This idea has been looked at by mainstream psychologists and sociologists for decades. This New York Times article relates the thought back to a 1940s article. That article and the popular novel 1984 (published in 1949) are likely the two primary sources of our popular understanding of this phenomenon.

I particularly liked one bit of that article:



The example it uses is that in English we don't use masculine/feminine words, but many languages do. So if I say "I met a friend yesterday." I don't have to tell you if they were a male or female friend. In French, however, I would say "J'ai rencontré avec un ami hier." Now you know they were a male friend. When I think about the situation in French I have to consider that when I speak. This does not mean, however, that the French have a stronger sense of gender in relationships. On the contrary, most Americans I know consider the gender of their friends when spending time with them. But they don't have to for them to speak correctly or to think about the situation in English.

From my understanding there are mixed opinions but I believe most say that, in general, our language does not limit our potential for thought. However, given that culture and language grew up together, our cultural values get imposed on our language. In many cultures it is not proper to use the word "no" directly. It's just rude. In English, however, we are taught to use this word and to be direct "No means no" and other such phrases come to us from our culture. And the thing is: our language attempts to be a reflection of our thoughts. It is our attempt to relay our thoughts to others. If you have ever tried to search for words to explain something then you understand that while language may not impact your ability to think it definitely impacts your ability to tell others what you are thinking.

An article in Scientific American comes to this conclusion:


But I would argue that it isn't really the new words themselves that give people these thoughts. It is the thoughts behind the words they are being introduced to and their newfound ability to relay thoughts they may have already had, but were previously unable to speak about, that gives them these seemingly new thoughts. For example, I would never have thought about this color by relating it to kaya wood before I studied go. I would have just called it gold or maybe wheat colored. But learning something new gave me something new to say about that color.

Most evidence presented for or against this idea is anecdotal and until we have an objective way to measure thought patterns inside the human brain we can't say anything objective about how language impacts thought because all we know about another's thoughts comes from their language (be it spoken, written, or body language).

_________________
"You have to walk before you can run. Black 1 was a walking move.
I blushed inwardly to recall the ignorant thoughts that had gone through
my mind before, when I had not realized the true worth of Black 1."
-Kageyama Toshiro on proper moves

Ok, but that information is meaningless without the following piece of information:
The majority of go players lives in Asia, and all of the infrastructure to become a "really great" player is located in Asia: Europe/America don't have inseis and we certainly don't have a meaningful pro system yet.

So just going by these numbers, even if Asians were culturally/genetically handicapped at playing Go, you would still expect them to outperform the nations where Go is a niche sport even for hardcore nerds (i.e. the "West").


Nah, I won't agree with that. Go strength is such a specific cognitive skill that I believe how we "think about the game" makes little to no difference.
Reading out complicated fights/judging a position in Go is a mental exercise akin to a physical exercise, yet you surely wouldn't suggest that maybe the best weightlifters/boxers/runners in the world are that good because they "think differently" about their respective sport.

I can google as well as the next fellow, but instead of tossing academic studies at each other, let's ask ourselves if it seems plausible or not that the Asian dominance in high level go could be related tendency to think about the game differently than many Westerners.

Just to take things to the extreme for a moment - would anyone argue that all people perceive everything in the same way? Surely not. So may we for a moment draw back from the language-thought connection, and just say that different people think differently. We also know from our own experience that different people (take Robert Jasiek as a prominent example from our community) think about go differently than other people do. The way that comes naturally to me is without a doubt not the best way, and although I am not able to define what the good way entails, I am sure that it comes more naturally to some other people.

Why do some of you find it so implausible that what applies to individuals might also apply to groups of people that have something or other in common?

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Patience, grasshopper.

One reason it's implausible is that if individuals often think differently within the same culture, then this is incompatible with an entire culture thinking differently from another culture but with all constituents thinking the same way. It's certainly in tension with the claim that most of them think in the same way. Another reason it's implausible is that people in this thread are appealing to linguistic differences, but if people think differently while speaking the same language, then it's clearly shown that language underdetermines how we think which greatly undermines its ability to help explain why a particular culture might all think the same way.

