Love this exchange between Daniel Kahneman and Tyler Cowen:
COWEN: Do you think that working outside of your native language in any ways influenced your ideas on psychology? It makes you more aware of thinking fast versus thinking slow? Or not? KAHNEMAN: It’s something I used to think about in the context . . . I’m from Israel, and it was thinking whether there was something in common to Israeli intellectuals operating in a second language. And I thought that, in a way, it can be an advantage to operate in a second language, that there are certain things . . . that you can think about the thing itself, not through the words. COWEN: It’s like lower sunk costs in a way. KAHNEMAN: I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but I thought that this was not a loss for me, to do psychology in a second language.
This resonates with my experience as somebody who operates primarily using a second language. Working in English has made my work better, not worse. It’s been a forcing function that has made me more aware of the contingency of language; a significant effect given how central language is to information architecture.
Daniel Kahneman on Cutting Through the Noise (Ep. 56- Live at Mason)