11 ms·

The rise and decline of thinking over feeling

109 points by Bostonian 5y ago

FridayoLeary 5y ago
"The facts don't care about your feelings" is the favourite (and rather witty) catchphrase of a certain political commentator. I think there's a lot of truth in that.
- codq 5y ago
  Which is hilarious, because that certain political commentator is driven almost entirely by ‘feeling’, along with rhetorical tricks and debate strategies, like the Gish Gallop. My sense is he's much more interested in winning, or being perceived as winning (feeling) vs. actually being correct (facts).
  - FridayoLeary 5y ago
    True. Which is why I didn't name him. I would like to add that he's far from unique in this regard, this is true of many commentators on both sides.
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    I think that's pretty much the same for everything political. You would rather want to win than being right and lose.
sh4un 5y ago
[flagged]
atq2119 5y ago
This is a curious pattern and interesting to think about. Jumping to the conclusion that it is caused by more female writers is a bit silly, though. Were there also more female writers in the early 19th century?
- wrnr 5y ago
  God dang man you are right. This website has a real blind spot when it comes to documenting "bad" behaviour by others, like this other article[1] where they measure how the term "Whiteness" is used in the NYT 3 times more often than 10 years ago. Seems like our political discourse is on a downward spiral. [1]https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
rahimnathwani 5y ago
If you want to know what led us here, read: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity--And Why This Harms Everybody https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1634312023/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1634312023/
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Actually, no. The right has always prioritised irrational feelings over facts while pretending to do the opposite. The problem is more that Frankfurt School academia has buried that rather obvious fact under a blizzard of careerist Hegelian blather, which has left it with no response to tribal and irrational (and cynically manipulated) feeling-based "argument". Race and Gender critiques are perfectly valid, but they're not the only possible critiques, and this seems to have been forgotten. Certainly the fact that academia hasn't responded effectively to its own forced gig economy casualisation - when it might have a century or so ago - should give pause for thought.
- js8 5y ago
  I used to somewhat believe this too, but the fact is left is much more diverse than that. Some prominent left thinkers have always been in (rather vocal) opposition to this - from the top of my head, Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Adolph Reed, Mark Fisher.. Anyway, I think the rise of emphasis on feelings is due to advertising technology, getting better at attacking feelings (and disabling critical thinking) in the recent decades. In some sense, the entitlement (frankly, everywhere on the political spectrum) is driven by the same "I am a consumer, so serve me" mentality.
  - chillingeffect 5y ago
    I'm one who tries hard to interpret those texts into my own "common" comprehension. I would love it if academics could communicate in more down to Earth lingo. But I suspect they're obscuring much of it bc they don't want bad forces to utilize it. Agree with yr interp of feeling language. Hayakawa would too, re: poetry. Furthermore it's an expression of success... we've thought our way into awareness and can now practice "spirituality [...] forgiveness, [...] and healing." As well as just plain entertainment.... And all of this needs to bring in the media theory side that technical info has been moving out of books! I defy the authors to scan bound manuals, gopher, Usenet FAQs, IETF docs and github for signs of creeping "feminization."
323 5y ago
lived experience >>>> any expert opinion Or put another way, today N=1 trumps N=1000. That's how you shutdown any discussion.
- swayvil 5y ago
  There is a huge difference in substantiality there that I rarely see addressed. When you consume an opinion, expert or otherwise, you are consuming a mere symbol, something of relatively miniscule substance. When you consume a lived experience you are consuming an infinitely dimensioned, infinitely deep thing, of relatively massive substance.
- indymike 5y ago
  > lived experience >>>> any expert opinion This is why there's a saying in public relations that a story is worth 1000 spreadsheets. What has happened is that people are engaged and persuaded by emotion, and media has evolved to service this.
- throwhauser 5y ago
  Bezos has noticed an adjacent phenomenon. "The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right." When reasoning becomes too abstract, it's more likely to fail to account for things happening in the real world.
lngnmn2 5y ago
Thinking Fast and Slow has all the known answers. Two systems metaphor is surprisingly good and correlates to Jekyll/Hyde and other classic notions. Different subsystems of the brain could be synchronised and this is what all the eastern ancient practices are about.
karpierz 5y ago
There's a bit of irony in claiming that there's a decline in rationality by doing a hand-wavy data analysis, and relying on peoples' gut feeling that the world has become more feelings driven to push their conclusion forward.
- d23 5y ago
  Yes, thank you. It’s quite an interesting observation, but to call this article shallow would be too generous. With a few wording tweaks to add a dash of self-awareness, this would be perfectly contradictory satire.
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    It's marginal revolution. This is kinda their thing. Lots of short posts and interesting but not explored in depth ideas. Some people like it, others prefer Steve Yegge.
mwattsun 5y ago
