Billions of Sketches Reveal Hidden Cultural Variation in Human Concepts

That's a very cool paper. Weird that LTR people have this bias more than RTL readers? It may have been an artefact of the study design, they state in the results that most RTL readers were bilingual (and the LTR readers presumably not, given that the study was done in Canada), that the study instructions were in English and that this may have primed the RTL readers to be more LTR-y.

I remember is 2017 closer to the original release of the quick draw data set, there was some analysis of which way circles tended to be drawn in different counties. https://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/way-you-...

> To build the dataset, we keep only sketches that have been recognized by the neural network in the QuickDraw game. To prevent imbalance from overly represented countries (e.g., the US), we down-sample the data by focusing on the 100 most prominent countries and capping the number of drawings per category–country pair at 10,000. [p19]

single hand six in chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_number_gestures

Sometimes this is exaggerated. How do people view slide rules, telegraphs, and gramophones, or other historical artifacts from a further generation ago? They aren't that strange, and neither should rotary phone or film be to the current generation.

Three languages understood by humans: Music, Math, Money. Also donut.

1. Please read the paper before making that judgement; it is brief. The paper is focused on variation of visual representation of concepts, not variation of concepts themselves. That the concepts of “smiley face” or “pizza” are sketched differently by different people does not mean that those different sketches are actually representing different concepts. They very clearly are still representing the same concepts.

2. However, there can absolutely be variation of concepts without necessitating treatment of those variations as separate concepts (up to a point). There are very strong arguments for understanding concepts as being very often not rigid but fluid/cloudy. Football and crossword puzzles are both wildly different variations of the concept of “games” for example, yet that concept is able to contain such disparate variations without becoming absurd or impractical. See Douglas Hofstadter’s books “Surfaces and Essences” and “ Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies ”; Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” also touches on this, as do many other reputable thinkers in philosophy of mind.