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> According to the article rationality started to decline at ~2000 From the article: What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend around

by T-A 5y ago

> According to the article rationality started to decline at ~2000 From the article: What precisely caused the observed reversal of the long-term trend around 1980 remains perhaps even more difficult to pinpoint. Eyeballing the chart, "rationality words" peaked somewhere there.

ordu 5y ago
Yes, you are right. I concentrated on another graph, that shows the use of "intuition" words starts to grow closer to 2000. But it fits perfectly to a narrative of "The Book of Why" of Judea Pearl. He tells the history of statistics, and around 1980 there was growing frustration with logic and statistics. AI researchers was unable to build AI on a basis of formal logic (pattern matching, expert systems). So various probabilistic logics were spawned (fuzzy logic, bayesian analysis) they were trying to merge formal logic and statistics into a single framework. But it was not enough because it didn't allow to speak about causes and effect. And formal tools to deal with causality were developed in 1990s. Exactly when the "rational" word use declined and the "intuition" word use grown. We see in graphs how people stopped using "rational" words (because they saw that they didn't work?), and closer to 2000 they've learned a new vocabulary. Correlation between the history of statistics and this graphs is just perfect. Though it is just a correlation and moreover it is a hindsight correlation, not a good reason to be overexcited and to propose a causal explanation.
kerblang 5y ago
1979 is the year Baudrillard published Simulacra & Simulation (a sort of obsession for me) and became the philosophical superstar of postmodernism, documenting a great cultural sea change towards a more cynical, superficial, often delusional worldview that pervaded the 1980's and echoes today. He was more inflammatory than objective/rational himself, however.

by T-A 5y ago

ordu 5y ago

Yes, you are right. I concentrated on another graph, that shows the use of "intuition" words starts to grow closer to 2000. But it fits perfectly to a narrative of "The Book of Why" of Judea Pearl. He tells the history of statistics, and around 1980 there was growing frustration with logic and statistics. AI researchers was unable to build AI on a basis of formal logic (pattern matching, expert systems). So various probabilistic logics were spawned (fuzzy logic, bayesian analysis) they were trying to merge formal logic and statistics into a single framework. But it was not enough because it didn't allow to speak about causes and effect. And formal tools to deal with causality were developed in 1990s. Exactly when the "rational" word use declined and the "intuition" word use grown. We see in graphs how people stopped using "rational" words (because they saw that they didn't work?), and closer to 2000 they've learned a new vocabulary. Correlation between the history of statistics and this graphs is just perfect. Though it is just a correlation and moreover it is a hindsight correlation, not a good reason to be overexcited and to propose a causal explanation.

kerblang 5y ago

1979 is the year Baudrillard published Simulacra & Simulation (a sort of obsession for me) and became the philosophical superstar of postmodernism, documenting a great cultural sea change towards a more cynical, superficial, often delusional worldview that pervaded the 1980's and echoes today. He was more inflammatory than objective/rational himself, however.