I don't think viewing this through today's political lenses is very useful or correct. I remember a shift in the 70's with the sexual revolution and psychological movements like EST at centers like the Esalen Institute. People discovered they had repressed emotions they should bring forth and deal with. People discovered emotional intelligence. It was an exciting time of discovery of the depth of mind that earlier generations were not comfortable with. Men started crying in group encounters. Repressed sexuality was explored. Eastern religions were considered. LSD was taken. These things started in the late 60's but went mainstream in the 70's. To say this was bad and blame it on women is an echo of conservative criticism from those days.
- hectord 5y ago
  Both you and the author of the blog post assume that rationality is better than being able to show our emotions. The scientific paper doesn't say anything about it. A few decades ago we expected women to "show emotions" and men to be strong. We are now trying to change this cliché since it hurts all of us. What we see in the paper is that this change is taking place. I think it's good news. The idea that rationality was more prevalent until the 1970s since we "believed in science" is compelling. Since the 1970s we focus more on our emotions as you say. What's interesting is that this change took place before the era of social networks. Social networks might be an amplifier but it's definitely not the root cause.
  - kzrdude 5y ago
    Why do we think this cliché hurts all of us?
    - paulryanrogers 5y ago
      Because women should be free to show strength and men free to express emotions. And if they cannot without being judged or shamed then we're all worse for it. Cliches like those stifle our humanity and increase suffering.
      - 5y ago
cesaref 5y ago
So there is a change in the ratio of words used in print between the 1850s and the 2020s. This happens in English and Spanish (i'm assuming this is really an American centric discussion, as the paper says this, but the review doesn't mention America). There seem to be many possible reasons for this which aren't mentioned in the analysis. What percentage of the population were literate in 1950? What class of people were the printed material aimed at? I would imagine that the introduction of cheap effectively disposable books and magazines from the 1940s onwards, and the massive social changes which have lead to the vast majority of people having the education and spare time to read if they choose to will have totally skewed any analysis on the printed text. Even taking a single source (the NYT) will not account for changes in readership. There's an attempt to chase market share when competing with other news sources, with editors intentionally changing the tone and material they include to attempt to capture market share. Anyhow, an interesting idea, not convinced the analysis is strong enough to remove what I think of as more likely sources of the change in language.
r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
It's a bit weird that that the authors of the paper ascribe this to the "failure of neo-liberalism" when neo liberalism had most of its successes after 1978. Thatcher and Reagan first elected in 1979 and 1981 respectively. WTO founded in 1995. EU founded in 1993 (albeit preceded by EEC and European Coal and Steel Board). Fall of Berlin Wall 1989. Fukuyama's "End of History" 1992. If there is a correlation surely it's with neo-liberalism's success. Not saying it's causative mind.
- kazen44 5y ago
  also, the definition of neo-liberalism is about as vague as can be. it means different things to different people in different contexts.
cs702 5y ago
I found the paper's interpretive commentary both less biased and more insightful than the OP, which is a short, opinionated blog post mentioning the paper. In particular, these two paragraphs from the paper's section about "Potential Drivers" struck a chord with me: > What precisely caused the observed stagnation in the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint. The late 1980s witnessed the start of the internet and its growing role in society. 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. > In many languages the trends in sentiment- and intuition-related words accelerate around 2007. One possible explanation could be that the standards for inclusion in Google Books shifted from “being in a library Google had an agreement with” to “from a publisher that directly deposited with Google” after 2004 to 2007, thus affecting the corpus composition. The 2007 shift also coincides with the global financial crisis which may have had an impact. However, earlier economic crises such as the Great Depression (1929 to 1939) did not leave discernable marks on our indicators of book language. Perhaps significantly, 2007 was also roughly the start of a near-universal global surge of social media. This may be illustrated by plotting the dynamics of the word “Facebook” as a marker alongside the frequency of a set of intuition and rationality flag words in different languages. -- Paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118 Abstract: The surge of post-truth political argumentation suggests that we are living in a special historical period when it comes to the balance between emotion and reasoning. To explore if this is indeed the case, we analyze language in millions of books covering the period from 1850 to 2019 represented in Google nGram data. We show that the use of words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as “I”/”we” and “he”/”they.” Interpreting this synchronous sea change in book language remains challenging. However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in fiction as well as nonfiction. Moreover, the pattern of change in the ratio between sentiment and rationality flag words since 1850 also occurs in New York Times articles, suggesting that it is not an artifact of the book corpora we analyzed. Finally, we show that word trends in books parallel trends in corresponding Google search terms, supporting the idea that changes in book language do in part reflect changes in interest. All in all, our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.
