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verscorch · 7 years ago

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Recent events got me wondering why I deal with some people.

It’s no secret that I am a very focused, driven individual, and when it comes to leadership, I hate playing tug-of-war. There are proven, effective ways of doing things that I believe ought to be kept in mind as guidelines even if not adhered to letter-for-letter:

Be willing and able to communicate issues, whether they’re “actual” issues or “perceived” issues, with those who you work with. This is the golden rule, part one. If you’re not willing to put yourself out there then no conversation will ever happen. The issues will perpetuate.

Be willing and able to listen and put to meaningful thought into issues as they’re brought up. This is the golden rule, part two. Communication is a two-way street. You can send all you want but it’s pointless if there’s no one there to receive it. The meaningful thought part is especially important here. Sometimes you have to sit and let words digest instead of going with your knee-jerk reaction. This can be difficult, and is much easier to do via text than it is to do via voice.

Be motivated and show enthusiasm. If the leaders are motivated and enthusiastic about what they’re doing, then others will follow. Positive mindsets, just like negative ones, are contagious.

If you expect the worst, you will usually get it.

In most situations I have been in, these guiding principles have worked incredibly well. These principles guide each and every interaction with my Ebonguard officers, who are absolutely fantastic. People are busy and that’s understandable, but every one of them is a joy to work with and I’m lucky to have them around. (I’d like to make some additions to the team to fill other roles, since most of us are oriented towards the actual administration of the group: looking over apps, chatting with recruits, overall making sure that we can keep the lights on. I would specifically like to add some dedicated RP officers, but this gets tricky when very few members of the LS are self-starters. I think if we get volunteers then we can make it work though as long as the new officers understand what is expected of them.)

I think I can chalk this up in part to the simple fact that the Ebonguard officers are good at what they do. The two most active members of the team have prior experiences, both good and bad I’m pretty sure, with running groups, which makes their insight invaluable and their opinions informed. We can actually sit down and have conversations. We do actually sit down and have conversations. And these conversations are productive! We pin-point problems. We suggest solutions. Sometimes we even plan RP, although schedules occasionally conspire to make that part a little difficult because the most active chunk of the team is comprised of a student, someone who travels like every other week for their job, and an Australian with no sleep schedule. (I wouldn’t have them any other way though!)

This is a very, very stark contrast to these assholes.

I am, for practical intents and purposes, the de facto leader of two seperate groups. One, just mentioned, is good. The other. Is not.

Take everything that makes my Ebonguard officers great and flip it, and you have the Artifice’s officer team.

Dealing with the Artifice team is a special exercise in both patience and masochism. To be completely frank, it didn’t used to be as bad as it is right now, and I have no idea when it got so bad. I know when exactly all the shit came to the forefront and precipitated into the situation that we’ve been living with for the past three and a half months. Before the New Year, we were all bright-eyed and motivated. We had a game-plan. We were going to work together. We were going to use the strong foundation that we built in order to make something truly great. We had a vision. We knew what we had to do, basically, to make it a reality.

... And then nothing happened.

We took December off for Finals season and holidays, as is kind of scheduled and expected, and I can only assume that during that time, something changed. When the clock struck twelve on New Years Day, something changed and it didn’t change for the better. A day passed. A week passed. No word of any change of plans. I rewrote the lore doc like we planned to do. Silence, maybe a grudging pat on the back. I spruced up the interior of the house, providing us with a shiny new space with which to run public events, which has since been used only once, and it wasn’t for strictly FC purposes. We were going to have a linkshell to help us network with people outside of our immediate circle, and although we have it now, it’s a far cry from anything we actually discussed doing and in pushing for it to actually get done -- I cannot and will not be responsible for everything -- I got demoted.

When we got to actually going over what happened in that particular instance, it felt productive at the time. Someone else stepped in to mediate the issue, though at the time I was definitely putting some serious thought into burning the group and moving on with my life. It’s no overstatement to say that I am the primary if not the sole creative force behind everything the FC is and does. I wrote the lore. My character is the last full-time leader of the FC, the other officers having all rerolled into characters who are not only wholly incapable of leading, but who don’t really mesh with the fabric of the group at all (even taking into account the idea that antagonistic relationships between characters within a group can be interesting and can very well be driving forces behind character development!). They do nothing. They affect nothing. They just kind of exist, and the only reason why they haven’t been fired yet is because that would be unfair on an OOC level even if it would be completely reasonable and in-character for my character to fire them or otherwise penalize them for not being useful to the company as a whole.

Unfortunately, it just popped up again. They cite passive-aggression as the precipitating factor despite being completely and totally unwilling to point out passive-aggression as it happens, and frankly since the way that I interface with the group has not changed since way, way back when I still actually liked them, I’m inclined to believe that it’s not necessarily an issue with how I interface but with how they perceive. They aren’t in a mindset that’s conducive to actually getting things done. All they do is ignore things as they’re brought up, or shut them down as being unnecessarily nitpicky, unimportant, or harsh, not even bothering to consider the fact that I don’t pipe up and say things for no reason. If I feel like it’s important enough to bring up, then chances are I have a good reason for it, those reasons ranging from “this is counter-productive” to “this hurt my feelings or made me angry for like five minutes and I would like you to stop doing that thing or take steps to handle similar situations differently in the future.”

But quite literally every time, one or the other chimes in to put the concern down without spending more than a hot 30 seconds considering what I’m trying to get at, and the overwhelming majority of the time they don’t ask me to clarify if I was being unclear, either. One just doesn’t seem to care. The other’s first reaction to anything I try to say that they don’t happen to agree with or like is immediate, intense anger which makes getting anything done impossible. For example, this person went off just the other day and, rather than even considering what I had said or was trying to say at quite literally any point in time, instead went on to characterize me as “having the weight of the world on their shoulders!” and being “easily replaceable.” To be fair, I lashed out first, but I made maybe one or two jabs at the two of them as a pair -- as officers, not even as people. This rant must have gone on for a solid seven to ten minutes.

Both of which I feel aren’t entirely true.

For the first count, it’s true that I voluntarily take on a lot of responsibility in running the company and making things work. I run the designated company plotline. I lead company meetings, in AND out of character because, again, my character is the only full-time leader of the FC. I’ve even started planning and slapping together some OOC shindigs like map parties and movie nights. But I don’t do this because I want an excuse to gripe. I do it because I like doing it. I like writing stories and I like seeing how people interact with the narrative I make. I enjoy playing a character in a position of power, although frankly it sucks that it also means I’m the only member of the officer team who is technically qualified to do the shitty, shitty job of hiring people IC. (There is a very good reason why IC play-ins are no longer a thing for Ebonguard, and its because I despise them. They are never anything but forced and robotic. Leon stops being Leon and starts being Officer Bot 5000 because, again, there’s no prerequisite or allowance for him to just not hire people who don’t leave a good impression on him; by this point in time people are already accepted into the FC on whatever character they applied with, and their character not being hired because my character is an asshole is a little unfair.)