A further reason some of us are skeptical is probably because some of us aren't using the so-called "Western" style of thinking: isolating from context, oversimplifying explanations etc... Some of us are thinking of culture as highly complex, contextual and so not easily pinned down according to those generalizations. What exactly is "the East" as a cultural entity? China, Japan and Korea? Let's set aside all the problems with bundling those three nations together as if they had some sort of common fundamental culture (which is nonsense). Do we want to say that Japan is worse than China and Korea because they think more like Westerners now? How would you show that? What are the relevant ways of thinking and have they been shown to be prominent not only in Japanese people in general, but in Japanese Go players? You can't chalk it up to the post-war Westernization, since Japan was still a powerful force in Go for a long time after that. How to you exclude concerns about the popularity of the game and infrastructure as an explanation? If Japan's loss of dominance is not due to thinking about Go in a non-Eastern way, then why would we suppose that must be the explanation in the West?

EDIT: By the way, don't Japanese counter words often group things according to form and function? Isn't this a supposedly Western way of grouping things and aren't counter words going to be pretty fundamental to linguistic practices? I'm not super familiar with Japanese, so someone might be able to correct me.

Well no, but the point I'd agree with is rather trite. We don't see a mass of Japanese (or Irish) chess grandmasters but then we don't have much a chess culture in either country and no great nexus of chess players of very high strength either. Is it really surprising at all that a handful of Asian countries with the largest concentration of strong amateur players produces all the great professional players? Why do we need to bring up arguments about different thought processes? If you have the vast majority of strong players then it'd be rather odd that you didn't produce the vast majority of professionals no? I mean go is young and not particularly popular in the West, you don't need any differences in how we think to explain why there aren't top professional players. I mean, turning professional in go happens very young and it's not exactly going to appeal as a career option to most Western parents just to start with.

You won't even agree that it's a possible reason?

What do you mean by "specific cognitive skill?" Go seems to me a rather multi-faceted skill, and if it were only a matter of reading the computers would have left us behind long ago. Don't you think that different people think about the game differently?

As to your comparison with other sports, I don't really understand your point. Thinking isn't the defining skill in the sports you mention.

Is it? Women think differently from each other, but they do have some ways of thinking in common with each other that are different than the way men think, no?

I'm not sure about this either. When you point out that we of the same culture are thinking "differently" (not agreeing with one another?) then that might still be evidence that we are all just using a similar type of logic to prove differing points, but that we still share the way of making a point.

Fun point!

Is it? I honestly don't know, but if we accept the premise that Western thought stems from the Greeks, we could at least say that Asian thought doesn't.

The fact that Japan no longer dominates does not indicate to me that they are playing bad go, but rather that the great go that they play has been surpassed by even better go by Koreans and Japanese. I agree with all of you who suggest that it's natural that if a game is a national passtime, that that nation will likely produce better players than another, but don't things become national passtimes because parts of the population excel at them?


Because it might hold a key to playing better go.

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Patience, grasshopper.

"Thinking" isn't the defining skill in Go, either. An intellectual who has never played the game will be just as bad as anyone else who has never played.
In fact, the intellectual, by virtue of being an adult, will probably be worse than a child who just started playing.
The defining skill in playing Go is "playing Go".


I don't see how that statement corresponds to reality, seeing as even the strongest bots currently get completely tactically owned by even the lowest ranked pros (on 19x19 at least).

I wouldn't accept this claim. It's not my experience. I would accept the claim that women often have similar sorts of experiences due to being grouped under a highly essentialized label and are pushed, culturally, towards thinking about certain things more frequently then others, but I take neither of these to constitute ways of thinking in any deep sense.



