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>> We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,830 works of fiction from 1880 to 1999 and find that slightly more than half (54.7 percent) of
by YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,830 works of fiction from 1880 to 1999 and find that slightly more than half (54.7 percent) of the variance explained by time is explained better by an author’s year of birth than by a book’s year of publication.
Ten thousand works! Wow, the authors did some reading!
Oh, no, wait. They used topic modelling. Basically, two people manually labelled a corpus with 10 categories of topic and then they trained a text classifier on that data. Then they used the classification to draw conclusions about the texts in the corpus.
I'm so sorry to be the typical disparaging HN commenter, but trying to understand literature through text modelling is like trying to enjoy nature by counting the trees in the forest. And yes, I'm aware it's common practice. That doesn't make it any more sensible.
Probably my favourite XKCD of all time:
https://xkcd.com/2610 https://xkcd.com/2610
"If I assign numbers to each of these things, then it becomes data and I can do maths on it".
- LudwigNagasena 5y agoTrying to understand and trying to enjoy are two totally different things.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- netizen-936824 5y agoCame here to say this. To understand the forest's inner workings and mechanisms you likely wouldn't be setting up an afternoon picnic
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y agoYes. Did someone say they're not?
- LudwigNagasena 5y agoYes, you did: > trying to understand literature through text modelling is like trying to enjoy nature by counting the trees in the forest
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y agoWhere does the text you quote say that trying to understand and trying to enjoy are the same thing?
- LudwigNagasena 5y agoIt implies that they are similar in some important ways and thus comparable in the given context and thus not totally different.
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y agoWhere does it do that? Show me.
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago> trying to understand literature through text modelling is like trying to enjoy nature by counting the trees in the forest
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y agoWhere does that say that enjoying and understanding is the same thing? Show, me.
- gizmo686 5y agoOn the other hand, trying to understand forests by counting trees in them is a well accepted practice. Including manually counting trees in a small area and extrapolating to a larger one.
- specialist 5y ago> If I assign numbers to each of these things... Heh. I just started Seeing Like a State [1998] by James C. Scott. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State Hearing about failed utopian efforts, like "scientific forestry", what laypersons today might call "tree farms", I can't help but think of so many failed IT projects. If there's been one constant in my career, it'd be the banality of misapprehended complexity. It must be something like a natural law. Like how humans are turrible at assessing risk.