8 ms·

The rise and fall of rationality in language

124 points by olifante 5y ago

earthscienceman 5y ago
PNAS: Read It, or Not? The reason people are down on PNAS is the way that members of the National Academy can, if they choose, sort of jam things into the journal through a side entrance. Here are all the details. The unusual thing about the journal is the existence of "Track I". Basically, a member of the NAS can publish up to four of their own papers per year. Each of these have to be submitted with the comments of two qualified referees, but the author gets to pick them. So a reasonable member should be able to get any sort of interesting or at least non-insane paper in there, by judicious choice of colleagues for review. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pnas-read-not https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pnas-read-not
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  >So a reasonable member should be able to get any sort of interesting or at least non-insane paper in there, by judicious choice of colleagues for review. An easy way to go get interesting papers in does not seem like a reason to be 'down' on it.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  This is, in principle, the standard approach for a periodical of a scientific society, be it Proceedings of the Royal Society, Comptes-rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, Doklady Akademii Nauk, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They come less from a time of ubiquitous formal peer review and more from a time of communicating results in personal letters. In fact, as such societies were originally conceived as a sort of long-running conference crossed over with a social club, the journals were intended as little more than a streamlined way of publishing meeting minutes; that their names still suggest that everything within is supposed to accompany an oral presentation is not a coincidence. Over time, they more or less turned into standard peer-reviewed journals, but these traces of their original form still persist.
- canjobear 5y ago
  We called the Track I papers “fake PNAS” in grad school.
thyrsus 5y ago
It's good to see principle component analysis used to select only two components. Configure the algorithm to give you all statistically significant components and it can come back with 30 or 40 components, which fit the data exquisitely but which are as interpretable as a tarot deck and almost as meaningless.
scrubs 5y ago
Great HN post. Thank you for OP for supplying the link. Through my various social engagements, I've spent time in many political discussions. Trump, politics, race, and anti-vaccination are recurring themes. Some observations: * Those on the left tend to insert race into situations in which it does not naturally arise as I see it. Here focus is nominally on inclusion/significance of minorities. It periodically comes with a tone of judgement something like getting a visit from an evangelical at your door. Listen to NPR: at least around north east cities it's replete and centered on identity politics. * Those on the right tend to insert race into situations in which it does not naturally arise as I see it. Sometime emphasis here comes as self-righteous anger, feeling excluded, and kind of self-imposed victimization of thought or culture putatively at the hand know-it-all-liberals. * Older guys on the right side who are pro-Trump, anti-vax tend be the angry individuals spending time recollecting the good-ol-days when guys were hardcore men. I sometimes probe these older guys with questions. What I tend to get is a lot o whining, frustration but little in the way of answers. That's a shame: us older guys are supposed to have some answers standing on the shoulders of our own experience. My view then is the emotionalism, complaining, putative self-righteous anger, and whining is a layer on top of a more basic problem which is victimization. And that sits on an even deeper layer of lack of competence broadly speaking on what to do about it. Whether it's "stop the steal", deep state, MSM (mainstream media) there's a running sense of we're victums. Look at headlines. You'll see plenty of "The real truth behind..." (i.e. you've been lied to elsewhere), "The dirty little secret at..." (i.e. people have omitted information we're strong enough to tell you). I yet remain convinced that the majority of Americans (of which I am one) know full-well the solutions are at the center. I also feel like almost all Americans are sick-and-tired of the 24-7 soap opera from the talking heads on TV, and headless voices on AM/FM.
- ss108 5y ago
  Indeed; there is way too much identity politics now. It's all identity politics. Dems had a chance with Trump to rise and be above the identity politics, and to focus on more universal goods, such as the rule of law, having a non-conspiracy based response to covid (Trump lowered the bar so much lol), etc. I don't think they properly seized it.
enderm 5y ago
In my opinion, objective truth does not exist. “Fact-free argumentation" is good and desirable.
- Lhiw 5y ago
  [dead]