The source of my gripes is not and never has been “I DO EVERYTHING!” in fact quite frankly I’m of the opinion that life would be a lot easier if I did, in fact, do everything. If I did everything then that would mean that everything is done to my (relatively high) standards and specifications, and not only that but they are done in a timely manner. The source of my gripes is, instead, that I’m sitting over here working my ass off while for all intents and purposes, they pick their noses. I’m pretty understanding of prior obligations and life getting in the way of things; it’s not an issue at all with my Ebonguard team even though the breakdown of time available to spend on doing stuff ends up being relatively the same. But their current reasoning does not hold up when taking the entire picture into account. I’m more than willing to and capable of understand/ing when you have to deal with a continuing family emergency. But what I’m not is a mindreader.

One is pretty good at communicating when obligations arise and I respect him for that. My problems don’t usually start with him and in fact if I were in charge I would probably keep him around in the same capacity.

The other? At no point in time did she ever even make the slightest attempt to communicate to me, or the officer team as a unit, that she had some personal issues to deal with. The people closest to her as a person? Sure. I’m not in that group. But the officer team as a unit? Never.

Even discounting the current situation, it neither explains nor excuses the perpetual state of apathy they’ve basically been stuck in since Thanksgiving. One of them used to chip in and DM scenario events from time to time which was a pretty cool gig, and then he stopped. The other used to have a plot chain she was also running, and then lost the motivation for since they can’t manage large stories like I can. She at one point wanted to tie her plot into what I had so that I could continue/finish what she started, but she never gave me the notes and she never followed through on actually doing that. (This is what has happened to every event chain, whether heavy on story or not, that I’ve ever seen her try to run from the start of me being in the FC. It’s not the first time, and I guarantee that it won’t be the last.) This one also told me to my face not too long ago that she didn’t actually have any desire to be a leader and occasionally wondered what it would be like if she passed it off and then joined another FC just to be a member without all the responsibility.

And frankly, I wonder that too; if you don’t want to be a leader and/or don’t have the time or mental energy to dedicate to being a leader, then chances are pretty good that you should step aside and hand someone else the reigns. I would be absolutely willing to provide compensation for material assets and just straight-up buy the FC and take it off her hands. I could probably fix every single issue that the FC has within the span of 72 hours or less.

I also do not like this person as a person because they don’t treat me with respect and yet expect it in return, which is a MAJOR button of mine (I also have a general contempt for authority figures I guess), but it’s 2AM and that is a story for another time.

#mid.txt #salt on main

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biofunmy · 6 years ago

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Social Media Pollution, a Huge Problem in the Last Election, Could Be Worse in 2020

It’s unlikely you have heard of @ToTheXToTheY. But you may be familiar with its work.

This anonymously run Twitter account made a splash in 2016, after a protester rushed Donald J. Trump at a rally in Dayton, Ohio.

The Secret Service nabbed the man before he got too close, but not before Mr. Trump flinched. That was an understandable reaction, but it created a potential image problem for the candidate, since he was the No. 1 tough guy in the Republican primary race at the time.

Soon after the incident, @ToTheXToTheY posted a doctored video that falsely linked the protester, a college student named Tommy DiMassimo, to ISIS. The bogus message from an account with some 5,000 followers would have gone all but unnoticed, but then Mr. Trump retweeted it.

The candidate also added a bit of commentary: “USSS did an excellent job stopping the maniac running to the stage. He has ties to ISIS. Should be in Jail!” And he stood by the hoax video a few days later on “Meet The Press.”

A judge, determining that Mr. DiMassimo posed no threat to national security, later sentenced him to one year’s probation.

A few weeks after the Dayton rally, @ToTheXToTheY came to Mr. Trump’s aid again by sharing a video claiming without substantiation that Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, then Mr. Trump’s last-standing Republican primary opponent, had hired prostitutes. The tweet was picked up by Radar Online and various social media accounts before making The National Enquirer, which led Mr. Cruz to issue a strong denial.

The identity of the person or persons behind @ToTheXToTheY remains a mystery. Twitter has suspended the account, saying it violated its rule against posing as another person, brand or organization.

@ToTheXToTheY is an example of a supervirus that has ravaged the body politic. More than two years after anonymous accounts polluted the discourse surrounding the last presidential election cycle, there is no cure in sight.

When it comes to disinformation, all signs point to a 2020 campaign that will make 2016 look like a mere test run.

The Pseudonymous Stars of ’16

Anonymous political attacks are as old as the republic itself. Before the rise of cloaked social media accounts, there were pamphlets of unknown origin, anonymous letters peddling false charges, as well as dubious parking-lot fliers, phone calls and blog posts.

But it has never been easier to reach millions of voters with anonymous attacks than it is now, and legislators and regulators seem ill-equipped to keep up with the changes in mass media.

@ToTheXToTheY was one of countless mystery players in the last campaign, which “set a record for pseudonymous attacks,” as Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a political communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied disinformation in 2016, told me.

There was @Ten_GOP, whose unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud were retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. and tens of thousands of others. The Facebook user “Matt Skiber” helped organize pro-Trump rallies attended by real, unsuspecting Americans. “THANK YOU for your support, Miami!” the candidate wrote on his own Facebook page, beneath a photo of one event.

“Matt Skiber” and @Ten_GOP originated in Russia, according to the report filed in April by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

Various other accounts had the platforms suspended for suspicious behavior, like Deplorable Eddie-T, which won attention for tweets like the one about Hillary Clinton’s supposed deathly illness.

And then there’s Microchip, a social media presence that BuzzFeed News declared “the bot King who helps Trump win Twitter.”

Microchip claimed to be a software developer from Utah when BuzzFeed communicated with the account in 2017. But who knows?

Many suspicious accounts were suspended, only to be reborn under different handles before disappearing — and it’s not clear they won’t be able to spring back to life for 2020.

Facebook’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, who’s in charge of devising tools to eradicate junk speech on the platform, conceded to my colleagues Cade Metz and Mike Isaac that, when it comes to problematic posts, “It’s never going to go to zero.’’

It seems likely that anonymous, large-scale disinformation attacks are going to be as much a part the election process as candidates kissing babies and pretending to relish scrapple. Are we O.K. with that?

Right to Know

Over the last century, the United States has made a number of moves to take anonymous attacks out of politics, albeit with varied success, through campaign finance laws. It did so based on a bipartisan consensus that voters had a right to know who was trying to influence them and why.

“One thing we’ve assumed for a good part of our history is, we need to have electoral integrity, so a certain amount of activity needs to be disclosed,” said the former Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Democrat who has championed campaign finance reform. “Who’s financing the people who get elected? People have a right to know that — it’s a foundation for the integrity of the system.”

In 2002, Mr. Feingold and his Republican colleague John McCain pushed through a law that sought to force more political advertisers to disclose their backers ahead of elections. Mr. McCain had extra motivation after supporters of his primary opponent in 2000, George W. Bush, ran commercials smearing his record without having to reveal their involvement — the sort of thing that can happen on social media without drawing much notice.

That effort followed decades of legislation meant to expose special-interest groups seeking to take an outsize role in American politics.

When radio was the tech disrupter of the day, Herbert Hoover pushed for laws to ensure that it would be used for “the public benefit.” As the historian Jill Lepore noted in her 2018 book “These Truths,” “Hoover refused to leave this to chance, or to the public-mindedness of businessmen.” The Radio Act of 1927 compelled stations to disclose the names of sponsors and to give equal time to opposing political candidates.

