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Daniel Nettle is Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Newcastle.
Fotografie: via author's website

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The bright yellow cover got me, so I added this small volume to a stack I scooped up before Christmas break. Yes, it's overdue. I was on a little happiness jag with [b:The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want|2326098|The How of Happiness A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want|Sonja Lyubomirsky|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1266733909s/2326098.jpg|2332650] and [b:Flow|66354|Flow|Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1170649609s/66354.jpg|64339] in the same stack. Alas, none of these titles wooed me well.

Nettle presents statistics and information from studies, but his writing was not engaging. In grad school a woman from England incorporated the word "whilst" in a short presentation. Charming. But I felt put off by this British-ism in print. Silly, but there it is. I hoped for something as winning like Gretchen Reuben. Not this time.
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rebwaring | 1 andere bespreking | Aug 14, 2023 |
This book provides a detailed explanation of the Big Five personality model. Although the explanation of the model itself was interesting, the most valuable parts of the book were the first and last chapters.

The first chapter establishes how personality models like the Big Five are generated. Unlike models with less construct validity, these models do not start with a schema and then put people into it. Instead, these models start by asking behavioral questions and then looking for clusters of correlated behaviors. These clusters become the characteristics of the personality model. Although these models are determined statistically, it is hypothesized (though not yet verified) that the reason such clusters of related behaviors exist is because they correspond to underlying tendencies in the brain. E.g., the cluster of behaviors that are labeled "Extroversion" in the Big Five model all seem to be related by an individual's reactivity to rewards. Another interesting thing to note about this method of building a personality model is that every personality factor is a continuum. Models which try to push people into discrete buckets generally fail to have statistical validity.

The second chapter is a look into the question of why personality variation exists. Nettle makes the argument that variation exists because for every personality trait, there are some situations where being high on a trait is advantageous and some situations where being low on that trait is advantageous. Even neuroticism (sometimes called low emotional stability), which seems unrelentingly negative in the modern world, can be beneficial for individuals who live in a dangerous situation. Environments tend to change more quickly than evolution can normalize to a smaller range of variation.

The first of the ending chapters discusses the factors that determine personality. Heritability is a large factor, but explains, in general, only about half of the variation in personality. General environmental factors fail to explain the rest, but specific environmental cues can influence personality. E.g., certain types of chronic threat may increase neuroticism. Cues during gestation can affect fetal development. The final factor, and perhaps the most interesting one, is that one's own characteristics can influence how one responds to environmental cues in a way that can, over time, influence personality. E.g., someone who is conventionally attractive may get more positive enforcement when they act in extroverted ways and so their extroversion may end up larger than someone who had a similar inherited background but less positive reinforcement. (By the way, another interesting thing noted in this book is that personality factors can and do change somewhat over time. They're stable but not fixed.)

The last chapter was a look at how to live with our personalities. The first point Nettle makes is that no personality configuration is "good" or "bad". Each is what it is. That said, personalities do influence our characteristic behaviors and how we structure our life narratives. Someone with low conscientiousness is less likely to inhibit harmful behaviors such as a drug or alcohol addition. Someone with high neuroticism is likely to construct their life narrative more negatively than someone lower on that scale who experienced the same events. But personality is not destiny. Personality characteristics are interesting because they predict behaviors at a level that is well above chance, but there is still plenty of variation. As Nettle points out in a thought experiment, if someone were like you on all of the personality traits, you're likely to understand the choices they make, but there are still lots of different choices you can make. E.g., the alcoholic who knows they can't stop at just one drink could choose to drink or could choose to avoid alcohol completely. The person whose agreeableness is high enough that they often neglect themselves could choose to run themselves ragged helping others or find some way -- such as pre-scheduled time -- to take care of themselves.

All in all, I found this book to present an interesting and balanced view of what personality is and how it influences our lives.
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eri_kars | 5 andere besprekingen | Jul 10, 2022 |
review of
Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine's Vanishing Voices - The Extinction of the World's Languages
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 6-12, 2017

I have much to say on this subject & I say it here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/524556-biolinguistic-diversity?chapter=1 . The below is just the truncated beginning of the review so you might as well go to the full thing (broken into 3 chapters).