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > Objective truth does not exist. Besides this statement?
  - mariavillosa 5y ago
    Oh I was writing the same comment, you beat me to it, and more elegantly!
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Well, enderm did say "in my opinion"...
    - throw0101a 5y ago
      > Well, enderm did say "in my opinion"... Not when I posted, he didn't. That's why I my quotation of him is different than what's now in his post.
- mariavillosa 5y ago
  >Objective truth does not exist That's an objective truth claim right there!
  - mikelevins 5y ago
    Moreover, if this claim is true, then it's false. It therefore refutes itself.
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
buzzin__ 5y ago
How well do the charts match the point at which bottom 50% of population rationality-wise started mass posting on the internet?
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  This is irrelevant to the paper. The paper analyzes n-grams from books and the NYTimes. These aren't random internet posts.
kelseyfrog 5y ago
> What ends up in the university libraries used for the Google n-gram data varies with trends in Google’s book-inclusion policy, editorial practices, library policies, and popularity of genres. As none of those effects can be excluded it is important that we find the same trends for word use in the New York Times. The interesting line of thought here is that NYT articles have fairly clear authorship (and to a lesser degree editorship). Do individual authors follow a similar trend (implying that people are changing) or do authors stay the same (implying that the NYT composition is changing)? In short, how much is personal change, and how much is churn?
canjobear 5y ago
Google Books is not a reliable sample of language over time due to shifts in genre representation that are correlated with all kinds of things like university library policies, interactions of OCR with typesetting practices, etc. Also note this is a “contributed by” paper which means it didn’t go through the usual PNAS review process. (Presumably the authors didn’t think it would make it through.)
- Manheim 5y ago
  Instead of arguing why the data sources they have analyzed is limited or not fully representative, I suggest we get interested in their findings and look further into the matter. The authors are open about the limitations and possible biases in the data sources, and how modern use of language could affect the interpretations. I think they've provided good descriptions on how they have taken this into account in their study.
- hcarvalhoalves 5y ago
  Even if the data source is biased, it would be interesting to know _how_ it’s biased. After all, it’s the data that is widely available to people on the internet.
  - lillabullero 5y ago
    In this particular case, it's biased because Google Books includes much more fiction and many fewer scholarly works after about the year 2000. Link to a response of a previous article by this same group: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/45/e2115010118.short https://www.pnas.org/content/118/45/e2115010118.short
naasking 5y ago
> Perhaps more importantly, there could be a connection to tensions arising from neoliberal policies which were defended on rational arguments, while the economic fruits were reaped by an increasingly small fraction of societies The decline of collectivism and the rise of individualism following the near total destruction of unions and the labour movement? Sound like a pretty significant contributor to me.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  Unions in the private sector destroyed themselves. They bankrupted nearly every private domestic industry where they predominated. That is what caused their membership rates to decline. They are now poised to take over the new bright spots of the US economy: Amazon and Tesla, and destroy these golden geese, for the short term benefit of their members, just as they did to the ones before them. In the one sector where expenses are socialized, and thus which doesn't go bankrupt easily, they have gotten increasingly powerful. Government social welfare spending has rapidly grown, at the behest of public sector unions who increasingly control the political system: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long... A couple anecdotes illuminates the kind of power these unions wield: New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year: https://archive.md/JnJQY https://archive.md/JnJQY In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year. California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers.
wyager 5y ago
These observations are also consistent with the collapse of scientism (I.e. appeal to scientific credibility by making irrational arguments with scientific-sounding words) as a rhetorical technique. The reduction of pseudo-rational terminology might actually indicate an increase in net rational thought.
- im3w1l 5y ago
  I had the same thought while reading the abstract but I don't think it can explain Fig 1 / Table 1.
unchocked 5y ago
I hope to outlive this age of spectacle.
- klibertp 5y ago
  I'm 35 this year and, call me defeatist, I have no such hope :-(

