14 ms·
Who lusts for certainty lusts for lies
- thfuran 3y agoThat or maths. Though I seem to recall a quote about statistics...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hprotagonist 3y agoin the case of ngrams, both!
- thfuran 3y agoYes, I think (as the article says) using ngrams can easily land you in the camp of telling lies with statistics.
- diogenes4 3y agoAt this point I'm waiting for data to show up validating that google ngrams has use.
- vlz 3y agoWhile the point made by the authors is certainly a valid one, it's a bit sneaky and not very fitting to their overall message that they have the Y-axes on the ngram graphs not 0-indexed. This makes the google results seem more extreme than they in fact are and is a bit of misdirection in itself. Compare e.g. to the actual ngram viewer which seems to index by 0 per default: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=said&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=said&year_star... https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=said&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=said&year_star...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- boxed 3y agoSuch a shame too as the point would be equally valid without the graph-lies.
- chefandy 3y agoKind of. The author could fix a lot of their problems with the very prominent dropdown above the graph letting them select the collection— English fiction for example. The long s character can be tricky for OCR, but is not likely relevant to most people's casual use of the tool. I worked on a team that overcame it in a high volume scanning project so they should be able to correct that with software and their existing page images. The plurals criticism is just wrong— you can even do case sensitive searches. It's not perfect, but it's not useless, and it's not a "lie"— it's just a blunt instrument. Even if the criticism was factually correct, 'proving' that you can't do fine work with blunt instrument is of dubious value. I think a lot of folks around here are super thirsty to see big tech companies get zinged and when it happens, their fact checking skills suffer.
- nerdponx 3y agoThis is the fundamental problem of data analysis: your analysis is only as good as your data. This is not an easy problem. It's hard in general to evaluate data quality: How do we know when our data is good? Are we sure? How do we measure that and report on it? If we do have some qualitative or quantitative assessment of data quality, how do we present it in a way that is integrated with the results of our analysis? And if we want to quantitatively adjust our results for data quality, how do we do that? There are answers to the above, but they lie beyond the realm of a simple line chart, and they tend to require a fair amount of custom effort for each project. For example in the Google Ngrams case, one could present the data quality information on a chart showing the composition of data sources over time, broken out into broad categories like "academic" and "news". But then you have to assign categories to all those documents, which might be easy or hard depending on how they were obtained. And then you also have to post a link to that chart somewhere very prominently, so that people actually look at it, and maybe include some explanatory disclaimer text. That would help, but it's not going to prevent the intuitive reaction when a human looks at a time series of word usage declining. Maybe a better option is to try to quantify the uncertainty in the word usage time series and overlay that on the chart. There are well-established visualization techniques for doing this. but how do we quantify uncertainty in word usage? In this case, our count of usages is exact: the only uncertainty is uncertainty related to sampling. In order to quantify uncertainty, we must estimate how much our sample of documents deviates from all documents written at that time. It might be doable, but it doesn't sound easy. And once we have that done, will people actually interpret that uncertainty overlay correctly? Or will they just look at the line going down and ignore the rest? Your analysis is only as good as your data. This has been a fundamental problem for as long as we have been trying to analyze data, and it's never going to go away. We would do well to remember this as we move into the "AI age". It also says something about us as well: throughout our lives, we learn from data. We observe and consider and form opinions. How good it is the data that we have observed? Are our conclusions valid?
- gcanyon 3y agoFrom the comments on that page: "Do publishers still order many carloads of “is” each year during spring thaw..." In Dictionopolis they do! Any Phantom Tollbooth peeps here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Tollbooth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom_Tollbooth
- bluetomcat 3y agoYou can never construct a representative image of the past. You are operating with a limited amount of sources which have survived in one form or another. They are not evenly distributed across time and space. There is an inherent “data loss” problem when a person dies - gone are all the impressions, unwritten experiences, familiar smells. Even a living person’s memory may not be reliable at one point.
- pintxo 3y agoAt one point? Human memory is surprisingly unreliable. One example to test for yourself: https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo?si=16fwk8wG8Yyhim5t https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo?si=16fwk8wG8Yyhim5t
- psychoslave 3y agoThat is not even memory bias here. Sure, what you pay attention to will impact what you remember, but this experience goes further and show how your attention can be manipulated to be blind to ploted events.
