i think you're up against something less straightforward in the linguistic bugbear. to a real extent it has become taboo to discuss intelligence of any kind, and it is a polite fiction that we are (via language) 'apes together strong' as the meme puts it. in personal conversations i've had some success agreeing and amplifying by stepping back from purely verbal to nonverbal communication skills and observational learning. if someone hits me with "akshully it's language that makes humanity smart" i don't fight them, i say "yes of course our ability to learn from one another is what made us human in the first place, and allowed us to evolve technologies instead of creating everything from scratch every generation. this is such an important fact that it predates language by a million years -- our ancestors who found they could carry a little water in half a gourd were observed doing so by peers, and mimicked. that's an older cultural tech than our hairlessness, and we're hairless because of it (and the increased utility of sweating). it's only this slow growth of culturally-evolved technology that allowed us the kind of surplus calories necessary for physically evolving such large brains (and such helpless infants and children). I completely agree with you about the role of social learning in the development of human intelligence." then you can just go on from there to discuss optimization.
i think you're up against something less straightforward in the linguistic bugbear. to a real extent it has become taboo to discuss intelligence of any kind, and it is a polite fiction that we are (via language) 'apes together strong' as the meme puts it. in personal conversations i've had some success agreeing and amplifying by stepping back from purely verbal to nonverbal communication skills and observational learning. if someone hits me with "akshully it's language that makes humanity smart" i don't fight them, i say "yes of course our ability to learn from one another is what made us human in the first place, and allowed us to evolve technologies instead of creating everything from scratch every generation. this is such an important fact that it predates language by a million years -- our ancestors who found they could carry a little water in half a gourd were observed doing so by peers, and mimicked. that's an older cultural tech than our hairlessness, and we're hairless because of it (and the increased utility of sweating). it's only this slow growth of culturally-evolved technology that allowed us the kind of surplus calories necessary for physically evolving such large brains (and such helpless infants and children). I completely agree with you about the role of social learning in the development of human intelligence." then you can just go on from there to discuss optimization.
Hehe sure