting to hear. How can we communicate the most content in the smallest number of syllables or words?

1:31:14Adam Aleksic:Yeah, I mentioned this language, Ithquil, which is a hypothesized conlang. And conlangs are great for really just exploring the boundaries of what language could be. And that's kind of what I was trying to say with the dolphin thing. You can just explore the sounds. Sorry, digression. Ithquil is a language that creates like the most information transferred. And it's like a highly dense language carrying many different meanings. and it's impossible for a human to learn. I mean, no native speakers of Ithquil exist because at the end of the day, we are humans using language to connect with other humans and we're using it in a way that we can understand and describe our reality.

1:31:52Adam Aleksic:And that's how it works. I'm sure you can create a robot language that works more efficiently, but. I was going to say, I'm sure that you saw that conversation between two AIs that realized that they were both AIs and they say, should we switch to bleeps and bloops? And it's way quicker for us to be able to communicate like that. I don't know whether that was actually fake or real. I'm not sure about that either. But it is true that computers do not think about language in the way we do. In fact, I would be very hesitant to say Chachipiti even speaks English rather than it's just predicting tokens based on a statistical model of what English should be.

1:32:24Adam Aleksic:What it's actually doing is when you input something in English, it converts those words into tokens, which is like a segment of the word. So it breaks up the words into smaller parts, pairs those parts with numbers. These numbers turn into like coordinates, kind of like on a Cartesian plane, like X, Y axis, but like way more dimensions. So X, Y, Z to like thousands of dimensions. Then it ends up as like a data point called an embedding. And this embedding is like the representation of what you said, right? And then that gets processed through these neural networks. And they figure out through previous learning things and previous ways they've understood embedding.

1:33:04Adam Aleksic:how they can predict the next token output. So then they create an output token and then that's translated back into language. And so all this is happening between you saying something and ChatGPT responding with something. I think that's very important to understand because there's a huge misconception that it's speaking English. Along the whole way that I spoke about language getting broken down, turned into numbers, broken back up into these tokens, and then turned back into language, a lot of meaning can get lost. And that's where something like Delve could get overrepresented. That's where something could happen where our natural way of speaking gets improperly encoded, the training process does not work correctly, and then it ends up speaking this misaligned version of language.

1:33:49I wonder what's going to happen. I wonder what the next few years are going to have in store for language because you have got bigger influences and bigger broadcasts than ever before. So is this, would you say that this is going to be the time in human history where language is potentially going to change the most rapidly?

1:34:05Adam Aleksic:I think so. I think it's a hard thing to measure what it even is for a language to change because as I mentioned, I don't even know what language is. So if I'm starting with my research question, realistically, no, we don't know what language is. It's all made up and because of the thing i mentioned where everybody speaks their own kind of version of language and the thing that we call a language is really just this weird spectrum of people talking that sounds similar to each other and it's like where do you draw the category here um of course chat gpt is trained on a corpus of the english language which is made up in the same way gen z is made up it's like a category that we think is a thing and then that category is this weird homogenized thing already that there is an english language there's a way you speak in a way i speak that are slightly different from each other and that we can find this shared reality between ourselves.

1:34:46Adam Aleksic:But then when our collective shared reality is fed into the chat bot that then creates its own reality based on the shared reality and outputs is what we end up with is just something that's not really a way that you speak. It's not a way that I speak. It's not a way that anybody speaks. It's a mathematical representation of speech. Dude, you rule. Your work's so interesting. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with everything you've got going on. Let's bring this one up. I think the most important thing is I try to use my media to push people to more longer form stuff. So I got a Substack Etymology Nerd and I got a book called Algo Speak about how social media is changing language.

1:35:18Adam Aleksic:But I am on social media platforms as Etymology Nerd as well. All right. Goodbye, everybody. Click. Thank you for having me. Dude. So fucking good. That was a lot of fun. Wow, I feel like we covered so much ground. You roll. That was great. Been out here all morning. Not a single bite. Guess the fish finally figured it out. just like hackers do when Cisco Duo is on guard. With Duo's end-to-end fishing resistance, every login, every device, every user stays protected. No hooks, no catches, no bites. Cisco Duo. Fishing season is over. Learn more at duo.com.