I'm not sure how that counts as evidence for the claim that we're all using the same fundamental logic to come to different conclusions. It is compatible with that hypothesis, though. The difficulty is that the analogy between how individuals think differently and how cultures do no longer holds, because cultures are the bearers of different logics but individuals are merely the bearers of different conclusions (and different logics only to the extent that they belong to a culture or the like). So then you can't appeal to the way individuals think differently to make it plausible that cultures do. In fact, you would now have to show why we shouldn't accept the conclusion that ALL humans think according to the same logic, and cultural differences are just tendencies to make certain points with that logic that other cultures don't.



Sure, but does Asian thought stem from some sort of common source in a way that justifies thinking anything falls under the general label "Asian thought"? I also think we also have to be careful about claiming, straightforwardly, that Western thought stems from the Greeks. It also has deep roots in the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and, more recently, developments such as the Enlightenment. Neither of these are mere inheritances of Greek thought (not that Greek thought was itself homogeneous).



Well, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg on the surface, which suggests to me that the answer isn't obvious and probably isn't simple. That is, I think, at least my main problem with many of the suggestions in this thread that evoke East vs West dichotomies: the real story is a lot more complicated than the nice and neat Orientalist narrative being given.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

or just:
Try, try again.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

It could be that the reason Canada is so good at hockey and Jamaica not so good is because of the way we think about life. But it's more likely that the main reason Canada is so much better than tropical countries at hockey is because there are a lot more players in Canada and a lot more interest and funding in the sport.

To me, this is the main problem with your argument. You seem to be ignoring all of the obvious and rather indisputable factors that cause China, Japan, and Korea to be better at Go, and are proposing an alternative hypothesis. But your hypothesis doesn't explain anything that is not already explained by existing factors and so far no evidence has been offered to support the hypothesis. It's not enough for something to be possible - it's possible Russell's Orbiting Teapot exists - the hypothesis must either explain something previously unexplained or have evidence backing it up in order for it to have value (and only the latter says anything about its truth value).

As a possible example of evidence that could back your hypothesis up, gather groups of two players, both relatively strong and of about equal strength, one of whom was raised in the East and the other the West. Ask them to evaluate a set of positions and explain their thinking. Then ask a player stronger than both of them which one has a better understanding of the position. If you could show that repeatedly the Eastern player is evaluated to have a better understanding of the position than his Western counterpart, it would lend weight to your argument.

_________________
We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

I'm not ignoring the obvious, I just don't find the obvious particularly interesting - do you? While I don't have any evidence that being Asian influences one's potential go prowess, there is evidence that being Asian reflects how one views relationships and conflicts, approaches and solves problems, and places one's priorities. All of these are elements of go skill. I understand that I haven't proven or even demonstrated any causality, but I personally don't really care. I'm not a scientist but rather casual observer. The most interesting observation I made today was the extent of the resistance to even considering the possibility that one's cultural, linguistic and racial background might play a role in one's skills.

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Patience, grasshopper.

It's off topic, but proof, evidence, and the like depend a lot on the audience, and what the audience is willing to believe.

"Evidence", by its very nature, includes some degree of uncertainty, and at some point, to believe anything at all, you simply have to accept it as (probably) true. If you insist on absolute proof, you will never be able to believe in anything - orbiting teapots, gravity, or the meal you had for lunch.

The scientific method is useful in that it appears to have a track record for improving understanding. But do we really know more about the world than people that draw their conclusions from superstitions like fortune tellers or voodoo dolls?

Maybe we do, and maybe we don't. Because of uncertainty, we don't really know anything - we just get confidence in what we believe in for some reason or another, and it makes it easier to sleep at night. Maybe for you, that thing that brings you confidence is the scientific method, but maybe for some guy down the street, his fortune cookies give him comfort.

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be immersed

Fair enough, there's nothing wrong with putting out the hypothesis. I just don't see why anyone should believe your hypothesis when there's an obvious explanation for the strength disparity between East Asians and others, whether or not it's as interesting.

