7 ms·
This is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone h
by dmazin 8y ago
This is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone has caused an actual shrinkage of the English lexicon [1]).
I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: (http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-side-autocorrect/ http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s...)
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references
- Bukhmanizer 8y agoHoly crap, everybody burn you're dictionaries.
- dmazin 8y agoThe interesting thing is that autocorrect tries to fix many alternate spellings actually included by dictionaries (e.g. "judgement").
- ljm 8y agoI find that even when I set my country to UK and my language settings say 'British English', I'm still getting various autocorrections to US English to the point where I'm maintaining a list of dictionary overrides for words that us Brits spell differently (or have a distinction for), and there are plenty of words that it claims don't exist when a cursory dictionary search elsewhere proves otherwise. It's mostly manageable on a laptop because it's easy to go back and edit text and make your computer behave. On a phone it's ducking^Wducking^Wfucking infuriating because you can automatically get the same correction a good two or three times before you can get the word you want, and you are very actively fighting a tool that is trying too hard to help, to the point it will deliberately misinterpret your keypress if it thinks it has a better idea of what you wanted to type.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vatueil 8y agoRecently my Google keyboard's auto-correct has developed an annoying tendency to insert apostrophes when they're not needed (e.g. "its" -> "it's", "were" -> "we're"). Even manually deleting the suggestion only works until the next time I do need to write the contraction, whereupon it resumes "correcting" the non-contracted word every single time. Only fix I've found is to manually make the word a shortcut for itself (e.g. shortcut "its" for "its") so that when I type the word it inserts itself and is not auto-corrected.
- danieldk 8y agoGoogle Mail would suggest: Holy crap, everybody burn your dictionaries. ;)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- duderific 8y agoUnless they meant "Holy crap, everybody burn: you're dictionaries!"
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoReads like a Fahrenheit 451 / 1984 mashup. The perfect dystopia.
- mike_ivanov 8y ago> you're dictionaries. that's why we need them :-P
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- _bxg1 8y agoIt's worse than that though; at least in Allo, it began suggesting smart replies before you even touched the keyboard.
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y agoThis is happening everywhere. We're being made more and more homogeneous. The same applies to other aspects of our life, e.g. music, films etc. The general rule is what is popular is safer, so it's being promoted more. In this case what is less popular is not even given a chance to surface - no matter if it's popular radio or YouTube recommendations.
- z0r 8y agoI'm not sure how true your observation really is, but I sympathize with the sentiment. My personal fear is a future where the only freedoms left are to work and consume.
- mike_ivanov 8y ago> being made more and more homogeneous. It might be the way around. This kind of intellectual homogenization might indicate an emergent entity coming to being - some kind of (new?) societal organism, sort of like national state, but I don't know what it actually is this time. We might never learn.
- wahern 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
- mike_ivanov 8y agoNo, it's on a different scale. I'm talking about things like an anthill or a tuna shoal kind of emergence -- a collective animal.
- wahern 8y agoAn ant is a phenomenon that emerges from the interaction of genes as they react to the environment in the same way that an anthill is emergent from the collective behavior of the individual ants as they react to the environment. Memes would be the basic building blocks of any organism that emerged from the manner in which replicated ideas collectively reacted to the environment. Arguably this describes human culture, though I think that's a long way from exhibiting independent intelligence (but maybe we'd be incapable of recognizing it). Presumably something could emerge from the collective interaction of such meme-based organisms. Though like with ants, where the phenomena of an anthill can also be understood directly in terms of genes (all the ants are siblings), I suspect it could really just be reduced to the interplay of mutually reinforcing memes. I wonder what the analog to delineating the internal and external environment is in the meme-based universe....