ausbah 5y ago
>A more plausible explanation is more female writers and the closely related feminization of culture. so what is the point of this piece? is he blaming the slowdown of scientific advancement in the past 40-50 years on "femininity", or straight up just woman? maybe I'm being overly cynical in my reading, but the inclusion of that last bit doesn't smell very well reasoned. other explanations would be great
- crispyambulance 5y ago
  There is no other explanation. How could there be from such a short insipid quip? It's just a blog from 2 bored libertarian/right-leaning academic economists. Content from there pops up on HN every once in a while (because libertarians). Not much to see.
- jfengel 5y ago
  I find that the people who most loudly praise logic and decry emotion tend to be the most emotional and least logical. It's usually a way of saying "my assumptions about the world are self evident and any challenge to them obviously irrational".
  - kazen44 5y ago
    also, it usually forget that humans are in essence emotional beings. emotions and the relation between people and these emotions are far too large to ignore in advance of "rational" thinking.
  - 6chars 5y ago
    So true Discounting the fact that humans aren't coldly rational is irrational. People love to hide behind "logic", but poking a bear and expecting it not to attack you because that would be an "irrational" emotional response is not smart, it's wishful thinking. I can understand why people crave a "grand unified theory" on how the world works and the importance of emotion is an obstacle to having an elegant, comprehensible model for the world, but that doesn't mean it's right to ignore it.
    - 5y ago
swayvil 5y ago
I suspect that all thinking starts as feeling. Like feeling is fire and thought is smoke. So to address feelings really does get to the root of the matter better than to address thoughts. But we only seem to be able to express and address thought, in this medium of language. So we are eternally missing the point. Orbiting it but never touching it. A different kind of conversation is called for.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  I want to complement what you said with the other side: I think the end of thinking is also feeling. We think (and use all other tools) in order to feel better. That's kind of the point of any technology.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    Darn good point.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  If true, this seems to have profound implications for people working in AI.
- mistermann 5y ago
  Exactly, but what kind of conversation would work?
helen___keller 5y ago
Analyzing the types of words that appear in all texts is the most noisy and raw data set imaginable. You could probably find any number of confounders, such as a rise in a genre of romantic fiction or self help books. To draw any substantial conclusion without further analysis is an obvious stretch
rob_c 5y ago
Frankly this snacks of the education systems starting to rot imo. I'd say "simple media" or "self respect" but if that were true it would have decreased during the papers becoming popular before the wars... My take is either audio/video media is to blame in some way, or, the grasp of the language is failing. I'm going with the latter driving the former but maybe I'm a pessimist.
whalesalad 5y ago
Both are equally important. If you ignore your feelings long enough you will be unable to think clearly.
- LQexplanation 5y ago
  On some level you can't repress feelings, you just dress them up in (pseudo) scientific terms and try to push them as logical arguments.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
known 5y ago
"Young women learn to feel more easily than men learn to think" --Voltaire (b. 1694)
wayoutthere 5y ago
This kind of meta-linguistic analysis is reminiscent of what I call “linguistic philosophy” that was popular in the mid-20th century as a reaction to the postmodernists. This school of thought is largely viewed as a dead end — words don’t have fixed meaning across time, audience or geography. Even translated words can have very different contextual meaning between languages that cannot be generalized outside of the context of a specific speaker in a specific context. To try to analyze them as if they tell us more about the world than an author’s state of mind is folly. Furthermore, the last 50 years have been a real reckoning that people don’t make decisions based on facts; they make them based on feeling. This has always been the case; what happened in the 60s was people started questioning the ex post facto “rationality” applied to decisions made by those who comprised the ruling power structures. Much of the discourse prior to that time were emotional in nature but clad in the language of rationality because that’s what the culture at the time would accept. That there were “rational” arguments in favor of segregation or prohibition doesn’t mitigate that they are failed policies. Historically, “rationality” has just been a code word for “the dominant viewpoint of the ruling class”. If anything, the change in language usage is simply following a cultural recognition that they were never rational arguments in the first place, so they’re just not spoken about as if they are authoritative anymore.
james-bcn 5y ago
Those graphs look a little too perfect to me. I wonder to what extent the words were chosen to give the desired graph.
achenatx 5y ago
Decisions have always been mostly based on feelings. The foundation for all decisions is and always has been values. Values are opinions based on feelings. From the foundation of values, you can use logic to ensure that you are consistently following your values (feelings) but the foundation is still emotional. In the past, american culture (at least in the media) was more of a monoculture, which meant more shared values. When you derived decisions from the shared values using logic, you would come to the same place using the same path. This could make it appear that people were mostly using logic. An example of what I mean by values are: Optimizing for economic efficiency is more important than the suffering of the people at the bottom. Or increasing the average wealth is more important than decreasing the variance of wealth. People having free healthcare is more important than property rights. In any debate or discussion, the logic is virtually irrelevant when the values arent shared.
