5 ms·

On the other hand, I can think of at least two prominent elected officials (one at my state's level and one at the national level) who no longer speak in senten

On the other hand, I can think of at least two prominent elected officials (one at my state's level and one at the national level) who no longer speak in sentences that I can parse with my own mental model of English. The one from my state released a statement yesterday that seemed identical to the kind of thing one would get from a late '90s IRC chatbot that was trained on a big dataset of energy company press releases.

tw1010 8y ago
Care to name them? I'd be curious to read what they've written.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelbuckbee 8y ago
  I presume that the national level figure was Trump. Whose "nuclear sentence" has been much discussed: “Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”
  - weliketocode 8y ago
    I'm angry at myself for wasting my time reading that garbage.
    - tw1010 8y ago
      It's fascinating how big a quotient the persuasiveness of his speech lies on the vocal level, and is almost nonexistent when written out, abstracting away that detail. It almost makes me think that the current level of chatbots are enough, if only they could nail the text-to-speech component; to really surf whatever it is that makes speech sound powerful and influencial.
      - vxNsr 8y ago
        I'm pretty right leaning and I honestly think the funniest thing is listening to him talk, I never have any idea what he's talking about no matter how long I listen to his speeches. Ideologically he and I agree on some things, but I just never know because I can't understand a single thing he says unless he tweets it. I think he actually suffered when twitter upped the char allowance bec the brevity forced him to be succinct.
      - oblio 8y ago
        The thing is, that's a very hard problem. He's probably got either the luck to be in a favorable space or some sort of native intuition that makes his speeches resonate with a certain group of people. It's basically something very fuzzy, historically the hardest thing to emulate with computers :)
        tw1010 8y ago
        Fuzzy would imply it's hard or impossible to model it, mathematically. But ask any good biologist and I bet you'll hear quite a bit of confidence that the keys behind powerful speech can be understood. For an engineer without domain expertize, yes it's fuzzy. Armed with the right research papers? Highly likely something persuasive could be implemented.
  - 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dwringer 8y ago
  I was trying to keep this as a discussion about the technology and not about the politicians involved, but it apparently didn't stop most of the thread from ending up dead anyway, so the statement I had in mind (you can find more on the source if you're interested) was: > "Our electric grid system is not stable. If it can be down or you have rolling brown outs or black outs and we know that is possible. If you don't have base load that means something, some type of energy that will run 24/7, rain, shine, no matter what happens is uninterruptible. The only two things you have that does that on a uninterruptible basis is coal and nuclear" This isn't the first time I've wondered at the applications of natural-language processing software in political [speech]writing. I'm not sure where best forum is for people to discuss these ideas, but I apologize if this was too political, regardless, for this site.

tw1010 8y ago

Care to name them? I'd be curious to read what they've written.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
michaelbuckbee 8y ago
I presume that the national level figure was Trump. Whose "nuclear sentence" has been much discussed: “Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”
- weliketocode 8y ago
  I'm angry at myself for wasting my time reading that garbage.
  - tw1010 8y ago
    It's fascinating how big a quotient the persuasiveness of his speech lies on the vocal level, and is almost nonexistent when written out, abstracting away that detail. It almost makes me think that the current level of chatbots are enough, if only they could nail the text-to-speech component; to really surf whatever it is that makes speech sound powerful and influencial.
    - vxNsr 8y ago
      I'm pretty right leaning and I honestly think the funniest thing is listening to him talk, I never have any idea what he's talking about no matter how long I listen to his speeches. Ideologically he and I agree on some things, but I just never know because I can't understand a single thing he says unless he tweets it. I think he actually suffered when twitter upped the char allowance bec the brevity forced him to be succinct.
    - oblio 8y ago
      The thing is, that's a very hard problem. He's probably got either the luck to be in a favorable space or some sort of native intuition that makes his speeches resonate with a certain group of people. It's basically something very fuzzy, historically the hardest thing to emulate with computers :)
      - tw1010 8y ago
        Fuzzy would imply it's hard or impossible to model it, mathematically. But ask any good biologist and I bet you'll hear quite a bit of confidence that the keys behind powerful speech can be understood. For an engineer without domain expertize, yes it's fuzzy. Armed with the right research papers? Highly likely something persuasive could be implemented.
- 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dwringer 8y ago
I was trying to keep this as a discussion about the technology and not about the politicians involved, but it apparently didn't stop most of the thread from ending up dead anyway, so the statement I had in mind (you can find more on the source if you're interested) was: > "Our electric grid system is not stable. If it can be down or you have rolling brown outs or black outs and we know that is possible. If you don't have base load that means something, some type of energy that will run 24/7, rain, shine, no matter what happens is uninterruptible. The only two things you have that does that on a uninterruptible basis is coal and nuclear" This isn't the first time I've wondered at the applications of natural-language processing software in political [speech]writing. I'm not sure where best forum is for people to discuss these ideas, but I apologize if this was too political, regardless, for this site.