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All right, so we've talked about your interest in linguistic being sort of, I guess, I don't know,
maybe you always had this in the back of your mind, but I guess it's also relatively new since
you've moved to Japanese environment, right? Yeah, it's always been there. I mean, I did
language studies, I might have mentioned this in one of the previous ones of like doing Japanese
when I was in undergrad. I spent a lot of my high school years studying Spanish,
of which I can remember very, very little. Don't worry, you're just like 95% of the Americans
who spend seven years learning Spanish and only know how to say, I don't know.
I think the, what's the favorite phrase? I think it's, you know, the high school kids who learn
Spanish, something about a cat being in their pants. I think that was a weird one from way
back when. Maybe you didn't run into that, but it was some strange one.
So I guess the linguistic things are a thing, and I think you will
become weirdly aware of these things as you transition into bilingual personality,
which we have decided, or I have personally decided for you. I was going to say,
we is a strong use of the word. I'm using a royal we here. It's a royal we, isn't it? Okay, all right.
That you will, at the end of however long this journey will be, you shall be a fluent
bilingual, or Janglish at least. As long as I make it past the one and a half mark,
right? I can consider that a round up. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we can even test you,
you know, every once in a while. I would just like, stop the conversation in the middle,
and be like, my brain will just go, panic. Anyway, so linguistics aside, like what has
been sort of interesting to you, maybe, I don't know, as after you left grad school, because,
you know, I know that in grad school, you have very little bandwidth to be interested in a lot
of other things. What's bandwidth? Was that a thing you were supposed to have in grad school?
I must have missed something there. Maybe it was another class or something like that. Yeah, so
03:01
how did I sort of get like to that? And where did my interest go afterwards? Let's see. I finished,
right. And I took a direction, which already pursued some of the interests I would have had,
shall we say, in grad school. I did, while I was in grad school, I was actually doing,
I was still doing writing consultant work. I don't know if you knew about that. But
like at the writing center? I was working at the writing center. Yeah, yeah. And it was just
very low level. But I started doing that about halfway through as essentially an attempt to try
and like stay connected with that space with the writing and and just language of communication
and that type of field, if one can say. Like language, like language plus teaching? Yeah,
it's it's that in-between space of being able to help others see ways in which they can use
language. And in particular, I mean, it was obviously tuned around English at the time and
still very heavily is not bilingual yet. And the that sort of interest, right, is something that
sat with me for quite a while. Right. So it was already there. And I knew that would probably
grow if I were to take another step into the space, well, outside of the States. Right. So
into a language environment that I had very little familiarity with to be sort of surrounded by it.
Right. And yeah. So language was was there. Right. It was sort of already seated in a particular way.
It just hadn't had a lot of bandwidth or room to sort of grow in that in that space.
Right. But this does connect with the interest I sort of picked up maybe maybe a year in the
first year here was pretty much recovery. The second year here. We'll talk about that on another
episode. Len's year of recovering. It was all a blur.
But yeah, so so the first year I got through in the second year, you know, slowly starting to
to spend a little more focus on things like learning Japanese, right. Getting myself
out and sort of talking to more people or trying to do more things on a regular basis.
And one of the things that in this sort of language space caught my attention
was something that caught everybody's attention, which was AI tools. Right.
In particular, you know, the one that always actually they don't they don't need my
06:05
publicity of them. You all know the the one I'm talking about, the AI tool that went boom,
you know, two years ago or whatever it was. And everybody has a certain type of generative type
of generative AI, you know, of which has had a number of sometimes funny and sometimes painful
and distressing to watch, you know, news reportings and a variety of other things.
I mean, you know, we're not monetizing this podcast so we can all talk about it.
No, but I just don't like giving them more airtime. It's fine. OpenAI and ChatGPT are
the ones that made the splash. Let's not even pretend like we have any meaningful market
that could influence people's opinion about ChatGPT. Good point. Right. Don't don't pretend
that we have a market. Got it. Yeah, that's that's a good starting point.
OK, so after grad school, after recovery, you had this, like, sudden, like,
marriage of language, technology, education, like all coming together in a form of ChatGPT.
Yeah, it was it came together. And if I perhaps there was more than one
nucleation, right, to give it a chemistry term, but it's at least one of them was
as the tool of ChatGPT became rapidly, easily accessible. Right. And they'd already gone
through iterations that didn't really see a lot of the public daylight. But this one had finally
kind of overcome a couple of the previous iterations. So being picked up. Right.
And so when this happened, the reason these things started to bleed together for me,
bleed together, link together, was that the response to them in the educational space.