- jhgb 5y ago
  > The foundation for all decisions is and always has been values. Values are opinions based on feelings. That line of reasoning would lead you to conclude that everything is feeling. But you give examples of things that can eventually be quantified as well. I don't see how some of those objective functions are qualitatively different from the rest.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    All logical systems must be grounded in axioms; your values are the axioms of your beliefs. You can logically derive inferences from your values, but your values cannot be derived from anything. Anything derived must rest on something lower, so there must be a lowest thing that is not a derivative. This is a universal truth. It's as true in mathematics (Peano axioms) as it is in personal beliefs.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      But of course axioms are traditionally defined as self-evident truths, not as "feelings". Furthermore whenever axioms are involved, the effort is to shrink their set as tightly as possible. I suspect that "feeling-oriented people" (for a lack of better term) are not the ones doing this, and if that is the case, I'd consider that an important difference from the people who are doing this, and hence I'd consider statements along the lines of "trying to be rational doesn't actually matter since it's feelings all the way down anyway" as unhelpful platitudes.
cryptica 5y ago
I think Daniel Kahneman's book 'Thinking, fast and slow' lays out a very good framework for thinking about thinking. To summarize: People have two strategies for thinking: System 1 (fast, reactive) and system 2 (slow, methodical). System 1 works quickly but is less accurate; it's more about pattern-matching and reacting to new information. This type of thinking was historically useful to quickly detect and react to predators (fight or flight response). System 2 works slowly and is more accurate, it's about synthesizing information with existing information, calculating and critical thinking. An interesting point made in the book is that most people cannot effectively use system 2 thinking when they're doing strenuous exercise or when they're under significant stress. Try multiplying 2+ digit numbers in your head while doing strenuous exercise. I think this book neatly explains why fear is a good way to control a population; it suppresses people's system 2 thinking abilities and makes them lean more on inaccurate system 1 pattern-matching and makes them highly reactive (easily 'triggered'?)... Then the media can exploit this reactive system 1 state of mind (looking for a predator to fight or run from) to send people off on a wild goose chase in all directions (and pitch them against one another) to distract them from what's really going on.
someelephant 5y ago
Emotion is the product of stress. As the economy continues to deteriorate for the average worker, expect a lot more feeling. Real wage deterioration starting around the time that this chart peaks lines up nicely with my hypothesis. Rich people don't feel this stress so they can't understand why poor people are emotional.
throwaway55421 5y ago
Well, the entire point of thinking is to feel. There is nothing else - feelings are how we ground our value systems. Thinking helps you decide on facts, feeling helps you decide how to act on them.
kspacewalk2 5y ago
Ok now give me the script and let me choose my own completely arbitrary small subset of keywords that are supposed to represent "rationality" and "emotion". I wonder if one can write an optimizer of one kind or another that has the conclusion I want to reach as input, and the keyword subset as output.
orange8 5y ago
Thinking is a form of feeling. The difference is that feeling, comes from a lower level part of the brain, the same one responsible for other "automatic" processes like heartbeat and breathing. Feeling is more superior, as it can shut down thinking when the available power/energy is limited, or the situation calls for a faster, automated response e.g. hands accidentally touch a hot stove... you really do not want to think about about whether or not to move them, you just will. Thinking is superior in all other situations.
mdp2021 5y ago
Gentlemembers, they counted words. They selected two groups of literal words and traced the diacronic proportion. It seems to be a severely unsophisticated "analysis"...
TheGigaChad 5y ago
Another idiotic brainfart from the rationalist community. Im surprised this is not on substack.
wazoox 5y ago
Related: why modern movies suck. https://youtu.be/CQ92cggLMx8 https://youtu.be/CQ92cggLMx8
apocalypstyx 5y ago
We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. --David Hume The longer I live the more I find interrogating any so-called rational position always leads down (ultimately) to some underlying feeling, that fundamentality rationality serves (at best) as an evolved means by which to better obtain the objects of those impulses and (at worst perhaps, though no less out of evolutionary necessity -- and perhaps expressly because of the possibility of self-examination opened up by the technical ability of the metacognition of the latter) alternatively act as an aesthetic veneer over those impulses.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Here's a paper talking about the obvious flaws to consider in this kind of research in general: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0137041 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Their finding that scientific publishing made up a greater percentage of "published" (but probably not read) words seems the obvious candidate here.
gromitss 5y ago

