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THE VIDEO SHELF · psycholinguistics

RSA ANIMATE: Language as a Window into Human Nature

An RSA Animate in which Steven Pinker explains how the mind builds infinite meanings from finite language, and why people often speak indirectly. It covers ambiguity, politeness and mutual knowledge, including the emperor's new clothes example.

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Why HN readers recommended it

HN recommends it as a short, clear explanation of why people avoid saying things explicitly and how common knowledge works socially and politically.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
Royal Society of Arts
Topic
psycholinguistics
Format
lecture
Level
general
HN recommenders in dataset
2
HN mentions in dataset
11
Recommendation years in dataset
2011–2022

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • It sounds like the ambiguity of it all is a feature, which makes me think of this wonderful RSA Animate of Steve Pinker's discussion of how we use language: [VIDEO] I have a feeling a lot of the insights of this talk also hint at …

    vanderZwan on Hacker News · 2015-06
    In Taarof

  • I was talking about something similar earlier today with a friend from high school. We were talking about how it was totally un-cool to disagree with the "consensus" about which girls were hot and which were not. We were imagining what it might have been …

    dbuxton on Hacker News · 2011-08
    In Randi Zuckerberg Runs in the Wrong Direction on Pseudonymity Online

  • You make a very reasonable but demonstrably false assumption about language: that it is all about A trying to communicate an idea to B, as clearly and as efficiently as possible, and all involved are cooperative. Reality is often much more complicated. Take the simple …

    vanderZwan on Hacker News · 2016-05
    In Can Multilingualism Survive?: How cities preserve and abandon languages

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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