I mean, it horrified me, actually, I was I was both horrified and angry, maybe angry
because. Elaborate, elaborate. This is interesting. Yeah. It wasn't everyone that reacted this way,
but a few of the early responses and even up to now, I understand it better now, but it's still
kind of frustrating. You get a lot of the educational spaces that saw this and responded
with like a giant recoil away from the tool. Like, do not do not even observe the tool. Do not
do not acknowledge its existence in the room. If you could, if you could personify, I don't think
09:06
that's the right word for this. The pink elephant. Anthropomorphize. Anthropomorphize,
you know, the the chat GPT's existence. It would be the equivalent of the the.
Not the metaphor, the pink elephant in the room. Right. Like, don't talk about the pink elephant
in the room because it's a pink elephant in the room. Do you know do you know this one?
I mean, I know I know the elephant in a room, but what's the pink elephant in a room?
I think that's just the full version. I think that's just like it's like, really? Yeah, I think
so. At least it's either that or since I've been here, I've like merged like a variety of like
other variations. I'll have to get back to you. I have never heard of colored elephant variation
of this. So there's this is a complete deviation, but I'm going to introduce one place where it
could have come in. Get used to it. Which have you ever read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
Absolutely not. Even though I know it's a classic. Okay. So there is a particular moment in that
novel of which there is a. Is it it's been so long, but there is there is, let's say not to
ruin any bits of the story, there is a particular object which can only be seen by attempting not
to see it. So you're trying to perceive it with like your peripheral vision. And there is essentially
a sort of little ongoing narration there, which is very reminiscent of an elephant in the room.
And I think one of the things they use is painting is like painting an object like,
you know, a ridiculous color, and one of them might have been, you know,
a vibrant pink, right? It's something that would just not make sense. And so therefore,
you know, comedy, sci fi tech insert here. That's why it can't be seen, right? Because it's just
so ridiculous that it doesn't, it doesn't compute with the people observing it. Anyway, so I don't
know if it comes from that. Okay, like, I don't I don't mean to extend your the derailment. Yeah.
I have definitely heard of elephants in a room. And I think it already served the purpose of,
you know, talking about the job, right? Something without talking about something. Right? Yep. Yep.
But like, I wonder, at some point, people felt like it's kind of like a cliche that people use
all the time, because I guess, as humans, we love talking about things without actually addressing
it. And yeah, yeah, maybe they felt like they need to add a little more punch to it, like make it even
more ridiculous how we're not addressing it directly. And made it pink. You're you could
12:05
be onto something. I mean, I just did. I did a very quick little little Google here, right? And
I tried to keep my my key typing light. And oddly enough, Urban Dictionary actually has a pretty
good reputation in some of the linguist community, which is a credible source. It's a fascinant. So
the way it's been described to me, at least, and I am I am not a linguist. For anybody listening,
I'm not a linguist. I am just vaguely on like the very outskirts and have received this information,
where it acts as a crowdsource platform, right? So the development of language over time is actually
like, not perfect, right? There's probably maybe bad actors and otherwise that exist in those spaces.
But the idea of watching language evolve over time is much more feasible on something like Urban
Dictionary versus like Merriam-Webster, right? It that is, you know, time and time and time they
hold on to things they spend a lot of time attempting to decide whether something is a new
definition to be included, etc. Urban Dictionary is like, this is the one that we got, you know,
from somebody today. And, you know, anyway, in order to say that pink elephant in the room is
just described the same way that elephant in the room would be, but it is, in fact, just another
accepted version. So I would have to dig even deeper to find out where the color comes from,
right? Okay, so my my money is on people. Because we love to use hyperboles whenever we can. And,
but there's no hyperbole appropriate for elephant. So they needed to come up with like the new
animal, and it is a pink elephant. Or, and this will need to be fact checked, but I wonder if it
started after the Disney's original Dumbo was published. Because that movie, I don't know if
you remember the animation, the OG animation of Dumbo has a pretty extensive section on a very,
for the lack of better word trippy segment where baby Dumbo accidentally gets drunk
and starts seeing all these hallucinations of pink elephants, right? So remember, I wonder
if the pinkness came from ever since I don't know when the Disney movie came out, like,
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I don't know, maybe it must be one of the earlier Disney films. Yeah, you're about to bring up the
dating or something. But that's that's where I put my money. But I'll leave you to the fact
checking. Oh my god, what were we talking about? I do know what we were talking about. So let's
let's leave it on this. You know what, I'm going to add it to the list.
Research about pink elephant. Yeah. Oh, don't don't worry. There's also white elephants
based on Urban Dictionary. So we'll get to those next time. We'll get to them in another in another
episode. So all right. So I can I can bring us back. I think my mind seems to have held up.
That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and find us on x at
Ego de Science. That is E I G O D E S C I E N C. See you next time.