109 points by Bostonian 5y ago

"The facts don't care about your feelings" is the favourite (and rather witty) catchphrase of a certain political commentator. I think there's a lot of truth in that.

codq 5y ago
Which is hilarious, because that certain political commentator is driven almost entirely by ‘feeling’, along with rhetorical tricks and debate strategies, like the Gish Gallop. My sense is he's much more interested in winning, or being perceived as winning (feeling) vs. actually being correct (facts).
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  True. Which is why I didn't name him. I would like to add that he's far from unique in this regard, this is true of many commentators on both sides.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  I think that's pretty much the same for everything political. You would rather want to win than being right and lose.

sh4un 5y ago

[flagged]

atq2119 5y ago

This is a curious pattern and interesting to think about. Jumping to the conclusion that it is caused by more female writers is a bit silly, though. Were there also more female writers in the early 19th century?

wrnr 5y ago
God dang man you are right. This website has a real blind spot when it comes to documenting "bad" behaviour by others, like this other article[1] where they measure how the term "Whiteness" is used in the NYT 3 times more often than 10 years ago. Seems like our political discourse is on a downward spiral. [1]https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

rahimnathwani 5y ago

If you want to know what led us here, read: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity--And Why This Harms Everybody https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1634312023/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1634312023/

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Actually, no. The right has always prioritised irrational feelings over facts while pretending to do the opposite. The problem is more that Frankfurt School academia has buried that rather obvious fact under a blizzard of careerist Hegelian blather, which has left it with no response to tribal and irrational (and cynically manipulated) feeling-based "argument". Race and Gender critiques are perfectly valid, but they're not the only possible critiques, and this seems to have been forgotten. Certainly the fact that academia hasn't responded effectively to its own forced gig economy casualisation - when it might have a century or so ago - should give pause for thought.
js8 5y ago
I used to somewhat believe this too, but the fact is left is much more diverse than that. Some prominent left thinkers have always been in (rather vocal) opposition to this - from the top of my head, Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Adolph Reed, Mark Fisher.. Anyway, I think the rise of emphasis on feelings is due to advertising technology, getting better at attacking feelings (and disabling critical thinking) in the recent decades. In some sense, the entitlement (frankly, everywhere on the political spectrum) is driven by the same "I am a consumer, so serve me" mentality.
- chillingeffect 5y ago
  I'm one who tries hard to interpret those texts into my own "common" comprehension. I would love it if academics could communicate in more down to Earth lingo. But I suspect they're obscuring much of it bc they don't want bad forces to utilize it. Agree with yr interp of feeling language. Hayakawa would too, re: poetry. Furthermore it's an expression of success... we've thought our way into awareness and can now practice "spirituality [...] forgiveness, [...] and healing." As well as just plain entertainment.... And all of this needs to bring in the media theory side that technical info has been moving out of books! I defy the authors to scan bound manuals, gopher, Usenet FAQs, IETF docs and github for signs of creeping "feminization."

323 5y ago

lived experience >>>> any expert opinion Or put another way, today N=1 trumps N=1000. That's how you shutdown any discussion.

swayvil 5y ago
There is a huge difference in substantiality there that I rarely see addressed. When you consume an opinion, expert or otherwise, you are consuming a mere symbol, something of relatively miniscule substance. When you consume a lived experience you are consuming an infinitely dimensioned, infinitely deep thing, of relatively massive substance.
indymike 5y ago
> lived experience >>>> any expert opinion This is why there's a saying in public relations that a story is worth 1000 spreadsheets. What has happened is that people are engaged and persuaded by emotion, and media has evolved to service this.
throwhauser 5y ago
Bezos has noticed an adjacent phenomenon. "The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right." When reasoning becomes too abstract, it's more likely to fail to account for things happening in the real world.

lngnmn2 5y ago

Thinking Fast and Slow has all the known answers. Two systems metaphor is surprisingly good and correlates to Jekyll/Hyde and other classic notions. Different subsystems of the brain could be synchronised and this is what all the eastern ancient practices are about.

karpierz 5y ago

There's a bit of irony in claiming that there's a decline in rationality by doing a hand-wavy data analysis, and relying on peoples' gut feeling that the world has become more feelings driven to push their conclusion forward.

d23 5y ago
Yes, thank you. It’s quite an interesting observation, but to call this article shallow would be too generous. With a few wording tweaks to add a dash of self-awareness, this would be perfectly contradictory satire.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  It's marginal revolution. This is kinda their thing. Lots of short posts and interesting but not explored in depth ideas. Some people like it, others prefer Steve Yegge.