For what it's worth, I'm not opposed to the concept that our different cultures affect our innate Go playing potential. I think it'd be very interesting if found to be true. I'm just extremely skeptical that it is true.

Kirby, you can of course go the Nihilistic route and claim that nothing can be known about the Universe. However, I think most people are okay with making some basic assumptions about the nature of the Universe as a grounds for their claims about knowledge, even if it's not an "absolute knowledge". If you're not, then there's nothing more that can really be said. If you are okay with that, then assuming we can agree on what these assumptions should be we have a starting ground for determining what is correct and what is incorrect. One of the assumptions I personally hold is that the world I observe around me is at least an approximation of the real world that exists.

I would especially like to object to your last paragraph. I don't base my beliefs off of what makes me feel best, I base them off of which ones offer accurate models of the world I seem to observe around me. Believing something just cause it makes you feel good is called being delusional. The reason I claim the scientific method is objectively a better basis for building knowledge (if you accept that it can be built at all) than fortune cookies is that the scientific method can accurately make verifiable predictions about the world we observe around us.

_________________
We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

It's tricky to say that the scientific method makes verifiable predictions, because the future is unknown. Further, the capability of the scientific method is limited to the model you choose to adopt. You might have a hypothesis, after repeated trials, the hypothesis does not hold, so you adjust your hypothesis. That hypothesis seems to correspond to your observations over and over again, so you believe it's true. But then new observations make you change your mind again.

This is one approach, and to be honest, I share your viewpoint in adopting this approach.

But not everyone uses this approach to make decisions, and I don't think that it's fair to call them delusional.

For example, you might have a person that grew up all of his life being told that, if he threw salt over his back before eating dinner, he'd have good luck. Maybe he's done that all of his life, and he can recount good this that have happened to him, so he starts to believe in this superstition.

Now later, it may be the case that he throws salt over his back before eating dinner, and something really bad happens. He could take two approaches:

1.) He could think, "Hey, this is just a stupid custom that has no scientific basis. I don't believe it." I think this is a valid approach.

2.) He could think, "Well, my mom told me this was the way things worked. And all of my life, it's worked this way. It doesn't seem to be working. There must be another reason. Maybe if you throw salt over your back it works usually, but on the second Tuesday every month, it doesn't".

So sure, you can be quick to call the second approach delusional, or superstitious. But the guy has reasons and life experiences for believing the way he does.

The "scientific" approach may not seem to have personal or cultural rationale tied to it, but the fact is, everyone has their own personal and cultural backgrounds. I don't think it's right to claim that those that have a reason for believing something in a way that's not scientific are delusional.

It's entirely possible that some of these cultural and ancient superstitions have some sort of truth to them that can't be found using the scientific method.

I think it's too simplistic to simply say that these viewpoints are delusional or biased - it's just that the bias present in the scientific method is commonly accepted in modern society.

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be immersed

Nice of you to start this topic! I've wondered on and off whether culture has something to do with East Asians being very good at weiqi.

Well, we can begin by saying that weiqi is one expression of Chinese culture that has existed up to the present. Anyone who has grown up in China or any country in which Chinese culture has been highly influential (e.g., Japan and Korea) will have seen weiqi being played at one time or another. So, the average Chinese or other East Asian person will likely already know something associated with the game, namely the culture that produced it.

When a Westerner learns Go for the first time, he/she approaches it from a Western viewpoint, of course. Since Go is a strategic board game, the Westerner will think that it is much like Chess. However, in Chess play depicts two armies in battle, fighting to the death. As well, one begins with a fixed number of pieces and that number drops as the game progresses, with pieces being moved here and there in specific sequences to avoid capture. Think soldiers moving around to position themselves for an attack on their enemy. Eventually the king on one side is captured and the game is over. In Go, it is the reverse. Therein, play depicts an empty piece of land that is slowly populated and ownership is disputed through a series of battles. Hence, a war. The number of pieces increases as the game progresses, with pieces being added to in specific patterns to preclude capture and subsequent removal. Think divisions being reinforced by more divisions. Eventually all the points on the Go board are occupied and both players agree to end the game; playing past a certain point means the board will become overpopulated, with one side eventually becoming vulnerable to capture by the other due to being reduced to one liberty. In Chess, one either plays until checkmate or a draw due to only a white king and black king remaining on the board.