1st off, this is one of the most important bks I've ever read - wch is to say that it's one of the most important to ME. Here's a list of the other 9 in a top 10 I might put it in w/, not organized into a hierarchy:

The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia - Alfred W. McCoy
Finnegans Wake - James Joyce
footnotes - tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
Why do Birds Sing? - David Rothenberg
The Many-Headed Hydra - Marcus Rediker & Peter Linebaugh
Gargantua & Pantagruel - Rabelais
t he bk
t he referent 4 wch consists of
t he non-materialized transparent punch-outs from a letter/whatever stencil
- Michael Frederick Tolson et al
Impressions of Africa - Raymond Roussell
A Void - George Perec (translated by Gilbert Adair)

That list is highly subject to change. It's tempting to put David Rothenberg's Thousand Mile Song in there or William S. Burroughs's The Soft Machine or whatever. Note that I included 2 of my own bks. I wdn't ordinarily do that but I'm so moved today. Anyway, the rating system on Goodreads has "5" as the highest. I'd give Vanishing Voices an 11.

For decades I've been saying that I think that imperialist languages are technical & that the languages that are being forced into extinction are more 'poetic'. Starting a year or more ago I decided to start (d) composing an 'opera' entitled Endangered Languages, Endangered Cultures, Endangered Ideas intended to be an outgrowth of this opinion. I started acquiring bks, such as this one, to research & to get libretto material from. I'll be culling from my review here for that.

I was explaining my 'opera' to a friend of mine & mentioned the idea that "imperialist languages are technical" etc & my friend, being the type who has to always argue about everything in order to show 'how smart she is' regardless of whether she'd ever given it a moment's thought before, asked me if I wasn't "just being romantic"? I told her that: 'No, I don't think so.' At that point, I'd just started reading Vanishing Voices but I hadn't gotten far enuf into yet to be able to quote from it or explain the authors's positions or to know if they reinforced my own or not.

WEEEELLLLLLL, Vanishing Voices reinforced everything that I'd previously thought & expressed it so articulately that I was very happy to be both born out & to know that such a resource was available. Of course, I'm not in the least happy that the language extinction problem exists. As w/ so many bks that're deeply important to me, reading this w/ the intention of reviewing it was intimidating b/c I felt like practically every paragraph was worth quoting & commenting on & it was very difficult to restrict my note-taking to a reasonably manageable quantity.

"The extinction of languages is part of a larger picture of worldwide near total ecosystem collapse. Our research shows quite striking correlations between areas of biodiversity and areas of highest linguistic diversity, allowing us to talk about a common repository for what we will call "biolinguistic diversity": the rich spectrum of life encompassing all the earth's species of plants and animals along with human cultures and their languages. The greater biolinguistic diversity is found in areas inhabited by indigenous peoples, who represent around 4 percent of the world's population, but speak at least 60 percent of the world's languages." - p ix

The notion of "biolinguistic diversity" is essential to me. Many people I know probably care about any species of animal being endangered but wdn't give much thought to endangered languages. I think it's very, VERY important to recognize that it's all part of the same concern & this bk bears that out brilliantly.

There're 4 photos on pp 3-4 of the last speakers of 4 languages.

"In 1984 Esenc had already written the inscription he wanted on his gravestone: "This is the grave of Tefvik Esenc. He was the last person able to speak the language they called Ubykh." With Esenc's death in 1992, Ubykh too joined the ever increasing number of extinct languages."

[In case the reader is imagining Esenc as some sort of 'wild man' I hereby note that his picture shows a man in a suit & tie, w/ a neatly trimmed mustache & glasses]

"Four years later in South Carolina a native American named Red Thundercloud died, the last voice of a dying tongue. No longer able to converse in his native language with the remaining members of his community, he took the language of his tribe to the grave with him. Red Thundercloud was alone among his people, but not alone among native Americans. Roscinda Nolasquez of Pala, California, the last speaker of Cupeño, died in 1987 at the age of 94, and Laura Somersal, one of the last speakers of Wappo, died in 1990.

"In another part of world on the Isle of Man, Ned Maddrell passed away in 1974. With his death, the ancient Manx language left the community of the world's living tongues. Just a hundred years earlier, not long before his birth, 12,000 people (nearly a third of the island's population) still spoke Manx, but when Maddrell died, he was the only fluent speaker left. Two years before his death, Arthur Bennett died in north Queensland, Australia, the last person to know more than a few words of Mbabaram, a language he had not used himself since his mother died twenty some years before." - p 2

There's really no 'need' for me to say much about any of this b/c the authors say far more authoritatively everything I might say. The purpose of this review is to try to summarize what they say enuf to get people interested in reading the bk. Many people might shrug off the death of languages as a 'natural' occurrence but how wd they feel if the language they speak were to die off around them as an obvious result of socio-political conditions that're irrelevant to actual qualities of the languages concerned?