mwattsun 5y ago

I don't think viewing this through today's political lenses is very useful or correct. I remember a shift in the 70's with the sexual revolution and psychological movements like EST at centers like the Esalen Institute. People discovered they had repressed emotions they should bring forth and deal with. People discovered emotional intelligence. It was an exciting time of discovery of the depth of mind that earlier generations were not comfortable with. Men started crying in group encounters. Repressed sexuality was explored. Eastern religions were considered. LSD was taken. These things started in the late 60's but went mainstream in the 70's. To say this was bad and blame it on women is an echo of conservative criticism from those days.

hectord 5y ago
Both you and the author of the blog post assume that rationality is better than being able to show our emotions. The scientific paper doesn't say anything about it. A few decades ago we expected women to "show emotions" and men to be strong. We are now trying to change this cliché since it hurts all of us. What we see in the paper is that this change is taking place. I think it's good news. The idea that rationality was more prevalent until the 1970s since we "believed in science" is compelling. Since the 1970s we focus more on our emotions as you say. What's interesting is that this change took place before the era of social networks. Social networks might be an amplifier but it's definitely not the root cause.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Why do we think this cliché hurts all of us?
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    Because women should be free to show strength and men free to express emotions. And if they cannot without being judged or shamed then we're all worse for it. Cliches like those stifle our humanity and increase suffering.
    - 5y ago

cesaref 5y ago

So there is a change in the ratio of words used in print between the 1850s and the 2020s. This happens in English and Spanish (i'm assuming this is really an American centric discussion, as the paper says this, but the review doesn't mention America). There seem to be many possible reasons for this which aren't mentioned in the analysis. What percentage of the population were literate in 1950? What class of people were the printed material aimed at? I would imagine that the introduction of cheap effectively disposable books and magazines from the 1940s onwards, and the massive social changes which have lead to the vast majority of people having the education and spare time to read if they choose to will have totally skewed any analysis on the printed text. Even taking a single source (the NYT) will not account for changes in readership. There's an attempt to chase market share when competing with other news sources, with editors intentionally changing the tone and material they include to attempt to capture market share. Anyhow, an interesting idea, not convinced the analysis is strong enough to remove what I think of as more likely sources of the change in language.

r_hoods_ghost 5y ago

It's a bit weird that that the authors of the paper ascribe this to the "failure of neo-liberalism" when neo liberalism had most of its successes after 1978. Thatcher and Reagan first elected in 1979 and 1981 respectively. WTO founded in 1995. EU founded in 1993 (albeit preceded by EEC and European Coal and Steel Board). Fall of Berlin Wall 1989. Fukuyama's "End of History" 1992. If there is a correlation surely it's with neo-liberalism's success. Not saying it's causative mind.

kazen44 5y ago
also, the definition of neo-liberalism is about as vague as can be. it means different things to different people in different contexts.

cs702 5y ago

I found the paper's interpretive commentary both less biased and more insightful than the OP, which is a short, opinionated blog post mentioning the paper. In particular, these two paragraphs from the paper's section about "Potential Drivers" struck a chord with me: > What precisely caused the observed stagnation in the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint. The late 1980s witnessed the start of the internet and its growing role in society. 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. > In many languages the trends in sentiment- and intuition-related words accelerate around 2007. One possible explanation could be that the standards for inclusion in Google Books shifted from “being in a library Google had an agreement with” to “from a publisher that directly deposited with Google” after 2004 to 2007, thus affecting the corpus composition. The 2007 shift also coincides with the global financial crisis which may have had an impact. However, earlier economic crises such as the Great Depression (1929 to 1939) did not leave discernable marks on our indicators of book language. Perhaps significantly, 2007 was also roughly the start of a near-universal global surge of social media. This may be illustrated by plotting the dynamics of the word “Facebook” as a marker alongside the frequency of a set of intuition and rationality flag words in different languages. -- Paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118 Abstract: The surge of post-truth political argumentation suggests that we are living in a special historical period when it comes to the balance between emotion and reasoning. To explore if this is indeed the case, we analyze language in millions of books covering the period from 1850 to 2019 represented in Google nGram data. We show that the use of words associated with rationality, such as “determine” and “conclusion,” rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as “feel” and “believe” declined. This pattern reversed over the past decades, paralleled by a shift from a collectivistic to an individualistic focus as reflected, among other things, by the ratio of singular to plural pronouns such as “I”/”we” and “he”/”they.” Interpreting this synchronous sea change in book language remains challenging. However, as we show, the nature of this reversal occurs in fiction as well as nonfiction. Moreover, the pattern of change in the ratio between sentiment and rationality flag words since 1850 also occurs in New York Times articles, suggesting that it is not an artifact of the book corpora we analyzed. Finally, we show that word trends in books parallel trends in corresponding Google search terms, supporting the idea that changes in book language do in part reflect changes in interest. All in all, our results suggest that over the past decades, there has been a marked shift in public interest from the collective to the individual, and from rationality toward emotion.