In a nutshell, the objective in Chess is to move around and capture the king. In Go, the objective is to claim land and build up.

Nevertheless, the capture objective associated with Chess colors most Westerners' initial experiences with Go. Capture is an important part of Go, but it is not the most important thing. Even in Chess, capture is important, but capturing alone does not win the game. When a Westerner encounters the mindset needed to win in Go, it's a new experience, as there are very few rules in the game, as opposed to Chess, with its prescribed starting setup and piece movements. One could be forgiven for thinking that Go must be a form of draughts!

I like to think that Chess is a "hunting" game and that Go is a "farming" game. When hunting, you need only be on the lookout for your prey until the opportunity presents itself to take it - and make sure you do not become prey yourself! Chess is similar in that you need to be aware of how many of your pieces are available and their relative positions, so that when the opportunity presents itself, checkmate! When farming, you need to be aware of what plants you have, what soil you have, what climate you have, etc. Environmental factors are more important when farming than when hunting; it is always possible to find animals to hunt, depending on the time of year. However, farming has to be carried out in accordance with seasonal changes, so the farmer must be always attentive to changes in the environment. Finally, successful farming requires constant care and attention to the crop until harvest time, whereas hunting often requires just a good hunting weapon and waiting for the opportunity to take prey with one stroke of the spear. Thus, an episode of successful hunting, while still requiring prior preparation, does not take long to execute. In Go, one does not expect to win in one fell swoop, but rather plants groups and nurses them according to environmental changes on the board as the occur throughout the course of a game, so that they grow.

A few stray thoughts to add the mix:

1. I suspect language (in the limited sense the paper uses) cannot deeply influence thought, but thought can certainly influence language, and the end result may be the same. Japanese culture values vagueness of language in many contexts. The language has acquired mechanisms (e.g. omission of subject) to reflect that. The resulting vague language can be the deuce to render into another language (e.g. Japanese rules into English).

2. Likewise, a nation can have a view of itself which can permeate everything it does. This too can affect language, and so while thought is ultimately affected by culture, words become the medium of that effect. A military nation may use military words for its favourite game and lead to a certain way of thinking about that game. Compare views of chess and go. In the case of Japan, they see themselves as a nation of paddy farmers in a harsh environment who have had to earn to cooperate socially to a degree other nations (they believe) do not. They find it easy to view go as a game of territory with cooperating groups resisting outsiders. True or not, they believe it.

3. If language is defined to include the written form, there is a case to believe that the use of characters helps predispose oriental brains to develop facility with small shape recognition, which can conceivably help with pattern recognition in go.

4. I think there is one distinct difference between the western and oriental approaches to learning go which does not get enough mention. We tend to believe that in any process it is the result that matters - any means can be used to achieve it and not achieving perfection means failure. The oriental tendency is to attach importance instead to how you proceed. Perfection is unobtainable but you can always strive towards it. Only the best means for that should be used. Success is defined as having the right approach (and this adds a moral nuance - the Way).

5. The difference in 4 is a matter of degree, of course and it is possible to find examples of both tendencies on both sides of the cultural divide. But as an example of stressing the importance of the right way of studying go (i.e. language being used to control thought?), I've just been reading a piece by Kada Katsuji in which he berates those (Japanese) amateurs who study fuseki and joseki because they apparently have results that can be used immediately in games, but who avoid life & death problems because the results seem often never to show up in games (e.g. "under the stones"). My impression is that this joseki tendency is especially strong among western amateurs. Whatever, Kada argues that so many josekis involves life & death problems that you can't learn them properly unless you study L&D first. But there are even deeper reasons why L&D should be emphasises - including the fact that he had L&D books to sell, of course Is not language affecting thought a major tenet of advertising? If so, can we explain all differences in what works for advertisers in each country purely on cultural grounds?