Stricter rules followed, and the first presidential television commercials, for the Dwight D. Eisenhower campaign in 1952 included the disclaimer “Paid For By Citizens for Eisenhower.”

As TV played a bigger role in elections, lawmakers required stations to keep publicly available lists of political advertisers and forced partisan organizations to list key personnel, fund-raising figures and advertising plans ahead of elections.

Legislators have failed to stay on top of social media platforms, with their billions of hard-to-track users from all over the world, in the same way.

New Thinking for a Newish Medium

The Citizens United Supreme Court decision of 2010 was infamous in some circles for having lifted prohibitions on corporate and union spending in elections. It’s worth noting, though, that the majority of justices stood by the old disclosure provisions, arguing, “The public has an interest in knowing who is speaking about a candidate shortly before an election.”

Empowered by the decision, special-interest groups found new ways to wield their influence anonymously, through nonprofit organizations that were not obligated to disclose their donors. But even these “dark money” groups are less phantomlike than social media trolls. When they advertise on TV and radio, they must still leave evidence of their activity, in the form public records documenting their plans to buy ads ahead of elections.

The rules now in place just don’t match up with how certain groups influence voters via the internet. Thanks to savvy lobbying by tech companies, online election campaign speech remains almost entirely unregulated.

The platforms won exemptions from many campaign finance provisions by arguing that the rules would stifle their growth. They don’t have the legal requirements for ad disclaimers and disclosures — like keeping public logs of political sponsors — that television does.

That’s how the Internet Research Agency, a home for troll accounts in St. Petersburg, Russia, could spend money on Facebook pages that worked for Hillary Clinton’s defeat without having to reveal its identity.

The platforms are taking steps to change. They say they are screening and authenticating political advertisers, whose activity they are disclosing voluntarily through public databases. They have also added human moderators and artificial intelligence programs to remove fake accounts, an initiative that has lessened social media pollution.

But they started policing themselves only after months of denial and public pressure. And their efforts only go so far: Every week seems to bring reports of improper activity slipping through the cracks.

“The platforms have taken some important steps,” said Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which works for the German Marshall Fund to combat efforts to undermine democratic institutions. “But it’s absolutely essential for the government to take appropriate action to make sure our elections are protected.”

The House recently passed a bill requiring platforms to keep public logs of political advertisers and tightening restrictions on activity originating outside the United States. A similar bill is pending in the Senate, but it has little chance of becoming law ahead of 2020, given the opposition of the Senate leader, Mitch McConnell.

The recent legislative action may be a start, but it’s steeped in assumptions of how media works left over from the days when TV and radio were the dominant forms. Social media posts that cost nothing don’t count as paid political ads, although they may have been created by well-funded organizations or profitable businesses whose goal is to sway voters.

The Internet Research Agency, for instance, pumped out free content from accounts that appeared to belong everyday Americans. Real citizens shared — and amplified — this stuff, sometimes by the hundreds of thousands.

When the Internet Research Agency did spend money on marketing, it was primarily to draw attention its social media accounts. And the real money went into the behind-the-scenes operation, based in St. Petersburg.

“The Internet Research Agency had a multimillion-dollar budget and was generating memes that they would post for free,” said Ian Vandewalker, the senior counsel on money and politics at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

The Brennan Center has called for increased focus on disclosure of the costs that go into producing online political content devised to sway votes, regardless of whether money was spent to promote it.

Toward a Scary 2020

Similarly, @ToTheXToTheY did not have to pay Twitter to influence voters. The account had an effect on the 2016 campaign because some very influential people drew attention to its wild claims.

It’s possible that the account was run by a Trump fan with social media chops. But even if it was part of a broader network created to swing the election, its activity would not necessarily fall under even the newly proposed election regulations.

Facebook asks its users to use their real names, but it doesn’t ask for proof of identity, which is how the Internet Research Agency managed to create its phony Americans.

Facebook says it’s getting better and faster at spotting fakes. Twitter says the same thing, but its job is more challenging, because it still allows people to have pseudonymous accounts.

There’s a logic to it. Any move to force users into the light would raise free speech issues here, while potentially harming dissidents looking for safe outlets in repressive countries.

And let’s not forget that certain vital documents, including the Federalist Papers and Common Sense, were written under a pen name or anonymously, and that the First Amendment protects anonymous speech.

But when it comes to elections, do voters have an equal right to transparency?

At the start of another campaign in which false, anonymous attacks are likely to be the norm, that question has gone unanswered.

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jeroldlockettus · 7 years ago

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What Would Be the Best Universal Language? (Earth 2.0 Series)

Around 7,000 languages are spoken on Earth 1.0. (Photo: Quinn Dombrowski/Flickr)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “What Would Be the Best Universal Language? (Earth 2.0 Series).” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

We explore votes for English, Indonesian, and … Esperanto! The search for a common language goes back millennia, but so much still gets lost in translation. Will technology finally solve that?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

In our previous episode, we talked about living under the ancient curse of the Tower of Babel.

Esther SCHOR: The curse of Babel is an existential condition in which we live every day. We use language to communicate, but we cannot rely on it to make ourselves understood.

We can’t always rely on it because …

John McWHORTER: Well, we have 7,000 languages.

Seven thousand languages? We learned about the many costs associated with this linguistic diversity — financial costs, psychic costs, even war:

Shlomo WEBER: Many people died in the war, which, in fact, easily could have been avoided.

And we learned that linguistic diversity has plenty of benefits too:

Lera BORODITSKY: There are certainly claims about types of thinking that become very hard without language — or become unlikely without language.

Those are some of the things we know about language here on Earth 1.0. But today’s episode is part of our Earth 2.0 series, in which we imagine we could reboot the planet and do some optimizing — or at least some tidying up. So, if we were starting over …

Maria Luisa MACIEIRA [French]: Si on devait tout recommencer à zéro…

Kew PARK [Korean]: … t시 시작한다면…

Isabela CABRAL [Brazilian Portuguese]: Se fossemos começar de novo …

Dhari ALJUTAILI [Arabic]:… أحسن طريقة لكل الناس على الأرض انهم…

CABRAL [Brazilian Portuguese]: para todos na Terra se comunicarem uns com os outros?

PARK [Korean]: 가장 좋은 방법은 무엇일까요?

… what would be the best way for everyone on Earth to be able to communicate with one another?

* * *

In the future, human-to-human communication may be so different that it’ll render our mission today moot. Between auto-translation and artificial intelligence and maybe even mind-melding, will anything ever get lost in translation? Maybe; maybe not. But — that’s the future. Let’s talk about language on Earth 2.0 using the tools and knowledge at our disposal today. If we could start from scratch, what would that look like?

Michael GORDIN: If we did this from scratch it would be a very surprising outcome.

That’s Michael Gordin, a historian of science at Princeton.

GORDIN: And who knows how it would work without the path dependency of previous empires, current economic structures, our current modes of transportation and media and communication? It would be very interesting to see how that would shake out.

Okay, let’s start with a couple basic questions. Number one: should we consider — please don’t throw things at me — should we consider having one common language?

BORODITSKY: I would be wary of thinking of common language as the solution to perfect communication …

Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego.

