TED Community » Wally Reimer

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• A reply on Conversation: The vagueness of words prevents us from achieving the collective intelligence we need to solve our social and political problems.

  Jun 6 2011: I believe that words have less influence on us than we assume. The brain evolved over millions of years as an instant answer machine. We assess the input we get from the outside world, factor in all our previous experience, our likes and dislikes and “poof”, the answer is our position on the issue.The reasons are totally subconscious. The book Blink supports this view. We must translate the answer into words to communicate it to others.We like to think that with the right words we can change someone’s position but this is rare. Words are a very recent addition to our brains and they are a bit of a “rube goldberg” invention but to our credit we have milked every bit of utility possible from words.
  
  If we can develop a more blueprint like way to represent the underlying concepts about a political issue as I am suggesting with conceptual objects, then I believe that we can create what I call a conceptual map of the issue which would show all possible positions and debating points. With the computer technology we have now, all 200 million voters could state their preferred position in a form of democratic vote. We will have to develop a science of Positional analysis to determine how to get the most “common good” out of the results because it is not as easy as counting votes.
  
  I am assuming all legal positions are valid but concede that as per Sam Harris,s talk, some positions can be rejected on a “good for society” basis like his example of forcing women to wear the burka. Biases of course are always relative to our own position which we assume is right. There is no bias in the position of a group.
  
  I predict that we will slowly move away from words on a domain by domain basis. Science and engineering has already done so, politics and social issues will have to go next to be followed by education. Who knows, in several hundred years, words may just be a curious quirk of history.

• A reply on Conversation: The vagueness of words prevents us from achieving the collective intelligence we need to solve our social and political problems.

  Jun 5 2011: I can’t argue with any of the above. I agree that language is one of our greatest inventions. The vagueness and generality of language is one of the pluses which makes it so versatile and gives us poetry, literature and song. In Steven Pinker’s talk he points out the vagueness is necessary for social interaction.
  
  What I am saying is that language is not suitable for creating the collective intelligence we need to solve social and political problems. To create collective intelligence we need to communicate much more precisely. I use the engineering analogy because they have replaced words with very precise drawings and blueprints even though they still go home at night and read stories in words to their children. For political problem solving we still rely on debates in words and politicians have made an art out of using words to confuse and mislead. I believe we can represent the concepts of politics and social issues in a blueprint like manner and then maybe we can begin to see progress like we have seen in engineering.