- Miraltar 3y agoExact but the point is still valid. The Mandela Effect is a great example of it.
- ongy 3y agoSerious question Are you supposed to not see the gorilla? I assumed it's the trap and there's some slightly less obvious catch in there.
- psychoslave 3y agoThat's why I always found so strange that only those with fame/wealth distorted social representations ends up with a Wikipedia biography.
- not_knuth 3y ago
- andrewflnr 3y agoThe title is true for a lot more areas of life than linguistics. There are no shortcuts to truth, DVD anyone who tries to offer you one is probably trying to sell you something.
- gilleain 3y agoWhat does "DVD anyone" mean? (Perhaps a roundabout way to say "Make obsolete", as a way to say "Get rid of"?)
- mancerayder 3y agoI just can't CD what that means either.
- Tactician_mark 3y agoIt's a Blu-ray mystery to me.
- psychoslave 3y agoIt fades away vinyl from my ens. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ens https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ens
- compiler-devel 3y agoThe redditification of HN is sad. With reddit de facto purging third-party apps with increased API prices, we now see reddit-tier conversations spamming message boards like HN.
- sk0g 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
- AugustoCAS 3y agoI'm going to use that title on the next conversations I have about estimates, in particular in the context of 'we need to know that this piece of work will be started in 4 months and finished in 8'. Those conversations definitely ſuck for me.
- dumbfounder 3y agoThis guy ſucks.
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- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gascoigne 3y agoSurely if you have story pointed and T-shirt sized your epics correctly that shouldn't be difficult? /s
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago> T-shirt sized your epics That one’s new to me. Does it mean if I wear an XL my epics can have more story points?
- gascoigne 3y agoCalculating story points based on the size of the t-shirt you're wearing that day might actually yield more realistic results. In my case every story would become an XL! :)
- js8 3y agoThough you should also remember "who lusts for promotion lusts for telling lies".
- 3y ago
- gniv 3y agoBTW, that glyph should have a small bar on the left, but I don't see it in the article (in Chrome on Mac). https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+017F https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+017F (that looks more like an s) Edit: But I see it in fixed-width font: ſ
- bradrn 3y ago> that glyph should have a small bar on the left It depends on the typeface. My browser’s fixed-width font, for instance, doesn’t display a bar.
- brightball 3y ago“Only a fool is sure if anything, the wise man is always guessing.” - MacGuyver
- robertlagrant 3y ago> Who Lusts for Certainty Lusts for Lies Well, maybe[0]. [0] with thanks to https://xkcd.com/552 https://xkcd.com/552
- cainxinth 3y agoAgnostics have been saying this for years (jk… sorta).
- guardian5x 3y agoYou are not wrong there. This title could also be an article about atheism and religion.
- lvass 3y agoSurely you meant to write agnostics.
- cainxinth 3y agoCorrected it
- phkahler 3y agoClassic mistake of not including zero on the vertical axis of a graph. If you're thinking "but then there won't be so much variation" you're right. Leaving zero off allows small variations to look large.
- PaulHoule 3y agoOn the other hand there are the cases where you do want to emphasize small variations. In a control chart showing the fill weight of cereal boxes you certainly don’t want zero on the chart. Neither do you want to plot daily temperatures in a city on a chart that includes 0 Kelvin.
- hef19898 3y agoSure you do, why not? If you don't, show the deviation values (plus and minus) centered around zero again.
- stefantalpalaru 3y ago[dead]
- gitgud 3y agoReminds me of a feeling I had when solving a jigsaw puzzle: Everything must fit together to reveal the big picture!… In reality things almost never fit together to reveal some big picture… so trying to make them fit like puzzle pieces often leads to false conclusions
- jgalt212 3y agoThe words of Colonel Nathan R. Jessup come to mind.
- laura_g 3y agoWhat is it specifically about the 1970/80s that causes this dip? Was there an explosion of this academic writing around that era or something else to have this effect?