BORODITSKY: … because we already have [a] common language and that doesn’t lead to perfect communication.

McWHORTER: You would need oddly a language that had a lot less in it than many people would expect.

John McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia; he’s also an author and host of the Lexicon Valley podcast.

McWHORTER: You want it to be something that’s maximally easy for all of the world’s language speakers to use. You could have a universal language where tense was largely left to context, as it is in a great many of the world’s normal languages. You certainly wouldn’t have anything like grammatical gender. The vocabulary could be quite rich. That would be fun, but the grammar would be something where you could pick it up in a week.

Stephen J. DUBNER: I’m curious to know the degree to which language generally is utilitarian, like, “I want to pick up that thing,” or transactional, “I want that thing from you.” or romantic, or relationship, or gossip, or lying, and so on. And I’m just curious how a linguist might think about that.

McWHORTER: Language is more than questions, commands, and certainly more than just naked statements. Real language is about communication and charting feelings, telling people new things and that means that a language is a whole lot more than just nouns, verbs, and adjectives. If somebody says, “Oh, she’s totally going to call you,” that “totally” means, “you and I both know that other people think she isn’t going to call, but we have reason to think that she is.” We are full of things like that.

Okay, this leads to question number two: if there were a universal language, should it be a pre-existing one, or an invented one? English, while hardly universal, has of course become a very powerful language.

McWHORTER: What makes this regrettable to many, and quite understandably, is that English was the vehicle of a rapaciously imperial power and now America is the main driver.

So any pre-existing language will come with baggage, with lots of votes for and against. Does this mean we’d be better off inventing a new one? Apparently, some Facebook bots recently gave it a try.

CBS NEWS: According to several reports, Facebook’s artificial intelligence researchers had to shut down two chatbots after they developed a strange English shorthand.

A shorthand that its human creators couldn’t understand. As it happens, the dream of inventing a universal language has long been pursued by scholars, priests, even — as you’ll hear — by an ophthalmologist.

SCHOR: The history of language invention, which goes back millennia, has to do with reversing the curse of Babel.

Esther Schor is a professor of English at Princeton.

SCHOR: In other words, to return the world to a single language of perfect understanding. For some language inventors, this was imagined to be God’s own language and the language of divine truth.

In the 13th century, for instance, Ramon Llull, a Majorcan philosopher with Franciscan ties, sought to create the perfect language for channeling “the Truth,” and converting people to Christianity.

SCHOR: He created a formula for generating propositions from letters and words. He felt that some of them would be propositions to which an infidel would, of necessity, have to consent. But Llull’s truth was not the Truth, or at least it didn’t seem like the truth to the Saracens who eventually murdered him.

A few centuries later, the German philosopher Leibniz— an admirer of Llull’s, by the way — tried to build a language based on logic.

SCHOR: Leibniz’s idea was to represent propositions by numbers and he would reason by getting the ratio of one proposition to another and calculate an answer. Again, we have the idea of a language of logic without words.

And in the 19th century, a Jewish ophthalmologist named Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof created a language both idealistic and pragmatic.

L. L. Zamenhof, or Doktoro Esperanto, invented Esperanto in 1887. (Photo: Wikimedia)

SCHOR: It’s called Esperanto because that was his pseudonym, Doktoro Esperanto, which means the hopeful one. He brags in this initial pamphlet that you can learn it in an afternoon and that it’s fun. So it was supposed to be easy to learn and easy to pronounce.

Esperanto was derived from various European roots. Zamenhof’s idea was not to have Esperanto displace other languages.

SCHOR: He called it a helping language or an auxiliary language. It would stand next to national languages and be a helping language to make bonds among people who were not like one another.

Zamenhof was a universalist …

SCHOR: But he was also a universalist who understood what it meant to have warm feelings for one’s people. Esperanto was to somehow reconcile those two things — to try to breed in us these feelings of attachment for other people who were really quite unlike us.

The larger goal of Esperanto was nothing less than world peace.

SCHOR: He knew that language could be a wall between ethnicities, but that it could also be a bridge. That was his motivation — to build a language that would be a bridge among ethnicities. He modeled it on the teaching of Hillel. “Do not unto others as you would not have them do unto you.” Hillel was a 1st-century rabbi, so it had a very Jewish cast to it.

This did not help Esperanto’s cause. As Esther Schor told us: “[A]nti-Semitism changed the fortunes of Esperanto when the French demanded that Zamenhof shear away its religious ideology.” Hitler and Stalin would also reject Esperanto. Regardless: if you remove its religious and utopian components, what’s left, Esther Schor says, is a language with some substantial benefits over many other languages, whether existing or invented.

SCHOR: What he wanted was maximal flexibility and simplicity. For one thing, the verbs are all regular in Esperanto. He wanted a language that was egalitarian and neutral. He didn’t want people to be disadvantaged because they weren’t a native speaker. He speaks very movingly about what it’s like to try to speak a language that’s not your own. He talks about his pulse racing and his palms sweating. It’s an experience I’ve had. Perhaps you have had it also.

Ruth KEVESS-COHEN: Esperanto is a lot easier to learn than other languages because it has very regular rules and very regular grammar.

That’s Ruth Kevess-Cohen. She helped develop an online Esperanto course for the language site Duolingo.

KEVESS-COHEN: You find that it’s taking you a lot less time than you thought to learn the language. Here’s a sentence in Esperanto. “Mi estas knabo” — “I am a boy.” There is no “a” in Esperanto. “Knabo” you can see is a noun because it has an ‘o’ at the end. Every noun ends in the letter ‘o,’ every adjective ends in the letter ‘a.’ Every verb in the present ends in ‘as,’ So you already know that “estas” is “am,” “are.” It’s the same. There’s no conjugation of that.

We spoke with Kevess-Cohen at this year’s Esperanto-USA National Congress — or Landa Kongreso, as you say it in Esperanto. Our producer Stephanie Tam spent a couple days there. You’ll hear about that in an upcoming special episode. You may be surprised to learn that Esperanto is still spoken. Esther Schor again:

SCHOR: These days, the most informed estimates I hear are several hundred thousand people speak Esperanto. The strength of Esperanto is not in numbers. The strength of Esperanto is in its continuity over 130 years in 62 countries, from generation to generation, without being passed down from generation to generation.

Still, for all its thoughtfulness and pragmatism, Esperanto never got anywhere close to its intended universal status — what Esperantists refer to as “La Fina Venko,” the “Final Victory.” Why not?

SCHOR: I can answer that by looking at what does look like a universal language in our world, which is English. What looked like a universal language in Zamenhof’s day was French. Both French and English were propelled into the world by commerce and armies, and Esperanto had neither of those.

GORDIN: In order to keep a language constant enough so that it can function as a global, universal language, the way English is functioning now, you need to have a global communications infrastructure that standardizes dialects and pronunciations.

Michael Gordin again.

GORDIN: You need to have a global entertainment industry that produces books with standard spelling, and a pattern of accents that are considered acceptable, or that mark different classes or regional identities, and that constant reinforcement requires an infrastructure.

It’s something we don’t think about — at least I’d never thought about it — but there’s a lot of upkeep associated with language.

