[affgrff2]

This thought experiment is deeply flawed as it assumes that what you propose is possible and the outcome would be as you suggest. I am not convinced that people can bootstrap themselves like this and that language itself does not contain views, values and perspectives.

[loceng]

Step one with someone locked or frozen-stuck in such belief-logic is that improvement is possible - which is part of developing psychological flexibility.

You'd have to pay attention and find any step forward possible for them to begin to enter the discomfort that is holding them back - which may be the biggest challenge of their lives up until that point.

Ideally though, as we're all sheep to some degree - which is exactly what this HN post is stating in a more sophisticated way, and attempting to warn for this - ideally there's a culture of practices that develop oneself, so you're just going along with the "herd" - that path hopefully not corrupted and led by bad actors attempting to send us off a cliff or into their totalitarian pen.

[fransje26]

> that language itself does not contain views, values and perspectives.

Language itself does, in fact, very much contain views, values and perspectives. As an example, there are population groups that do not have a word for the color blue, and that cannot, in consequence, distinguish between green and blue objects. [0] [1] And that's an example that has been noticed throughout the world.

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-didn-t-even-see-the-colo...

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2023/how-blue-and-green-appeared-langua...

[somenameforme]

The claims in the first link, at least, should set off your BS detector. The colors they claim the group could trivially identify are very near identical in terms of 3d distance. By contrast, the colors they claim they could not determine the difference between are extremely far in 3d distance. It's objectively illogical. A quick search turns up that the claims are indeed false, and were fabricated by the BBC for a documentary. Here's [1] an email chain involving various researchers that worked on these experiments. The conclusion is that:

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"The experiment shown in the documentary was a dramatization; the genuine color experiments done with the Himba, some years before, used a different sort of stimuli and a different experimental method; the stimuli shown in the documentary were modeled on those used by Paul Kay and others in experiments on other groups; but in all of the relevant experiments, the dependent measure was reaction time (in finding a matching color or an oddball color), not success or failure.

The BBC's presentation of the mocked-up experiment — purporting to show that the Himba are completely unable to distinguish blue and green shades that seem quite different to us, but can easily distinguish shades of green that seem identical to us — was apparently a journalistic fabrication, created by the documentary's editors after the fact, and was never asserted by the researchers themselves, much less demonstrated experimentally."

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[1] - https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=18237