"English, as Glanville Price put it, is a "killer language." Thus, it has been said that Irish, for instance, was murdered by English. Others, however, have in effect put the blame on the Irish by saying that the language committed suicide. The Irish writer Flann O'Brien, although pro-Irish, resented and rejected the attempt to revive the Irish language, because he was of the opinion that the difficulties faced by Irish were "due mainly to the fact that the Gaels deliberately flung that instrument of beauty and precision from them."" - p 6

This was one of the only things in Vanishing Voices that I had my doubts about. I'll take the authors's word for it that that was really O'Brien's opinion but when I think of O'Brien, whose work I know reasonably well & whose writing I love, & Irish I think of this passage:

"What's this I have in me pocket? Dirty scrap of paper. Some newspaper heading I cut out. 'Language in danger.' Of course, if I was a cultured European I would take this to mean that some dumb barbarous tonguetide threatens to drown the elaborate delicate historical machinery for human intercourse, the subtle articulative devices of communication, the miracle of human speech that has developed a thousand light years over the ordnance datum, orphic telepathy three sheets to the wind and so on. But I know better.

"Being an insulated western savage with thick hair on the soles of my feet. I immediately suspect that it is that fabulous submythical erseperantique patter, the Irish, that is under this cushion—beg pardon—under discussion.

"Yes. Twenty years ago, most of us were tortured by the inadequacy of even the most civilised, the most elaborate, the most highly developed languages to the exigencies of human thought, to the nuances of inter-psychic communion, to the expression of the silent agonized pathologies of the post-Versailles epoch. Our strangled feelings, despairing of a sufficiently subtle vehicle, erupted into the crudities of the war novel. But here and there a finer intellect scorned this course. Tzara put his unhappy shirt on his dad (Fr. for hobby-horse as you must surely know), poor Jimmy Joyce abolished the King's English, Paulsy Picasso started cutting out paper dolls and I . . .

"I?

"As far as I remember, I founded the Rathmines branch of the Gaelic League. Having nothing to say, I thought at that time that it was important to revive a distant language in which absolutely nothing could be said." - pp 102-103, The Best of Myles - Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O'Brien)

No, no.. That's not the passage I'd intended to quote at all! HOWEVER, in the course of looking thru every page in the above-quoted 400pp bk I stumbled across that relevant passage instead of the one I'm looking for. Wish me luck. Back tuit.

"The Irish lexicographer Dinneen, considered in vacuo is, heaven knows, funny enough. He just keeps standing on his head, denying stoutly that piléar means bullet and asserting that it means 'an inert thing or person.' Nothing stumps him. He will promise the sun moon and stars to anybody who will catch him out. And well he may. Just take the sun, moon and stars for a moment. Sun, you say, is grian. Not at all, Dinneen shouts that grian means 'the bottom (of a lake, well)'. You are a bit nettled and mutter that, anyway, gealach means moon. Wrong again. Gealach means 'the white circle in a slice of half-boiled potato, turnip, etc.' In a bored voice he adds that réalta (of course) means 'a mark on the forehead of a beast'. Most remarkable man. Eclectic I think is the word.

"That, of course, is why I no longer write Irish. No damn fear. I didn't come down in the last shower. Call me a bit fastidious if you like but I like to have some idea of what I'm writing. Libel, you know. One must be careful. If I write in Irish what I conceive to be 'Last Tuesday was very wet,' I like to feel reasonably sure that what I've written does not in fact mean 'Mr. So-and-So is a thief and a drunkard.'" - pp 276-277, The Best of Myles - Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O'Brien)

Nope. That's not what I wanted to quote either. But, HEY!, it shd serve to prove that anything by Myles na gCopaleen deserves to be in my top 10. In fact, I hereby alter what my top 10 are by adding the previous 2 runner-up bks & the above-quoted bk. Let's just say that my top 10 are in base 13. 13's an unlucky number b/c it doesn't get a chance to be itself, it has to stay 10 or under. Some numbers have all the luck. HERE'S the part I wanted to quote:

"THE GAELIC

"A lady lecturing recently on the Irish language drew attention to the fact (I mentioned it as long ago as 1925) that, while the average English speaker gets along with a mere 400 words, the Irish-speaking peasant uses 4,000. Considering what most English speakers can achieve with their tiny fund of noises, it is a nice speculation to what extremity one would be reduced if one were locked up for a day with an Irish-speaking bore and bereft of all means of committing murder or suicide.

