speedrunner: ok coming up is a skip that saves about 7 seconds (does a completely incomprehensible frame-perfect blink-and-you’ll-miss-it skip without batting an eye) alright cool
STORIES THAT WERE TOLD BY PEOPLE SPEAKING LANGUAGES WE NO LONGER KNOW
STORIES TOLD BY PEOPLE LOST TO THE VOID OF TIME
STORIES
GUYS LOOK AT THIS
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS
GUYYYYYSSSS
“Here’s how it worked: Fairy tales are transmitted through language, and the shoots and branches of the Indo-European language tree are well-defined, so the scientists could trace a tale’s history back up the tree—and thus back in time. If both Slavic languages and Celtic languages had a version of Jack and the Beanstalk (and the analysis revealed they might), for example, chances are the story can be traced back to the “last common ancestor.” That would be the Proto-Western-Indo-Europeans from whom both lineages split at least 6800 years ago. The approach mirrors how an evolutionary biologist might conclude that two species came from a common ancestor if their genes both contain the same mutation not found in other modern animals.”
How do they control for stories that were borrowed, which almost certainly happened?
“ Unlike genes, which are almost exclusively transmitted “vertically”—from parent to offspring—fairy tales can also spread horizontally when one culture intermingles with another. Accordingly, much of the authors’ study focuses on recognizing and removing tales that seem to have spread horizontally. When the pruning was done, the team was left with a total of 76 fairy tales.”
This article doesn’t say how, but I bet those methods are in the paper.
For this, they used a library of cultural traits for each culture a fairy tale occurred in, and then measured the likelihood that trait t occurs in culture c due to either phylogenetic proximity (inheritance) or spatial proximity (diffusion), using autologistic regression:
(Autologistic regression is a graphical model where connected nodes have dependencies on each other, except instead of an undirected graph, ALR is a special case that requires sequential binary data and assumes a spatial ordering. In this case, the binary data are the cultural features).
Cultural traits states are generated using Monte-Carlo simulation and phylogenetic or spatial influence are fitted as local dependencies between the nodes in the graph representing cultural traits. I can’t find this in the paper (though it may be mentioned in the citation of the method they used), but presumably if the spatial influence exceeds the phylogenetic influence by a certain threshold, the trait is removed.
Hi! I know you’re ask box is chock-full so I’ll keep it brief! I love your blog so much, and seeing all of your ADHD posts make me genuinely go ‘this is me!’ But, I know that ADHD is commonly misdiagnosed as depression or anxiety in adults, and going through the long process of getting an official diagnosis doesn’t appeal to me tbh, especially because my GP makes me uncomfortable. Any advice for how to get a diagnosis without having to be ‘bad enough’ for the NHS to take me seriously?
I’m afraid my experience with mental health help on the NHS was never very good, primarily because they just don’t have the resources available for a lot of it. The way we got my brother diagnosed for his executive dysfunction disorder, was to find a private therapist and asked for an ADHD test. I think he was something like 60 quid for his one evaluation session, but prices and mileage may vary depending on where you are in the UK.
It’s also how I got diagnosed over here too in the US. I just asked my therapist about it being a possibility and her response was “well there’s no harm in finding out” so we did some tests and I scored a whopping 95%. I was expecting it to be like 50-50 that maybe I’d have it, but uh, nah haha
The test here is fairly similar to the one I did with her:
It also helpfully breaks the results down into whether you’re more hyper leaning, inattentive or if you’re a combination. I have a combination type, but I lean heavily towards hyperactivity, which I find bleakly hilarious with my chronic fatigue. It feels like owning a sports car propped up on cinder blocks most days, the engine’s revving but we’re not going anywhere.
It might not hurt to take the above test and see how you score. After that you can decide whether you want to seek out a formal diagnosis, either on the NHS or privately. For what it’s worth you wouldn’t need to tell your GP you want a referral for ADHD, you can just ask for a referral because you want to better manage the stress in your life or something.(I’d say “get a new GP”, but I know that’s not always an option. It certainly wasn’t for me.)