ausbah 5y ago

>A more plausible explanation is more female writers and the closely related feminization of culture. so what is the point of this piece? is he blaming the slowdown of scientific advancement in the past 40-50 years on "femininity", or straight up just woman? maybe I'm being overly cynical in my reading, but the inclusion of that last bit doesn't smell very well reasoned. other explanations would be great

crispyambulance 5y ago
There is no other explanation. How could there be from such a short insipid quip? It's just a blog from 2 bored libertarian/right-leaning academic economists. Content from there pops up on HN every once in a while (because libertarians). Not much to see.
jfengel 5y ago
I find that the people who most loudly praise logic and decry emotion tend to be the most emotional and least logical. It's usually a way of saying "my assumptions about the world are self evident and any challenge to them obviously irrational".
- kazen44 5y ago
  also, it usually forget that humans are in essence emotional beings. emotions and the relation between people and these emotions are far too large to ignore in advance of "rational" thinking.
- 6chars 5y ago
  So true Discounting the fact that humans aren't coldly rational is irrational. People love to hide behind "logic", but poking a bear and expecting it not to attack you because that would be an "irrational" emotional response is not smart, it's wishful thinking. I can understand why people crave a "grand unified theory" on how the world works and the importance of emotion is an obstacle to having an elegant, comprehensible model for the world, but that doesn't mean it's right to ignore it.
  - 5y ago

swayvil 5y ago

I suspect that all thinking starts as feeling. Like feeling is fire and thought is smoke. So to address feelings really does get to the root of the matter better than to address thoughts. But we only seem to be able to express and address thought, in this medium of language. So we are eternally missing the point. Orbiting it but never touching it. A different kind of conversation is called for.

guerrilla 5y ago
I want to complement what you said with the other side: I think the end of thinking is also feeling. We think (and use all other tools) in order to feel better. That's kind of the point of any technology.
- swayvil 5y ago
  Darn good point.
amanaplanacanal 5y ago
If true, this seems to have profound implications for people working in AI.
mistermann 5y ago
Exactly, but what kind of conversation would work?

helen___keller 5y ago

Analyzing the types of words that appear in all texts is the most noisy and raw data set imaginable. You could probably find any number of confounders, such as a rise in a genre of romantic fiction or self help books. To draw any substantial conclusion without further analysis is an obvious stretch

rob_c 5y ago

Frankly this snacks of the education systems starting to rot imo. I'd say "simple media" or "self respect" but if that were true it would have decreased during the papers becoming popular before the wars... My take is either audio/video media is to blame in some way, or, the grasp of the language is failing. I'm going with the latter driving the former but maybe I'm a pessimist.

whalesalad 5y ago

Both are equally important. If you ignore your feelings long enough you will be unable to think clearly.

LQexplanation 5y ago
On some level you can't repress feelings, you just dress them up in (pseudo) scientific terms and try to push them as logical arguments.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

known 5y ago

"Young women learn to feel more easily than men learn to think" --Voltaire (b. 1694)

wayoutthere 5y ago

This kind of meta-linguistic analysis is reminiscent of what I call “linguistic philosophy” that was popular in the mid-20th century as a reaction to the postmodernists. This school of thought is largely viewed as a dead end — words don’t have fixed meaning across time, audience or geography. Even translated words can have very different contextual meaning between languages that cannot be generalized outside of the context of a specific speaker in a specific context. To try to analyze them as if they tell us more about the world than an author’s state of mind is folly. Furthermore, the last 50 years have been a real reckoning that people don’t make decisions based on facts; they make them based on feeling. This has always been the case; what happened in the 60s was people started questioning the ex post facto “rationality” applied to decisions made by those who comprised the ruling power structures. Much of the discourse prior to that time were emotional in nature but clad in the language of rationality because that’s what the culture at the time would accept. That there were “rational” arguments in favor of segregation or prohibition doesn’t mitigate that they are failed policies. Historically, “rationality” has just been a code word for “the dominant viewpoint of the ruling class”. If anything, the change in language usage is simply following a cultural recognition that they were never rational arguments in the first place, so they’re just not spoken about as if they are authoritative anymore.

james-bcn 5y ago

Those graphs look a little too perfect to me. I wonder to what extent the words were chosen to give the desired graph.

achenatx 5y ago

Decisions have always been mostly based on feelings. The foundation for all decisions is and always has been values. Values are opinions based on feelings. From the foundation of values, you can use logic to ensure that you are consistently following your values (feelings) but the foundation is still emotional. In the past, american culture (at least in the media) was more of a monoculture, which meant more shared values. When you derived decisions from the shared values using logic, you would come to the same place using the same path. This could make it appear that people were mostly using logic. An example of what I mean by values are: Optimizing for economic efficiency is more important than the suffering of the people at the bottom. Or increasing the average wealth is more important than decreasing the variance of wealth. People having free healthcare is more important than property rights. In any debate or discussion, the logic is virtually irrelevant when the values arent shared.