"My point, however, is this. The 400/4,000 ratio is fallacious; 400/400,000 would be more like it. There is scarcely a single word in the Irish (barring, possibly, Sasanach) that is simple and explicit. Apart from words with endless shades of cognate meaning, there are many with so complex a spectrum of graduated ambiguity that each of them can be made to express two directly contrary meanings, as well as a plethora of intermediate concepts that have no bearing on either. And all this strictly within the linguistic field. Superimpose on all that the miasma of ironic usage, poetic license, oxymoron, plamás, Celtic evasion, Irish bullery and Paddy Whackery, and it is a safe bet that you will find yourself very far from home. Here is an example copied from Dinneen and from more authentic sources known only to my little self:

"Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m.—act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling addressing, the crown of cast-iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff-faces, the stench of congealing badger's suet, the luminance of glue-lice, a noise made in an empty house by an unauthorized person, a heron's boil, a leprachaun's denture, a sheep-biscuit, the act of inflating hare's offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrake's clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustman's dumpling, a beetle's faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man's curse, a blasket, a 'kur', a fiddler's occupational disease, a fairy godmother's father, a hawk's vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blur-bottle's 'farm', a gravy flask. a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge-mill, a fair-day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoat's stomach-pump, a broken—

"But what's the use? One could go on and on without reaching anywhere in particular.

"Your paltry English speaker apprehends sea-going craft through the infantile cognition which merely distinguishes the small from the big. If it's small, it's a boat, and if it's big it's a ship. In his great book An tOileánach, however, the uneducated Tomás Ó Criomhthain uses, perhaps, a dozen words to convey the concept of super-marinity—drthrach long, soitheach, bád, naomhóg, bád raice, galbhád, púcan and whatever you are having yourself.

"The plight of the English speaker with his wretched box of 400 vocal beads may be imagined when I say that a really good Irish speaker would blurt out the whole 400 in one cosmic grunt. In Donegal there are native speakers who know so many million words that it is a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a life-time. Their life (not to say their language) becomes very complex at the century mark; but there you are." - pp 278-279, The Best of Myles - Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O'Brien)

Now, obviously, O'Brien is, ahem, taking some liberties here. But, at the same time he does have something to say about what's possible in languages-known-to-entirely-too-few. Imagine how funny he might be in Irish writing about English! At any rate, I'm so inspired by the above that I'm going to look up a list of the top 400 words in English & read them as "one cosmic grunt" at an open poetry reading 2 days from now. (Witness my document of this: "Cosmic Grunt / Betsy DeVos" - https://vimeo.com/203362094 )

But let's get back to something not in the least bit funny: the murder of a language thru the genocide of the language's speakers:

"As a telling example, we can take what happened in El Salvador in 1932, when after a peasant uprising anyone identified as Indian either by dress or physical appearance was rounded up and killed by Salvadoran soldiers. Some 25,000 people were killed in this way. Even three years later radio broadcasts and newspapers were calling for the total extermination of the Indians of El Salvador to prevent another revolt. Many people stopped speaking their languages to avoid being identified as Indian, in order to escape what they feared was certain death in a country which officially had no Indians." - p 6

"Linguistic diversity, then, is a benchmark of cultural diversity. Language death is symptomatic of cultural death: a way of life disappears with the death of a language." - p 7

& let's get real here, Holmes, there're people who want that to happen. I'm not one of them.

"The worst case, however, is Australia, with 90 percent of its estimated 250 Aboriginal languages near extinction. Only some 50 languages are widely spoken today and of these only 18 have at least 500 speakers. These 18 account for roughly 25,000 of the remaining 30,000 speakers of Aboriginal languages. There is no Aboriginal language that is used in all arenas of everyday life by members of a sizeable community. It is possible that only two or three of the languages will survive into the next century." - p 9

One of my preoccupations for decades is that languages don't necessarily translate into each other as easily as the naive might imagine. Some ideas are more native to one language than another, one can expect for there to be ideas in one language entirely lacking from another.

