THE LANGUAGE OF RELATIONS
Summary: Khoni Chin discusses the strong expectation in American society for adults to demonstrate linguistic competence in reading and understanding various materials. They challenge this norm by advocating for openly admitting a lack of knowledge, suggesting that admitting not knowing should be normalized rather than seen as a failure. They propose an approach called 'The Language of Relations,' emphasizing understanding and reasoning with the help of AI, rather than memorizing every detail. The idea is to prioritize human judgment and reasoning over extensive memorization, leveraging AI for memory-intensive tasks.
American society does have a very strong default expectation of linguistic competence: adults living in an English-speaking environment are generally expected to be able to read contracts, news, professional materials, government documents, instruction manuals, academic materials, and so on by themselves.
Even when they actually cannot, very few people will openly say:
“I don't know this word.”
“I can't understand this.”
“My vocabulary isn't good enough.”
Because once you admit that, it can easily be interpreted as a lack of ability.
My strategy is precisely the opposite:
“Yes, I don't have the ability. So what?”
😂
I have even made this one of the core design principles of The Language of Relations:
I Don't Need to Know Everything.
I don't need to memorize every English word.
I don't need to become a specialist before asking a question.
I don't need to pretend I understand a field I have never studied.
I can admit that I don't know.
Then I can decode it.
This is actually extremely well suited to the AI era.
The implicit logic of traditional education is often:
Learn → Memorize → Become qualified → Enter the field → Ask questions.
What I want to test is:
Encounter → Decode → Ask AI → Understand relationships → Reason → Learn more.
The biggest change in between is this:
Allow “not knowing” to become a normal state rather than a state of failure.
And honestly, being a little shameless about it is especially important.
My memory is limited. I cannot remember that many words.
So don't force me to use English directly. 😄
I am not trying to train a person to become an “English model.”
I am acknowledging something much simpler:
Human memory is limited, so we should not force humans to perform memory tasks that machines are better at performing.
AI can handle enormous vocabularies, terminology, translation, retrieval, and contextual conversion.
Humans retain what actually matters:
judgment, questioning, association, reasoning, and choice.
So The Language of Relations is not really challenging English education.
It is challenging something deeper—a default assumption:
Why should I pretend to know a language perfectly before I am allowed to think?
That, I think, is a very good question to put at the core of this project.
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