“You may believe that spiritual experiences are just illusions,” said the Priest, “but I know what I have felt and experienced. And I could never deny it.”

“This isn’t about your ability to deny your feelings and experiences,” I explained. “The question is: do your feelings and experiences constitute good evidence? And the answer is, no, they do not. They don’t always mean what we think they mean, and we can be fooled.”

“Okay,” said the Priest, “in all fairness, I can see how some of my spiritual experiences might have been coincidence. But there’s no way I could dismiss all of them as pure coincidence.”

I’ve heard a few people say this. What they’re saying is that they’ve had experiences where something happened that seemed a) spiritually appropriate in some way, and b) too unlikely to have happened by pure chance.

But notice the assumption: that we can guess the likelihood of an event, and tell when an event is less likely to happen than random chance.

The truth, however, is just the opposite: People are rotten at guessing probabilities, especially when the probabilities are very small. It doesn’t come naturally to us.

Here’s a test you may have heard before. Which is more likely: getting killed by a shark, or getting killed by falling airplane parts?

It’s airplane parts, by thirty to one. We overestimate the risk of shark attack because we have all heard examples of shark attack. This is a cognitive quirk called the availability heuristic; events seem more likely if we can easily recall examples of them. An interesting demo here.

Another one: you’re more likely to die by a meteor impact than by lightning.

I must confess, that meteor stat surprised me. Here’s the explanation:

What is the approximate probability of a given person being killed by a meteorite?
1 in 20,000. If this statistic sounds incredibly high given that you’ve probably never heard of anyone who was killed by a meteorite, it’s because the data is skewed. Every so often an impact large enough to wipe out just about all life on Earth occurs, and in between times, pretty much no one is killed by a meteorite. So while you have a 1 in 20,000 chance of being killed in this manner, the statistic is not much different for the entire population of Earth combined. If an asteroid large enough to kill people hits, it will probably kill a lot more than a few; but there’s a 19,999 in 20,000 chance that it won’t happen in your lifetime. Hence the statistic. If I had asked what the probability was of any given person being individually STRUCK by a meteorite, the answer would be astronomically higher.

We can use statistics to calculate the probability of events that have happened. And in fact, in natural language processing we calculate the probability of unseen events using a range of techniques under the heading of smoothing. But this doesn’t come naturally to our reptile brains.

The fact that lotteries exist shows that people are awful at probability guessing. Religious belief is often sustained by erroneous guesses about the likelihood of events.

Note: I am aware that my sources are a bit contradictory on the relative probability of lightning vs. tornado. Different estimates are probably due to different assumptions.

New Scientist has an interesting article on the Pirahã people of the Amazon. The article is behind a paywall, but you can find other interesting articles here, here, and here.

The Pirahã language is a real minimalist language:

• They have no notion of time.
• Their words for colour are black and white.
• They have one word for mother and father, ‘baixi’. There are separate terms for ‘son’ and ‘daughter’, but no others.
• They have only ten or eleven sounds in their phonological inventory, compared to more than forty for English.

Also, they only have two words for numbers, which are glossed as ‘one’ and ‘two’, but which mean something like ‘some’ and ‘some more’. Most interestingly, they don’t seem to be able to grasp the concept of numbers or addition, even when taught. If you show a collection of five objects to a Pirahã man, and ask him to duplicate the collection, he has a terrible time putting down as many items as he sees.

Some are seeing a return to Whorfianism, where language is a straitjacket that constrains our ability to reason, but Dan Everett (who works with the Pirahã) says that the difference is cultural — they don’t like to challenge their culturally ingrained notions. And who does?

A friend and I were having the “Bible: Gay or not gay?” discussion.

“I don’t think this is a very important or fruitful discussion to have,” said I. “Quotes can be pulled to support any interpretation you’d care to have.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” said the friend. “Because the Bible contradicts itself.”

Something about that struck me funny. As little as I regard the Bible (or insert your own favourite scripture here), I still wouldn’t say it contradicts itself. For that to happen, there would have to be two unambiguous (and opposed) statements. I don’t see that this is the case. Everything in there is ambiguous! Think of the possibilities: Does this passage refer to a past event or a prophetic future event? This reference to ‘life’: does it refer to ‘life of the body’ or ‘spiritual life’, or both? Are these beasts real or do they represent something? Does this instruction apply to me, or just to who was being addressed at the time? Not only is interpretation on multiple levels possible; it’s actually necessary in some cases (think John’s Revelation).