Sorry about that. Perhaps uncalled for and just the result of not winning an argument on the internet. I do appreciate Kirby coming to my defense though. I'm actually not a big fan of fortune cookies.

This also jibes with Nesbitt's chapter on the social origins of mind, which argues that the mentality of the Chinese stems from an environment conducive to the development of an agricultural society as opposed a Western mentality shaped by having hunters as predecessors. (Note also John Fairbairn's mentioning of the Japanese seeing themselves as a nation of rice farmers). The idea that our strengths and weaknesses are shaped by evolution isn't entirely new, and besides, we all know how good farmers are at go. Joking aside, I would like to come back to a related point:


Taking my side of this argument has lost a Harvard president his job, but since I'm already in a little deep, I might as well keep swimming. As with Asians and go, there is an obvious argument explaining why men and women may tend to set different priorities, have different skill sets and different interests. It's just a given fact that societies push men and women in different directions. It's also not just a matter of what they may think about frequently, but whether there is a preference for example for thinking about relationships between people as opposed to relationships between objects. Would this be a difference in a deep sense? How deep is deep? Do we know at what depth good thinking about go kicks in, and does it make any difference whether the factors involved are social or evolutionary? I suppose you are implying that there are no aspects of gender based thought that wouldn't change if the societal pressures were to shift, but that's also a hard hypothesis to back up. Would there be more female pilots and go players? Who knows? It would be similarly difficult to remove Asians from their social context and teach them go.

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Patience, grasshopper.

“Are people just people, or might there be something like an Asian way of thinking that is different for playing go?”

Maybe off-topic, in this off-topic thread. If the question is changed -- from "advantageous" to "different",
in other words, "different, however so slightly, that is, 'more Asian'" -- then I think this is a very interesting question,
and there is probably anecdotal evidence to support either way.

daal, what do you think?

Yeah, like I said, it's trite. Then again, so is saying "my cup fell to the ground from my hand because of the force of gravity." I think if you want to argue "Asians and Westerners think differently" you might have a more interesting conversation than "Asians and Westerners think differently and that's why Asians are better at go" because of all the alternative hypotheses that don't need to invoke anything particularly controversial in the latter. The other issue is working backwards from "the Japanese are better at Go" to "the Japanese and the British don't think alike" is problematic because you're assuming the controversial part and trying to prove the accepted bit. Working the other direction would be more interesting.

Also, even if someone proved that Asians are better at go than Europeans simply because more Asians play go, this doesn't say anything about whether Asians think differently to Westerners.

Chinese civilization arose in a region of East Asia with a subtropical climate and an abundance of waterways - better for farming than for hunting. The earliest European civilizations, at least the Continental European ones, arose in regions with thick forests, high mountains and hilly terrain, and short summers. In such an environment agriculture has a limited role, so it was not as influential as hunting & gathering. Agriculture was more important in the Mediterranean Basin than in Northern Europe, but even in the Mediterranean hunting and gathering still served to fill market niches which could not be filled by agriculture alone.

I once read in the introduction of the book Go Nation: Chinese Masculinities and the Game of Weiqi in China, written by Marc L. Moskovitz and published by the University of California Press, that the reason Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Go players are stronger than those in Western countries is because in the former, pros have a stronger presence and so amateurs know exactly how limited their own skills are when compared with those of pros.

I believe that those who approach weiqi with a "child's mind" and spend time learning as much as possible about it without preconceptions as to how it ought to be, will in time become strong. Even strong enough to play against strong East Asian amateurs.