/lit/ - Literature

>>16205771
>China, Estonia, Japan, and Finland do well because their populations have high IQs
Their IQs are not much higher than the rest of Europe, if at all.
>their social systems are conducive to cultivating elites and putting them where they are best used.
Both Finland and Estonia actively eschew "splitting up" kids by capability and practice a more egalitarian approach to education. If anything, this is the complete opposite. Also, Estonia is much poorer (and also less homogeneous, 30% Russian nationals) than many lower-scoring nations as well.
>If language was a significant impediment to actual quantitative things
Nobody said it was a "significant impediment" in that it prevented anybody from achieving mathematical fluency. Rather, the difficulties in learning idiosyncratic number systems during early education causes many countries to fall behind relative to other countries whose language has a more rational system.
>As the Chinese demonstrate, you literally cannot engage in censoring a specific word or phrase, people will just retool it. Jogger, redguard, YOOF, we all know what these terms mean.
... if you have access to a neologism-forming community. The ability to censor and destroy words as they are created can permanently cripple a society's ability to create conceptual building blocks and realize even more complex ideas. Not everybody is as lucky.
>Yes, having a specific term for a concept makes it easier to work with, and can set the stage for how we think of it
Okay, so now we're on the same page. And if there are languages that are significantly more flexible, evocative, and precise in their capacity to express ideas, then anybody using those languages would be able to *do* more with the same amount of effort. It's not about limitation of higher thought, but rather efficiency and the ability to reach higher peaks with less effort. I'm sure that you could find statistically significant differences if one were able to find useful metric.