GORDIN: When classical Chinese was being used as a lingua franca for a very broad region — it was used in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam as the language of written communication — a very strict civil-service exam system privileged learning the language to precision. That stabilized that language. To a certain extent the Anglophone entertainment publication and media industry, as well as the scientific institutions, stabilize a certain kind of global English now.

Gordin points to another factor that would make it hard to install a universal language: the nature of language itself.

GORDIN: The reason why I think you can’t just blanket install and say, “OK, everybody is going to learn Esperanto,” is because people will experiment and mess with the language. They’ll change it.

Which, by the way, is how we got to where we are today.

McWHORTER: Well, we have 7,000 languages.

John McWhorter, from Columbia.

McWHORTER: And language is inherently changeable not because change is swell but because as you use a language over time and you pass it on to new generations, brains tend to start hearing things slightly differently than they were produced and after a while, you start producing them that way. That is as inherent to language as it is inherent for clouds to change their shapes. It isn’t that that happens to some languages and not others. That’s how human speech goes.

DUBNER: All right, so imagine in our thought experiment now that we’ve got Earth 2.0. You’ve got seven, eight billion people. Let’s say we want to give everybody the most prosperity and opportunity and equity that’s possible. We make you the Chief, let’s say, Communications Adviser of Earth 2.0. We give you the task of writing the plan, the blueprint for creating from scratch our new language systems and institutions. What would that blueprint look like?

McWHORTER: I would say that an ideal, in the future, is that everybody in the world can communicate in one language, that people have another language that they use with their ingroup, and that we have as many of those languages as possible. I don’t think that it’s going to be another six thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine, ever. But there does need to be one language that everybody uses so that as many people in the world as possible can take advantage of economic benefits, such as they are.

WEBER: I would go with a global language on some higher level …

That’s Shlomo Weber, an economist who studies language.

WEBER: … but still keeping the local language for everybody, because sensibilities of the people [are] a very important thing.

DUBNER: Let’s say this Earth 2.0 experiment, just to be a little more realistic, that we’re still working with the resources we’ve got. In other words, the languages that exist now would still exist. English obviously has a big head start, but it obviously also comes with a lot of baggage, right? People learn English because it’s useful, but English has a history of colonialism and domination and so on. Would picking a language like English just doom it to failure?

WEBER: I don’t know. Most of the languages, maybe except Chinese, have the history of domination too.

DUBNER: Does that mean you’re nominating Chinese because they took the Middle Kingdom route and they never really tried?

WEBER: Definitely would be one of the leading languages. Absolutely. But we could have chosen six or seven. To choose one, it’s a very difficult thing. Of course, the colonial legacy of English is questionable. But it’s true for so many others — the history of Russian language, of Japanese, of French, of German, Turkish empire had also its ups and downs. But given our circumstances … English. A reluctant vote for English.

McWHORTER: I almost wish that there was some reason that everybody had to learn colloquial Indonesian. It’s the only language I’ve ever encountered where you can learn a whole bunch of words and, even though you’re going to sound like an idiot, you can get an awful lot done. You don’t sound nearly as much like an idiot stringing together your Lonely Planet words in many parts of Indonesia. There’s no such thing as the moon being a girl and a boat being a boy. None of those things that make languages hard to learn. Really — almost none! I thought this should be the world’s universal language. Indonesian is one of those languages, like English, which has been learned by so many different people speaking so many different languages that it’s relatively user-friendly as languages go.

DUBNER: You’ve argued that isolation in a language breeds complexity. Considering that English is the least isolated language there is these days — it’s everywhere — does that necessarily mean that it will or is becoming less complex, to make it accessible to newer users all over the world?

McWHORTER: It doesn’t mean that but only because this business of languages being more complex when they’re isolated, and becoming simpler when they’re spoken by a lot of adults, is largely something that happens before widespread literacy. English didn’t become relatively user-friendly because of the Bosnian cabdriver in New York. It happened when Scandinavian Vikings flooded Britain and learned bad old English but were dominant enough that generations started speaking the way they did. That became the language. You and I, right now, are speaking really crappy old English. And we feel fine about it.

DUBNER: Speak for yourself. I feel I’ve been pretty literate today. See, I didn’t use the right word for literate. Literate is written, right? I can’t even think of the right word for what I’m trying to say. What do you call it when I’m being …

McWHORTER: Articulate, I suppose.

DUBNER: Articulate. I couldn’t even come up with that. That’s how bad … I know you’re right. I just proved your point. You know what that was? That was Muphry’s Law. Do you know Muphry’s Law?

McWHORTER: No, what’s that?

DUBNER: Muphry’s law is whenever you try to correct someone’s mistake, you make an additional mistake.

McWHORTER: I didn’t know there was a name for that.

DUBNER: There is because our language is so rich, of course …

MCWHORTER: It is exactly that.

As rich as our language may be, there’s still plenty of room for improvement. Coming up after the break: let’s say we bit the bullet and went with English as our universal language. How could it be made more accessible and equitable?

McWHORTER: Easy, magic wand: something that we must get rid of is linguistic prescriptivism.

And: let’s not overlook how much technology is already changing our communication.

GORDIN: It’s not going to be a Babel fish that you stick in your ear and will translate everything immediately. But it does improve the possibilities of translating roughly between language groups.

* * *

On Earth 2.0, it might be nice if all seven-plus billion of us spoke one shared language — and then, as John McWhorter suggested …

McWHORTER: … and then people have another language that they use with their ingroup and that we have as many of those languages as possible.

This, McWhorter says, is pretty close to the way a lot of people already communicate.

McWHORTER: If you think about the typical person who speaks Arabic, for example. They almost certainly speak two different languages. There is the Arabic that we would learn in a book, and then there’s Moroccan Arabic, Iraqi Arabic, Sudanese Arabic, Libyan Arabic. Those are completely different languages from Standard Arabic — different basic words, different grammatical constructions. You grow up speaking your Libyan Arabic — that’s mommy’s language. Then, when you go to school, you learn something that often I’ve heard people from these countries also call Arabic and that’s this other language. That happened because of history, because of cultural history in the case of Arabic, the Quran. The religious unity of the nations has a lot to do with it, but ideally nobody would have to go to school to “learn Arabic.” That is going on in many South Asian countries. It’s what a typical African often has to go through. Or if you’re Sicilian, you speak Sicilian. You go to school and you learn Italian.

Okay, fine but then there’s the task of selecting the universal language. Michael Gordin of Princeton:

GORDIN: Even if we picked a universal language that was neutral, politics being what it is — and I doubt this could be engineered away — we’d find ways to particularize the previously general.

McWHORTER: It’d be interesting if there was some sort of academy that were designed to keep people from making it more complicated …

DUBNER: I love that the linguist is coming up with The Academy to Keep Language from Becoming More Complicated. You guys are the ones that have contributed, obviously, to the way we think about language as so complicated.

McWHORTER: See, we contain multitudes.

It might be helpful to look at some of the countries that already use formulas calling for two or three languages.

WEBER: The Indians, actually. In some other countries, in Nigeria, Kazakhstan. They tried to implement this formula.

The economist Shlomo Weber.