“Let’s just say,” said I, “that a complex text like the Bible is sufficiently rich to support a variety of diverging interpretations.

“What I find interesting is not what a text means or doesn’t mean, but the semantic gymnastics that true believers engage in to support their privileged reading of the text.”

Now that’s interesting.

Case in point: here’s a lone voice in the wilderness wondering why Latter-day Saints aren’t vegetarians despite LDS scriptures suggesting this should be so. (There’s also an amusing bit of shoehorning about the number 666 and current events, but wash your hands afterwards.)

Both the veg reading and the meat reading are valid interpretations from the text. Yet the meat interpretation is currently the privileged reading. Why might that be so? And why do Mormons defend their meat habit so vociferously?

My observation: when religious belief comes head to head with prevailing cultural practice, the cultural norm wins. And for the Western U.S., that means meat. Let the gymnastics begin!

But I’m not a gymnast of any description. I’m a much better spectator. So feel free to perform for me sometime. You can defend your reading of whatever text you like, and I’ll listen politely. But you won’t be telling me about the issue. You’ll be telling me about yourself.

Do you get a lot of people who say “Have fun!” when they mean “goodbye”? I’ve been hearing a few lately, and it’s making me think.

‘Goodbye’ derives from ‘God be with ye‘. People invoked God’s blessing upon someone when departing, almost like a ritual. What’s our sacrament today? Have fun! Is having fun the highest good to which we as a society can aspire?

The linguist in me steps in and says don’t be silly. When someone says something, they don’t even think of the words that the expression derives from. ‘Goodbye’ became a ritualised conversation-ender, like ‘Have fun’ is now. We do the same thing with “How are you?” The literal meaning has been subsumed in the ritual act of greeting.

And yet… cultural values are transmitted in just these kinds of rituals. Millions of times a day, people choose this kind of good-bye instead of some other kind of good-bye, and there’s a reason for it. It expresses, for better or worse, what we treasure.

From the seven-year-old mathematicians in the back seat, on the way to school this morning.

Son: What’s infinity plus infinity?
Other kid: Two-finity.
Son: Yep.
Other kid: What’s three-finity plus three-finity?
Son: Six-finity.
Other kid: Indeed. What’s one-finity plus another finity?
Son: Point one thousand five thousand ten thousand finity.
Other kid: How did you work that out?
Son: I got it from my experience.

I’d better check the school’s curriculum, just in case.

Anything you need to say about linguistics (101) can be found in the Simpsons.

Fortunately, Heidi’s done the work of cataloguing all those quotes, on her blog. Now you can include witty and relevant Simpsons quotes in your linguistic work with the merest of effort. Not bad for browsing, either.

I’d like to add my favourite, though. Used in many an ESL class.

Topic: Modal ambiguity, ability v. tendency

Homer the Great, 1995, production code [2F09].

Marge: Kids can be so cruel.
Bart: [walking by] We can? Thanks, Mom!
Lisa: [from another room] Ow! Cut it out, Bart!

I’m performing Mozart’s Requiem with Collegium Musicum this month. The first time I performed it was with Mack Wilberg as conductor, in the historic Tabernacle on Temple Square in Salt Lake City. Though my religious inclinations have changed since then (to say the least), I still do I enjoy coming back to the Requiem, and getting together with musical people for the purpose of making some great music. This is the smallest group I’ve ever sung it with — only twelve of us! Usually it’s one or two hundred singers. I’ll have to be more precise than usual.

There has been a bit of controversy over which pronunciation to use. We’re using German Latin (instead of Roman Latin) because it was first performed in St. Michael’s Church in Vienna. German pronunciation of Latin involves some differences over Roman Latin:

• ‘qu’ -> [kv], so ‘requiem’ would be pronounced [rekviɛm]
• initial and intervocalic ‘s’ -> [z], so ‘supplex’ is realised as [zuplɛx]
• initial and intervocalic ‘c’ -> [ts], so ‘cinis’ is pronounced [tsinis]

and many more.

The controversy is this: did they use Roman or German Latin in St. Michael’s in 1793? They were German, after all, and so the case for German Latin seems reasonable. Unless — and here’s the rub — unless they were aiming for a faithful Roman pronunciation, which they might have been, given that Vienna was a major city and St. Michael’s would therefore have been ‘high church’.

The debate rages. I’ll keep you posted.