Ideas don't form as words. The translation into human language takes time, but if it's possible to skip that step, it leaves more space for one to address the problem at hand.

Language is a late development in human evolution; for millions of years all human thought was preverbal, but this does not mean that it was not rational. We simply lacked the ability to communicate and record thought.

The thing about preverbal thought is that it's fast - so blindingly fast that when you consciously skip the translation of thought into words (an error-prone process at the best of time) it is possible to move from one intermediate concept to another with alacrity and thus to a final conclusion with much less effort. I believe that the training of such preverbal thought to a particular discipline is perhaps all that there is to what we name mastery.

This explains some of the difficulty that arises when a master attempts to describe to someone else the thought process by which they arrived at a decision - since the intermediate steps were not internally verbalized, it is a struggle to reconstruct them into a form that can be described to another. Brilliant individuals are frequently terrible teachers for the subject of their expertise; I think it is likely that this is simply because the inaccuracies of translating preverbal thought to speech (and the temporal mismatch, since the translation process is many times slower) render the final description disastrously incomplete.

This evening I had a striking memory of when I first learned math - and how I would figure out the answer to a problem in my head, then laboriously attempt to reconstruct the solution on paper for my teacher, who insisted that all steps be shown. This schooling trained me away from native ability, toward more rigidly structured (and documentable, and repeatable) forms of thought.

It's been shown in numerous studies that learning music at a young age has a significant beneficial effect on general intelligence, and tonight it occurs to me that this is likely because playing music is an almost entirely preverbal act - thought translated to action without the need for deep self-reflection and self-evaluation. The same benefit can be found in games of strategy, where no inner monologue is beneficial to the chain of reasoning required to discern the optimal move.

None of this is intended to discount the need for language; it is of course the foundation for our process of passing on and receiving knowledge efficiently (since experiential learning, while valuable, takes incredible amounts of time when applied to complex disciplines). It is simply a meditation upon an observation, and an unconsciously applied technique for solving problems.

All of this occurred to me in a moment; it has taken me perhaps 20 minutes to write it all down, even in so fragmentary a fashion as I have just done. Language is slow. Next time you need to think about a problem, skip the intermediate steps. The thought that comes before the words is all that you need.

Whee!

So, the 1.4.0 release of Gaia is now up! It was supposed to be released last week, but some major surgery on the internals caused a bunch of bugs to crop up which had to be squashed. Hopefully we should now be in a better position to deal with performance issues than we were previously, and we've gotten rid of a number of longstanding bugs along the way, so I think it's really a win all around. Enjoy!

...to change the minds of those who have been seduced by the irrational? Is skepticism really so difficult?

Every prayer constitutes an experiment. We must be ruthlessly honest in evaluating our data.