WEBER: They tried to combine all these things. Every child has to study his own language, English, and the language of the other part of the country. Everything beautiful. You bring national cohesiveness, you bring efficiency through English, and you still sustain your individual languages, your individual attachments, your identification. But it didn’t work, because the people didn’t accept this formula. Why didn’t [they] accept it? Because their attachment to home language was much stronger than doing anything else.

DUBNER: I thought that Kazakhstan worked better than, let’s say, India or Nigeria. What did Kazakhstan do, or what happened there that made it work better?

WEBER: They have a strong government there. But in the case of Kazakhstan, I think the people were convinced that this is right way to go. In Kazakhstan, with its oil and gas resources, English is very important to be a part of the international community. Of course, [the] Kazakh language is important, it’s their own language, but they also recognize that for [the] cohesiveness of the country, Russian is an important language.

DUBNER: But you’re also suggesting that authoritarianism is handy if you want to get everybody to speak the three languages, yeah? Because democracy is a little sloppier.

WEBER: A little sloppy in this regard, right. Some other advantages, but not that.

To be fair, there are a lot of differences between Kazakhstan and India. India is much larger, much more diverse. Even so, says Michael Gordin …

GORDIN: You have to give people a reason to want to engage with the language. The energy required to learn a language is high enough that you really have to work on the motivation. The constructed languages and the natural languages provide lots of examples of the importance of that.

OK, so how do you get people to engage with a language? As we’ve seen on Earth 1.0, most of the big, legacy languages come with a lot of baggage — cultural baggage at least; more likely, colonialist baggage. So what would happen if we chose English as the new universal language? I mean, with 1.5 billion speakers, it’s already 20 percent of the way there. What would you do to make English truly accessible to everyone, especially non-native speakers?

McWHORTER: Something that we must get rid of is linguistic prescriptivism, and by that, I mean that we live with an idea that some ways of speaking a language are bad, broken, and some ways aren’t. It’s all based on myths. That’s not to say that in a formal situation you can get up and say, “Billy and me went to the store.”

GORDIN: In the 19th century, the standard by which people had to know a language, a foreign language that wasn’t their own — so let’s for the moment pretend like everybody in the world speaks French, English, or German. You had to be really fluent in one of those three but only pretty competent in the others. A much weaker level of fluency. The French person didn’t have to know a lot of English but they had to be able, with a dictionary, to puzzle their way through a scientific article. You could relax the assumption that everything has to be perfect grammar-book English and just allow the publication of rougher English in a variety of forms, without this obsessive copyediting. That would be fairer.

McWHORTER: There are some kinds of English that would be so difficult for anybody else to understand that maybe there would have to be some adjustment. But schematically, the idea that most people in most nations have to learn a form of what they speak that requires effort to master — that’s crummy.

GORDIN: You could imagine subsidizing global English education. Another fair option is to say, “No, we actually really like the highly-readable, clean English.” You could charge slightly higher page fees for native speakers of English that would subsidize copy-editing for non-native speakers of English.

SCHOR: The most important thing would be to provide incentives for linguistic innovation, or for bringing language and the arts together, for bringing language and engineering together. This would have to come from some organization or donors, of course. But that’s as much of an institution as I would like to imagine negotiating language in Earth 2.0.

WEBER: I would like to have peace on this planet and then to approach those things.

DUBNER: What do you think would be a better way for everyone in the world to learn English? I’m especially curious to know, as an economist, what you think is the R.O.I. on an education dollar versus an entertainment dollar. In other words, would it be better just to have all Hollywood movies distributed globally for free? Would that be the best way for people to learn English?

WEBER: It could be the case. Once again, [the] example of India, Bollywood movies have contributed to [the] tremendous development of Hind[i] …The language was not spoken very widely in India, before the development of Bollywood.

DUBNER: Maybe even five years from now a technology like movies will seem very old-fashioned because there may be technology that’s essentially instant and perfect translation from any language to any language, right?

WEBER: Of course, technology will play a part.

GORDIN: Machine translation, I think, will never be perfect. It’s not going to be a Babel fish that you stick in your ear and will translate everything immediately. But it does improve the possibilities of translating roughly between language groups.

“It’s not going to be a Babel fish” — the Babel fish is from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by the way — “that you stick in your ear and will translate everything immediately.” Maybe not — but maybe. A New York startup called Waverly Labs has been working on a Babel fish-like earbud that’ll do live translation. They say they’ve already taken in $5 million in pre-orders. There’s also the rapidly developing Google Translate and Skype Translator. And it’s not just major languages that benefit from the digital revolution.

SCHOR: I don’t think there’s any doubt that technology has been a great boon to Esperanto …

Esther Schor again.

SCHOR … and I know many Esperantists, especially in the United States, who essentially live their Esperantic lives online. Some of them Skype, some of them do it on Facebook. LERNU.net has several hundred thousand registered users and there’s also Duolingo, which in the past two years since its inception, it has signed on about a million people into the Esperanto course, which is really amazing and marvelous.

But overall, the internet is dominated by what John McWhorter calls the big-dude languages, especially English. Google searches in English return roughly four times more results than Arabic searches; 95% of Wikipedia concepts are represented in fewer than six languages. There is of course no guarantee that this march toward English hegemony continues. History shows us that language is inherently mutable. So what can we assume about the future of language?

GORDON: Since we’re not changing the biology of humans, we can assume a couple of things …

Michael Gordin, the historian of science from Princeton.

GORDIN: … that people will learn languages; that they’ll learn them pretty well when they’re kids; and that languages won’t stay stable. If you want a more broadly-communicative, more inclusive infrastructure, you should focus on training children while they’re young and still able to learn multiple different languages and keeping them straight. In the 19th century, in Bohemia, the Czech region of the Habsburg Empire, it was quite common for neighboring peasant villages, one of which was predominantly German-speaking and one of which was predominantly Czech-speaking, to send kids to be educated in the other town. That way the kid would know both languages. Leveraging the way children can soak up languages almost effortlessly, to create a more dense web of people who understand each other’s languages, would improve some aspects of the system.

But here’s the thing. However judiciously we might draw up the best course of language for Earth 2.0, the original blueprint is unlikely to hold. Language evolves, it diverges; it constantly sparks its own offshoots. Consider a recent group of languages that were created from scratch.

Brian KERNIGHAN: Computer languages are very definitely created. And so somebody sits down and says, “this is the way we want to have our language work.”

Brian Kernighan is a computer-science professor at Princeton. He used to work at Bell Labs, the famous incubator of various operating systems and coding languages. Kernighan himself worked on the UNIX o.s. and the languages AWK and AMPL. The first major programming languages were invented in the late 1950s.

KERNIGHAN: The first high-level languages, I would say, would fundamentally be Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, and a language called ALGOL — which was in some sense more an academic exercise.

These languages were built for different tasks:

KERNIGHAN: Like scientific and engineering computation, which was FORTRAN; or business computation, which was COBOL; or even educational computation, if you like, which was BASIC. They’re definitely created for a purpose as opposed to being a natural process. On the other hand, once they’re created, then there’s a pressure for them to evolve.

Just a few years later, in 1961 …

KERNIGHAN: In 1961, a professional journal called Communications of the ACM in their January issue had a cover piece of art, which showed a schematic version of the Tower of Babel. It listed on that probably 200 programming languages. The message was, “Boy, there’s a lot of programming languages.”