- black_puppydog 8y agoThat looks like a nice page! As feedback: it lacks any kind of meta-information in human-readable form about what it is. The best I found was <meta property="og:description" content="Mondo 2000 The original magazine of cyberculture returns. Watch out for your overcoats!" /> Which was actually more helpful than the twitter or facebook bio texts :P
- kazinator 8y agoIf you write a word your spellchecker doesn't like, and you accede to the spellchecker, then it's not actually a word. Not to you. An utterance is only a word if you believe it in it and are confident enough to defend it against the opinion of a dumb machine. So this alleged culling of the lexicon by the spellchecker is largely a shakeout of non-words. Firefox's edit widget is underlining "spellchecker" in red, but I'm hitting [reply] anyway. I don't think it needs a hyphen that badly.
- black_puppydog 8y agowait, so according to that, old words that are still written in old manuscripts/stones down which but we don't remember the meaning of, simply because they weren't used for too long, would not be words? I tend to disagree...
- kazinator 8y agoThey are effectively like words in a foreign language.
- aurailious 8y agoI've heard arguments going both ways. That the internet and connectivity is going to dramatically slow language drift as well as accelerate it. I think the real answer is that we are rapidly changing how we talk but to a homogenous standard. I really wonder how global language will change over the next century. I would really like to know if English continues to borrow from other languages or all these dictionaries are going to stop that.
- ams6110 8y agoI think the trend will lead to illiteracy. Why learn to read and write when your computer can just speak to you and transcribe everything you say to it? I recently saw a signature board for honor students posted at a high school. The signatures from the early 1990s were all in cursive and every signature had its own style. The signatures from 2017 were mostly printed in block letters and looked like something a first or second grader would have written. It was pretty sad.
- freeone3000 8y agoI don't think lack of handwriting skill has anything to do with writing ability, which is generally understood to be the ability to express ideas in text. Of course keyboard skills have supplanted handwriting. Perhaps dictation will replace keyboard skills soon. The method of written creation is irrelevant to the output.
- cs02rm0 8y agoI tend to agree. It wasn't that long ago that kids writing in cursive couldn't wield a quill and blotting paper effectively. Or a wax tablet before that. At least, until some Doomsday scenario arrives.
- ams6110 8y agoI don't think it's irrelevant. Composing text deliberately by hand forces a more measured pace of thought and development of ideas. I've even heard educators say that it's not worth teaching arithmetic anymore because everyone has a computer, or a phone with a calculator. But if you don't grasp the concepts of addition and multiplication that are developed by actually doing it over and over you're never going to be able to handle the level of abstraction needed to progress to algebra, geometry, trig and calculus. Spelling is also not given much importance these days, with "creative" spelling being acceptable at least through the elementary grades. Even in high school it isn't given a lot of weight. If you don't learn the meaning of words and how to spell them, and how to construct a grammatically correct sentence without the assistance of a computer, you become mentally weak just as you become physically weak if you never exercise your muscles. Students are losing the ability to think. The ability to think is what is being fundamentally eroded by this sort of automation. Nobody tries to solve problems. They just reflexively google the question, or ask Siri or Alexa, and accept the first answer without giving a lot of thought to whether it even makes sense. I've caught myself doing it. More and more we are having our worldview formed not by critical thinking and development of our own opinions, but by what Google and other big media companies tell us.
- jgalt212 8y agoagreed. auto suggest or auto correct for searches means we only search for things Google recognizes
- decebalus1 8y agoI feel the same way when writing golang code.
- alexslobodnik 8y agoThis is an opportunity to stand out by using less common phrases.
- uptown 8y agoTomfoolery!
- thaumaturgy 8y agoFrom the paper you cited: > In our analysis we treat words with equivalent meanings but with different spellings (e.g. color versus colour) as distinct words... I think it's a bit of a stretch to use that to say that English lexicon is shrinking. The number of different spellings for the same words is, yes, but that's not necessarily bad. Other articles suggest that English vocabulary is still steadily growing: https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2016/feb/04/english-neologisms-new-words https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2016/fe... I think you made good points regarding QuickType though.
- robotresearcher 8y agoNext steps: AdWords in email suggestions. “M” expands to “Meet you at Starbucks (TM)”.