124 points by olifante 5y ago

PNAS: Read It, or Not? The reason people are down on PNAS is the way that members of the National Academy can, if they choose, sort of jam things into the journal through a side entrance. Here are all the details. The unusual thing about the journal is the existence of "Track I". Basically, a member of the NAS can publish up to four of their own papers per year. Each of these have to be submitted with the comments of two qualified referees, but the author gets to pick them. So a reasonable member should be able to get any sort of interesting or at least non-insane paper in there, by judicious choice of colleagues for review. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pnas-read-not https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pnas-read-not

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>So a reasonable member should be able to get any sort of interesting or at least non-insane paper in there, by judicious choice of colleagues for review. An easy way to go get interesting papers in does not seem like a reason to be 'down' on it.
mananaysiempre 5y ago
This is, in principle, the standard approach for a periodical of a scientific society, be it Proceedings of the Royal Society, Comptes-rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, Doklady Akademii Nauk, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They come less from a time of ubiquitous formal peer review and more from a time of communicating results in personal letters. In fact, as such societies were originally conceived as a sort of long-running conference crossed over with a social club, the journals were intended as little more than a streamlined way of publishing meeting minutes; that their names still suggest that everything within is supposed to accompany an oral presentation is not a coincidence. Over time, they more or less turned into standard peer-reviewed journals, but these traces of their original form still persist.
canjobear 5y ago
We called the Track I papers “fake PNAS” in grad school.

thyrsus 5y ago

It's good to see principle component analysis used to select only two components. Configure the algorithm to give you all statistically significant components and it can come back with 30 or 40 components, which fit the data exquisitely but which are as interpretable as a tarot deck and almost as meaningless.

scrubs 5y ago

Great HN post. Thank you for OP for supplying the link. Through my various social engagements, I've spent time in many political discussions. Trump, politics, race, and anti-vaccination are recurring themes. Some observations: * Those on the left tend to insert race into situations in which it does not naturally arise as I see it. Here focus is nominally on inclusion/significance of minorities. It periodically comes with a tone of judgement something like getting a visit from an evangelical at your door. Listen to NPR: at least around north east cities it's replete and centered on identity politics. * Those on the right tend to insert race into situations in which it does not naturally arise as I see it. Sometime emphasis here comes as self-righteous anger, feeling excluded, and kind of self-imposed victimization of thought or culture putatively at the hand know-it-all-liberals. * Older guys on the right side who are pro-Trump, anti-vax tend be the angry individuals spending time recollecting the good-ol-days when guys were hardcore men. I sometimes probe these older guys with questions. What I tend to get is a lot o whining, frustration but little in the way of answers. That's a shame: us older guys are supposed to have some answers standing on the shoulders of our own experience. My view then is the emotionalism, complaining, putative self-righteous anger, and whining is a layer on top of a more basic problem which is victimization. And that sits on an even deeper layer of lack of competence broadly speaking on what to do about it. Whether it's "stop the steal", deep state, MSM (mainstream media) there's a running sense of we're victums. Look at headlines. You'll see plenty of "The real truth behind..." (i.e. you've been lied to elsewhere), "The dirty little secret at..." (i.e. people have omitted information we're strong enough to tell you). I yet remain convinced that the majority of Americans (of which I am one) know full-well the solutions are at the center. I also feel like almost all Americans are sick-and-tired of the 24-7 soap opera from the talking heads on TV, and headless voices on AM/FM.

ss108 5y ago
Indeed; there is way too much identity politics now. It's all identity politics. Dems had a chance with Trump to rise and be above the identity politics, and to focus on more universal goods, such as the rule of law, having a non-conspiracy based response to covid (Trump lowered the bar so much lol), etc. I don't think they properly seized it.

enderm 5y ago

In my opinion, objective truth does not exist. “Fact-free argumentation" is good and desirable.