Let's take a somewhat shocking example. My motto (of sorts) is "Anything is Anything". In English that's a pretty straightforward tautology (at least at 1st glimpse). My multilingual friend Florian Cramer, who probably speaks at least 5 languages if not more, offered to translate it into German, his 1st language, for me, He concluded that there's no equivalent in German for "anything". That IS shocking isn't it? His translation had to substitute something like 3 to 5 words for "anything".

I tried Google translation & got "etwas". I then tried the Google translation to get "etwas" into English & got "something". Something ≠ Anything. Looking in my handy German dictionary I find "anything" translated as "etwas" or "alles". Reversing that in the same dictionary I find "etwas" translated as "something" 1st & "anything" 2nd. At any rate, I trust Florian's claim that "Anything is Anything" doesn't translate in its full meaning as easily as: "Etwas ist Etwas" (wch translates back as "Something is Something") or "Alles ist Alles" (wch translates back as "Everything is Everything").

"Thanks to the efforts of linguists, at least there will be some record of Ubykh with its unusual sound system containing 81 consonants and only 3 vowels. (Compare English with only 24 consonants and approximately 20 vowels, depending on the combination of sounds in a particular variety; or Rotokas, a language spoken on Bougainville island in Papua New Guinea, with the smallest number of sounds in any language, only 5 vowels and 6 consonants.)" pp 10-11

"In fact, from the evidence we have to date, it would appear that the most grammatically complicated and unusual languages of the world are often isolates—unrelated to any other language—and often spoken by small tribes whose traditional way of life is under threat. The majority of "world" languages such as Chinese, English, Spanish, and Arabic, spoken by 50 million or more people, are, by contrast, not isolates and they are also not as grammatically complex as many of the world's smaller languages." - p 11

OK, this is a tangent: I prefer complex culture, complex music, eg. I'm exasperated by the way global conqueror iTunes has reduced musical language to a level of imbecility, to "songs" played by "bands". iTunes might as well adapt Rotokas as its language, that way it would at least save something endangered.
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tENTATIVELY | 1 andere bespreking | Apr 3, 2022 |
Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are by Daniel Nettle. Library section 8B: Life Skills: Personal Growth. This fascinating book explains the “big five” personality types and how they manifest in the way we act and think. High scorers for “Extraversion” are outgoing and enthusiastic; low scorers are aloof and quiet. High scorers of “Neuroticism” are prone to stress and worry; low scorers are emotionally stable. High scorers of “Conscientiousness” are organized and self-directed; low scorers are spontaneous and careless. High scorers of “Agreeableness” are trusting and empathetic; low scorers are uncooperative and hostile. High scorers of “Openness” are creative, imaginative or eccentric; low scorers are practical and conventional.
Our personalities are all combinations of these types, but one often predominates. You can infer that if a parent is not conscientious, they will be less able to provide steady family involvement, a sensible routine, or quality parenting. Therefore if you prefer a steady and trustworthy spouse, you should select a conscientious self-starter who is self-directed and organized. We inherit our personality type. It creates about 50% of our personality. What is the rest? The rest might derive from early life experiences, illness, parenting, family structure, school life, friends – what we often call “nurture.” However, psychologists do not know much about these variables. How nurture and environment affects us is actually a very undeveloped area of psychology that is still largely unknown. Studies of identical twins reveal that those who were separated at birth and grew up apart have startlingly similar personalities, so nurture may have little to do with adult personality.
Which personality type of the five above do you think YOU are? I think I am high in “Openness” because I am an artist, creative, love to write and read, and express myself best through art, writing and music. I am open and accepting toward many kinds of people because art school taught me to accept and get along with students who were highly individual, unique and even eccentric. I also am “Conscientious” because I am organized and self-directed, have a smidge of “Agreeableness” (arguing upsets me), and “Neuroticism” (I have my worries like anyone else, but they do not drive my personality).
Determining your personality type gives you insight into who you are, why you make the choices you do, and how you can adjust your personality in beneficial ways if that is your desire.
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Epiphany-OviedoELCA | 5 andere besprekingen | Jun 18, 2021 |

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