Today, there are at least 1,500 programming languages.

KERNIGHAN: Do we need that many languages? Of course not. Do we use that many languages? Actually, no. The repertoire of most journeymen programmers is probably half a dozen to a dozen or something like that.

The parallel between programming languages and natural languages is not perfect, but still striking. A new language costs time, effort, and money to create, to learn, to maintain. Why, then, has there been so much growth?

KERNIGHAN: People are trying to write bigger programs, and they’re trying, often, to address programming problems. That is, taking on tasks that were not part of the original. Therefore the language evolves because the environment in which it lives is changing, the resources that are available for programmers — that is, hardware resources — are changing, and the desires of the people who write programs change as well.

GORDIN: Or an optimist would say developing into varieties of pronunciations and accents display the diversity of who we are.

Michael Gordin, speaking now about natural languages.

GORDIN: That process we’ve seen over world history many times: things fragment, then they coalesce, and then they fragment, and they coalesce again. Part of that has to do with tribal tendencies. Part of it has to do with a love of experimentation, regional loyalty, something that sounds aesthetically interesting. You could end up with something like a guy writing a poem in the late medieval period in the Tuscan dialect, Dante, producing a standard for a language by the act of his particularity.

This kind of change can create chaos. But: it’s also a hallmark of being human — a dissatisfaction with the status quo; a desire to experiment, to build, to adapt to changing circumstances.

BORODITSKY: We’re champions in the animal world at creating our own niches, taking the environment that we’re given, and then radically transforming it to suit our needs.

That’s the cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky.

BORODITSKY: And we do this with language as well.

And what is Boroditsky’s vision for language on Earth 2.0?

BORODITSKY: My emphasis would be on preserving diversity and preserving flexibility — making things really easy to learn and really adaptable to environment — rather than focusing on making something that is exactly the same and common across everyone. I don’t know that we can judge that we now have the best solution, and we should just build it right in. I’d still want people to learn lots of things through cultural transmission and adjust to their environment, the way that we do so well as humans. In some ways, becoming more aware of the relationship that we have with language is the thing that helps communication — more than simply trying to build one system.

It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that just about everyone we’ve heard from in this series on language has been … an academic. They, like all tribes, have their own dialects and sublanguages. Which is often not all that decipherable to the rest of us. I asked Shlomo Weber about this. He’s an economist.

WEBER: At the moment, I’m the director of the New Economic School in Moscow.

DUBNER: I have to tell you. I love academia. I love academics. I love the research you do. But my one big complaint is this: the way that you academics communicate to the rest of us, to the non-academics, is terrible. I understand these are areas of technical expertise but this strikes me as its own little Tower of Babel, where there are academic researchers all over the world doing this amazing and valuable research — which by the way is often funded by us, the taxpayers. And yet, we can’t really participate in it because of the way that you all communicate. I’m curious to know if we can’t solve the language or communication problem globally, if we could at least address this problem.

WEBER: Believe me, Stephen, I agree with you. I am doing my small part. I tried to write in newspapers, I go on television to talk about general things and not using the language. But it comes back to economics. There are incentives, and the incentives are not to go to tell you about this research. There is nothing in my incentive mechanism, what [my] university or community offers me, to go to talk to people who are interested in some simplified version of this research. For this, you really need to grow as an individual and to understand that, indeed, the research is supported by your dollars.

DUBNER: I will say this: honestly, as much as I complain about the gap, I’m grateful for it because I wouldn’t have a job if you guys communicated directly to people. Basically, I am the translator. So keep doing what you’re doing, Shlomo.

WEBER: Thank you. And you, Stephen, keep doing what you’re doing.

Coming up next time …

MACIEIRA [Brazilian Portuguese]: Isso vem no próximo episódio.

IVANOV [Russian]: Это будет в следующем выпуске.

Anisa SILVIANA [Bahasa Indonesia]: Yang akan datang selanjutnya.

Justin CHOW [Mandarin]: 在下一集.

Rendell de KORT [Papiamento]: … sigi proximo.

Larry Summers is a Harvard economics professor but he’s also a former president of Harvard, a former Secretary of the Treasury, and he was the chief White House economist under Obama when the Great Recession hit. What was that like?

SUMMERS: It was a very tense time. We would meet with the President each morning and talk about what was happening.

Summers gives himself and his team a crisis grade:

SUMMERS: While battlefield medicine’s never perfect, I think you’d have to say that the approach we chose was effective.

Summers also sort-of admits a past policy mistake.

SUMMERS: Perhaps, given what happened, you can say it was a mistake.

Summers also reveals — big surprise — that he is not a fan of the current White House.

SUMMERS: It’s the disregard for ascertainable fact and disregard for analysis of the consequences of policy actions.

That’s next time …

MACIEIRA [French]: Ca, ça viendra dans le prochain épisode …

MUSTAK [Bahasa Malaysia]: Episod seterusnya dalam Radio Freakonomics.

SCHOR [Esperanto]: Tiu venas venontfoje ĉe Freakonomics Radio.

Also: look for our upcoming special episode, with producer Stephanie Tam, about modern-day Esperanto. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Eliza Lambert, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins, and Brian Gutierrez; we had help this week from Sam Bair. Special thanks to our intern Kent McDonald — and to the many listeners who contributed their voices, and their languages, to this episode. The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via e-mail at [email protected].

Kim LE [Vietnamese]: Xin cảm ơn rất nhiều.

Hagit SALTZBERG [Hebrew]: תודה רבה

SILVIANA [Bahasa Indonesia]: Terima kasih.

ALJUTAILI [Arabic]: شكراً جزيلاً

MACIEIRA [Brazilian Portuguese]: Muito obrigada.

Mara DAJVSKIS [Latvian]: Liels paldies.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Lera Boroditsky, associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego.

Michael Gordin, professor of science history at Princeton University.

Brian Kernighan, computer science professor at Princeton University.

Ruth Kevess-Cohen, doctor at Cameron Medical Group.

John McWhorter, associate professor of slavic languages and linguistics at Columbia University, and host of Lexicon Valley at Slate.

Esther Schor, professor of english at Princeton University.

Shlomo Weber, director of the New Economic School.

RESOURCES

Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language by Esther Schor (Metropolitan Books, 2016).

Does Science Need a Global Language?: English and the Future of Research by Scott Montgomery and David Crystal (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

The Evolution of Language by W. Tecumseh Fitch (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language by Dean Falk (Basic Books, 2009).

How Many Languages Do We Need?: The Economics of Linguistic Diversity by Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber (Princeton University Press, 2011).

“How Language Shapes Thought,” by Lera Boroditsky, Scientific American (2011).

“Linguistic Distance: A Quantitative Measure of the Distance Between English and Other Languages,” Barry Chiswick and Paul Miller (2004).

Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English by Michael Gordin (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

The Story of Human Language, Part 1 by John McWhorter (Teaching Company, 2004).

“What is Universal in Event Perception? Comparing English and Indonesian Speakers,” Lera Boroditsky, Wendy Ham, and Michael Ramscar (2002).

“Why Academics Stink at Writing,” Steven Pinker, The Chronicle Review (September 26, 2014).