- djha-skin 3y agoThe best part of this article is perhaps the following critique of ngrams and by extension their popular use in modern algorithms: > The text of Etymonline is built entirely from print sources, and is done entirely by human beings. Ngrams are not. They are unreliable, a sloppy product of an ignorant technology, one made to sell and distract, one never taught the difference between "influence" and "inform." > Why are they on the site at all? Because now, online, pictures win and words lose. The war is over; they won. One never taught the difference between "influence" and "inform". What a scathing rebuke of our modern world and the social media that is part of it. Algorithms that attempt to quantify human speech and interaction and get it wrong most of the time in their quest to maximize their owner's profits. This somber warning is especially poignant in an age more and more ruled by generative AI, which I'm told is essentially an ngram predictor.
- acyou 3y agoInfluence and inform are two sides of the same moral coin, where we claim others ideas aren't their own, whereas we are the virtuous informed ones who draw our own conclusions. The low-pass filter of the mind only allows in what fits somewhere inside the existing framework. If you don't reject something, then being informed by it and being influenced by it are the same thing. In that framework, people who claim to be informed come off as high and mighty and a little lacking in self consciousness.
- gpderetta 3y agoI inform, you influence, he propagandizes.
- Turskarama 3y agoDisagree, influencing someone and informing someone are orthogonal. Influencing someone just means changing their behavior and/or beliefs. This can be done with either the truth or lies, or even just opinion (green is better than blue - neither true nor false). Informing someone specifically means giving them true information, which may or may not influence them.
- PaulHoule 3y agoDon’t like the title, at least for this article. When it comes to results like this it is more “lusting for clickbait” or the scientific equivalent thereof. (e.g. papers in Science and Nature aren’t really particularly likely to be right, but they are particularly likely to be outrageous, particularly in fields like physics that aren’t their center) On the other hand, “Real Clear Poltics” always had a toxic sounding name to me since there is nothing “Real” or “Clear” about poltics: I think the best book about politics is Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 which is a druggie’s personal experience following the candidates around and picking up hitchhikers on the road at 3am and getting strung out on the train and having moments of jarring sobriety like the time when he understood the parliamentary maneuvering that won McGovern the nomination while more conventional journalists were at a loss. What I do know is 20 years from now an impeccably researched book will come out that makes a strong case that what we believed about political events today was all wrong and really it was something different. In the meantime different people are going to have radically different perspectives and… that’s the way it is. Adjectives like “real” and “clear” are an attempt to shut down most of those perspectives and pretend one of those viewpoints is privileged. Makes me thing of Baudrillard’s thorough shitting on the word “real” in Simulacra and Simulation which ought to completely convince you that people peddling the fake will be heralded by the word “real”. (Or for that matter, that Scientology calls itself the “science of certainty.”)
- paulsutter 3y agoAnd it will also be wrong. > 20 years from now an impeccably researched book will come out that makes a strong case that what we believed about political events today was all wrong and really it was something different The one good thing about politics is that the motives are crystal clear, politicians want to stay in power first, and only secondarily want to improve things. Once you know this, everything makes sense. Even if we never find out what "really" happened
- bilbo0s 3y agopoliticians want to stay in power first, and only secondarily want to improve things. In all honesty, many don't even want to improve things. Most people with power, love power. It's contrary to their nature to change a system that confers power to themselves. That's not just in your own, but in any nation, the people in power will be resistant to change.
- digitalsushi 3y agoWhen a measure (certainty) becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure (lies)
- dotsam 3y ago> It doesn't look like an indicator of the diachronic change in the popularity… I thought all change is diachronic.* I looked it up and found out that ‘diachrony’ is a term of art in linguistic analysis, contrasting with synchronic analysis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diachrony_and_synchrony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diachrony_and_synchrony *Edit: I initially thought that saying ‘diachronic change’ was like saying ‘three-sided triangle’. But thinking about it, I suppose things do change in space but not time, e.g ‘the pattern changes abruptly’
- dahart 3y ago> Ngram says toast almost vanishes from the English language by 1980, and then it pops back up. The Ngram plot does not say that. It shows usage dropping ~40% (since 1800). It’s indeed a problem that the graph Y axis doesn’t go to zero, as others have pointed out. But did the etymonline authors really not notice this before declaring incorrectly what it says? I would find that hard to believe (especially considering the subsequent “see, no dip” example that has a zero Y and a small but visible plateau around 1980), and it’s ironic considering the hyperbolic and accusatory title and and opening sentence.