Lhiw 5y ago
[dead]
throw0101a 5y ago
> Objective truth does not exist. Besides this statement?
- mariavillosa 5y ago
  Oh I was writing the same comment, you beat me to it, and more elegantly!
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Well, enderm did say "in my opinion"...
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > Well, enderm did say "in my opinion"... Not when I posted, he didn't. That's why I my quotation of him is different than what's now in his post.
mariavillosa 5y ago
>Objective truth does not exist That's an objective truth claim right there!
- mikelevins 5y ago
  Moreover, if this claim is true, then it's false. It therefore refutes itself.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago

buzzin__ 5y ago

How well do the charts match the point at which bottom 50% of population rationality-wise started mass posting on the internet?

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
This is irrelevant to the paper. The paper analyzes n-grams from books and the NYTimes. These aren't random internet posts.

kelseyfrog 5y ago

> What ends up in the university libraries used for the Google n-gram data varies with trends in Google’s book-inclusion policy, editorial practices, library policies, and popularity of genres. As none of those effects can be excluded it is important that we find the same trends for word use in the New York Times. The interesting line of thought here is that NYT articles have fairly clear authorship (and to a lesser degree editorship). Do individual authors follow a similar trend (implying that people are changing) or do authors stay the same (implying that the NYT composition is changing)? In short, how much is personal change, and how much is churn?

canjobear 5y ago

Google Books is not a reliable sample of language over time due to shifts in genre representation that are correlated with all kinds of things like university library policies, interactions of OCR with typesetting practices, etc. Also note this is a “contributed by” paper which means it didn’t go through the usual PNAS review process. (Presumably the authors didn’t think it would make it through.)

Manheim 5y ago
Instead of arguing why the data sources they have analyzed is limited or not fully representative, I suggest we get interested in their findings and look further into the matter. The authors are open about the limitations and possible biases in the data sources, and how modern use of language could affect the interpretations. I think they've provided good descriptions on how they have taken this into account in their study.
hcarvalhoalves 5y ago
Even if the data source is biased, it would be interesting to know _how_ it’s biased. After all, it’s the data that is widely available to people on the internet.
- lillabullero 5y ago
  In this particular case, it's biased because Google Books includes much more fiction and many fewer scholarly works after about the year 2000. Link to a response of a previous article by this same group: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/45/e2115010118.short https://www.pnas.org/content/118/45/e2115010118.short

naasking 5y ago

> Perhaps more importantly, there could be a connection to tensions arising from neoliberal policies which were defended on rational arguments, while the economic fruits were reaped by an increasingly small fraction of societies The decline of collectivism and the rise of individualism following the near total destruction of unions and the labour movement? Sound like a pretty significant contributor to me.

CryptoPunk 5y ago
Unions in the private sector destroyed themselves. They bankrupted nearly every private domestic industry where they predominated. That is what caused their membership rates to decline. They are now poised to take over the new bright spots of the US economy: Amazon and Tesla, and destroy these golden geese, for the short term benefit of their members, just as they did to the ones before them. In the one sector where expenses are socialized, and thus which doesn't go bankrupt easily, they have gotten increasingly powerful. Government social welfare spending has rapidly grown, at the behest of public sector unions who increasingly control the political system: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long... A couple anecdotes illuminates the kind of power these unions wield: New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year: https://archive.md/JnJQY https://archive.md/JnJQY In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year. California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers.

wyager 5y ago

These observations are also consistent with the collapse of scientism (I.e. appeal to scientific credibility by making irrational arguments with scientific-sounding words) as a rhetorical technique. The reduction of pseudo-rational terminology might actually indicate an increase in net rational thought.

im3w1l 5y ago
I had the same thought while reading the abstract but I don't think it can explain Fig 1 / Table 1.

unchocked 5y ago

I hope to outlive this age of spectacle.

klibertp 5y ago
I'm 35 this year and, call me defeatist, I have no such hope :-(