EXTRA

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Del Rey, 1995).

The post What Would Be the Best Universal Language? (Earth 2.0 Series) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/best-universal-language/

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Immediate Website Traffic Methods for Beginners

New Post has been published on https://myupdatesystems.com/immediate-website-traffic-methods-for-beginners/

Immediate Website Traffic Methods for Beginners

Marketing is a bad word. At least, it is to many newcomers in the business world. Marketing can be costly. Worse, you can actually pay for marketing and find that it didn’t turn into a sale. It sounds a lot like gambling, and that can be scary to those who are just starting out.

Alas… I have good news. There are some free online marketing methods that you can use right now, which will bring you some immediate traffic. How immediate, you ask? I have implemented some of these methods when I began blogging on a daily basis and saw traffic within five minutes of doing them. The real question should be, are you ready to convert that traffic. That subject is best left for another article, however.

Let’s take a look at the 5 immediate traffic methods for beginners:

#1) Blog-Hopping

The term blog-hopping means, to locate and comment on multiple related blog articles. You can locate blogs that are related to what you are marketing with some simple Google searches. You do not want to waste your time, however. The only way that this method results in traffic is if people reading it, and its owners are able to find you. That’s why you will want to stick to blogs that have the option to leave your URL in a field under your comment.

You can do the following search in Google to find such blogs:

“your keywords” +” leave a comment”

Change “your keywords” to your desired keywords or keyphrase, and make sure you include the plus sign and the following phrase exactly as is. Make sure there is no space between the plus, and the quotes so that Google knows you are trying to match the keywords that follow.

This search will bring up comments, many of which are using WordPress as their blogging platform. When you find a suitable article to comment on, you will need to make sure to avoid coming off as spam. Your comment should be well thought out and contribute to the discussion in some way. It is always best to read the article you are commenting on first. This way, you will know what to say, and the owner of the blog will know right away that you are not a spam bot.

In addition, it is important to note that you should not advertise in your comment. Let the URL field do what it does best. That is the only place for your link. Placing your link within your comment comes off as self-serving and can end up being rejected and possibly blocked from future commenting.

The blog-hopping method is one which can actually bring in traffic today. If you find that the blog article was written recently, and it has received other comments already, you can be sure that there is active traffic on the page. If your comment was well-thought out, then readers are more likely to follow your link in the URL field and find out more about you.

#2) Guest Blogging

The thing about guest blogging is that it can take a time to be published once your article is accepted. This timeframe depends on many factors, such as:

How many articles are scheduled ahead of yours?

Publishing frequency of the blog/website.

The popularity of the blog/website.

… and others.

Guest publishing on other blogs or websites is worth it though. A few years back, I published multiple guest articles on ProBlogger, as well as a list of other established blogs. ProBlogger accepted my lengthy articles, but it sometimes took a month before I would ever see them published.

When guest blogging as a traffic method, it is wise to diversify your portfolio as an investor would. You will certainly want to benefit from the popular blogs such as ProBlogger, but you need to pursue other blogs that are easier to get into as well.

The criteria you are looking for is:

Relevance to your niche.

Does it regularly publish new content?

Does it have active commentators?

Do they have a clear guest article submission policy?

You want traffic, so you will need to ensure that there are people actively commenting on articles. You will also want to make sure the site is up to date. If it’s currently 2016, and the newest article is dated 2013, then it is not an active blog. Some blogs leave commenting open, so there may well be new comments. It doesn’t look good, however, for your chances of being published as a guest author.

Many blogs that accept guest articles will have a page dedicated to listing their guest author requirements. These are usually a description of what kind of articles they accept, as well as what formatting is required to be published on the website. For instance, some blogs may require you to leave out HTML, while others allow some basic HTML formatting.

As previously listed, here is a way of locating blogs that allow guests by doing a simple Google search:

“your keywords” +” become a guest author”

#3) Press Release Distribution

Press releases are often associated with major companies and big announcements. An example of the major press release would be the announcement of an E3 event for gamers made by Microsoft or Sony. The good thing is, you do not have to be the CEO of a fortune 500 company to use press release distribution to benefit from its traffic benefits.

There are multiple press release websites online, that can be found by searching Google for “free press release”. These websites get a lot of traffic and are used by news networks for syndication. When used properly, your PR may be picked up by a major publication.

You can target specific categories and sub-categories on these distribution websites. Unlike with article marketing, a press release website is all about self-promotion. They do have specific requirements, however, and not just any “fluff” will make it through the approvals department.

In addition to the free options, there are many paid distribution services available. Also, on the free sites, there are often paid upgrade options that allow your content to get an extended reach beyond the free options.

To use such services, you will want to make any noteworthy news a priority for a press release. Got a public event coming up? Schedule a press release ahead of time. Major changes coming to the company? Announce it!

#4) Article Marketing

Getting your brand out there requires a lot of legwork. Sometimes, this means that a lot of time must be spent creating quality text content that can be published on major websites. This is different from guest blogging, however. EzineArticles is an example of an article publishing website, specifically tailored to publishing quality text content.

There are many article websites on the internet, but you want to find ones that rank high on Google and other search engines. You also want to locate sites that have an established reputation with other article marketers.

A good article must be written in a way which will keep the reader interested. One such example is breaking down a topic into a list. You will often run into articles that share a title format. An example would be this article titled, “5 immediate website traffic methods for beginners”. You can do the same thing for your article no matter what the niche may be.

To keep the flow of reading interesting, use numbered or bulleted lists. You can also include a relevant wrapped-image if the website allows it. Various visual elements such as images, bold text, italicized text, underlined text, and headers can help the flow of the article.

There are many writers that publish smaller articles that are in the 500 word range. I, however, prefer to write articles that are 1000 words at the bare minimum. Such articles not only cover a topic in depth but are also a genuine method of creating link-bait. This means that there are more opportunities for syndication, leading to additional traffic.

When writing articles for specialized article marketing websites, be sure to read and understand their guidelines before typing a single word. Self-promotion in an article can be frowned upon, and the site may have an author box or another way of allowing you to promote yourself.

#5) Forum Participation

Forums are pretty old-school. They are websites which allow you to register, and conversate in “threads”. You can create and reply to topics, and be notified when others are participating. There are forums for pretty much anything.

To find forums in your niche, simply search your keyphrase followed by the word “forum” in Google. Often times, the forums with the most traffic will end up on the top of search results. The forum will show the last comment date and time, so you can see how active it is.

The trick with forums is to use the member profile section and the signature section for your promotion. You will certainly want to avoid self-promoting in the body of your post when it comes to forums.

As with blog hopping, you want to avoid coming off as spammy. If you are commenting, make sure it is thought out and contributive to the discussion. If you are posting a new thread, you want to ensure that it follows the forum guidelines to the letter.

You can usually post a signature in your profile which appears whenever you publish something on the forum. Sometimes this signature will show up once for your first post in that thread, while many others will show the signature for every single comment you make. Either way, it translates to traffic.

Conclusion

By using these 5 immediate website traffic methods, you will quickly establish a regular amount of hits to your website. The next item on your to-do list is to ensure that you have your website setup for proper conversion. Hopefully, you already had this done, because these traffic methods are sure-fire.

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