jhgb 5y ago
> The foundation for all decisions is and always has been values. Values are opinions based on feelings. That line of reasoning would lead you to conclude that everything is feeling. But you give examples of things that can eventually be quantified as well. I don't see how some of those objective functions are qualitatively different from the rest.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  All logical systems must be grounded in axioms; your values are the axioms of your beliefs. You can logically derive inferences from your values, but your values cannot be derived from anything. Anything derived must rest on something lower, so there must be a lowest thing that is not a derivative. This is a universal truth. It's as true in mathematics (Peano axioms) as it is in personal beliefs.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    But of course axioms are traditionally defined as self-evident truths, not as "feelings". Furthermore whenever axioms are involved, the effort is to shrink their set as tightly as possible. I suspect that "feeling-oriented people" (for a lack of better term) are not the ones doing this, and if that is the case, I'd consider that an important difference from the people who are doing this, and hence I'd consider statements along the lines of "trying to be rational doesn't actually matter since it's feelings all the way down anyway" as unhelpful platitudes.

cryptica 5y ago

I think Daniel Kahneman's book 'Thinking, fast and slow' lays out a very good framework for thinking about thinking. To summarize: People have two strategies for thinking: System 1 (fast, reactive) and system 2 (slow, methodical). System 1 works quickly but is less accurate; it's more about pattern-matching and reacting to new information. This type of thinking was historically useful to quickly detect and react to predators (fight or flight response). System 2 works slowly and is more accurate, it's about synthesizing information with existing information, calculating and critical thinking. An interesting point made in the book is that most people cannot effectively use system 2 thinking when they're doing strenuous exercise or when they're under significant stress. Try multiplying 2+ digit numbers in your head while doing strenuous exercise. I think this book neatly explains why fear is a good way to control a population; it suppresses people's system 2 thinking abilities and makes them lean more on inaccurate system 1 pattern-matching and makes them highly reactive (easily 'triggered'?)... Then the media can exploit this reactive system 1 state of mind (looking for a predator to fight or run from) to send people off on a wild goose chase in all directions (and pitch them against one another) to distract them from what's really going on.

someelephant 5y ago

Emotion is the product of stress. As the economy continues to deteriorate for the average worker, expect a lot more feeling. Real wage deterioration starting around the time that this chart peaks lines up nicely with my hypothesis. Rich people don't feel this stress so they can't understand why poor people are emotional.

throwaway55421 5y ago

Well, the entire point of thinking is to feel. There is nothing else - feelings are how we ground our value systems. Thinking helps you decide on facts, feeling helps you decide how to act on them.

kspacewalk2 5y ago

Ok now give me the script and let me choose my own completely arbitrary small subset of keywords that are supposed to represent "rationality" and "emotion". I wonder if one can write an optimizer of one kind or another that has the conclusion I want to reach as input, and the keyword subset as output.

orange8 5y ago

Thinking is a form of feeling. The difference is that feeling, comes from a lower level part of the brain, the same one responsible for other "automatic" processes like heartbeat and breathing. Feeling is more superior, as it can shut down thinking when the available power/energy is limited, or the situation calls for a faster, automated response e.g. hands accidentally touch a hot stove... you really do not want to think about about whether or not to move them, you just will. Thinking is superior in all other situations.

mdp2021 5y ago

Gentlemembers, they counted words. They selected two groups of literal words and traced the diacronic proportion. It seems to be a severely unsophisticated "analysis"...

TheGigaChad 5y ago

Another idiotic brainfart from the rationalist community. Im surprised this is not on substack.

wazoox 5y ago

Related: why modern movies suck. https://youtu.be/CQ92cggLMx8 https://youtu.be/CQ92cggLMx8

apocalypstyx 5y ago

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. --David Hume The longer I live the more I find interrogating any so-called rational position always leads down (ultimately) to some underlying feeling, that fundamentality rationality serves (at best) as an evolved means by which to better obtain the objects of those impulses and (at worst perhaps, though no less out of evolutionary necessity -- and perhaps expressly because of the possibility of self-examination opened up by the technical ability of the metacognition of the latter) alternatively act as an aesthetic veneer over those impulses.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Here's a paper talking about the obvious flaws to consider in this kind of research in general: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0137041 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Their finding that scientific publishing made up a greater percentage of "published" (but probably not read) words seems the obvious candidate here.

gromitss 5y ago