- lolinder 3y agoThe graph axis isn't the only problem. The word "toast" did not drop in usage by 40%, Google's dataset shifted dramatically towards a different genre than it was composed of previously. I've been in conversations with people trying to explain those drops in the 70s, and no one (myself included) realized that it was such a dramatic flaw in the data.
- dahart 3y agoThat’s fair, the article has a very valid point, which would be made even stronger without the misreading of the plots they’re critiquing, whether it was accidental or intentional. I always thought Ngrams were weird too, I remember in the past thinking some of the dramatic shifts it shows were unlikely.
- bee_rider 3y agoIs there no way to filter out particular data sets? This seems like a pretty huge limitation.
- lolinder 3y agoSort of, but it's pretty blunt. You can select between a few different English corpuses, but it's basically fiction versus everything, not more fine than that.
- taeric 3y agoIs this that the n-grams are wrong, or that they are limited in what you can do/say with them? I find the data fun, but I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. You will be doing a query on past books on today's lexicon. Which just feels wrong. As an easy example that I know, if you search for "þe", you will not find a lot of hits. Which, is mostly fair, as historically we know that "þ" dropped off around the 1400s. That said, add in "ye" and you see a ton of its use. Is that an intentional feature of n-grams? Feels more like an encoding mistake passed down through the ages. Would be like getting upset at the great vowel shift and not realizing that our phonetic symbols are not static universal truths.
- tantalor 3y agoWhy the title change? Title on the site is "Who Lusts for Certainty Lusts for Lies" Title here is "Google Ngram Viewer n-grams are wrong"
- 0xfae 3y agoHN in general doesn't like "editorialized" titles. HN titles are meant to be a factual representation of what you are going read without the attention grabbing (albeit clever) title.
- tantalor 3y agoEr no. > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. The "don't editorialize" guideline is meant for the submitter to not change the the title to make some point. The site can & should use whatever title it wants. So be it if they want to editorialize. That's their prerogative.
- dredmorbius 3y agoBoth your and GP comment are inaccurate and/or unclear. HN prefers but does not require the original title. HN does not permit submitter editorialising. Where the original title is clickbait, which may include editorialising, HN requests that submitters change the title, if at all possible to some phrase within the article. Another de facto rule concerns "title fever", which is when a title is so distracting that it overwhelms the content of the article in discussion. From the guidelines: If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link. If the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids." Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> Some of dang's comments on the issue: - On changing original title (from yesterday, and NPR to boot): <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37625424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37625424>. Also: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36655892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36655892> - On substituting a phrase from the article: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20title%20phrase%20from%20the%20article&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> - On submitter editorialising: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8357252 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8357252> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35163133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35163133> - Distracting titles: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37137478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37137478>. Particularly cases where "the thread will lose its mind": <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176686> - "Title fever": (Beginning 4 'graphs in) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573>
- tensor 3y agoThe authors assert that the ngram statistics for "said" are wrong, and imply that they have evidence of the contrary, but they don't provide the evidence. Looking at their own website, all they provide is google ngram statistics: https://www.etymonline.com/word/said#etymonline_v_25922 https://www.etymonline.com/word/said#etymonline_v_25922. This coupled with the huge failing of not displaying zero on the y-axis of their graph, and even interpreting the bad graph wrong, makes me not believe them at all. A very low quality article.
- lolc 3y agoA decline to half the usage of "said" within 6 decades, followed by a recovery to the previous level within two decades? Show me evidence that the English language changed so fast in that way. It's extraordinary and you'd have to bring something convincing. Otherwise I believe their hypothesis and their conclusion that ngrams are bunk. Yeah they interpreted the "toast" graph wrong. They should be more careful to read shitty graphs that cut off at the low point.
- pixelesque 3y agoIt's possible (but I think unlikely) it could be somewhat due to different usage of words than the English language changing completely (which clearly didn't happen). i.e. maybe instead of lots of books having direct text like "David said" or "Dora said", over time there was a trend to use a different more varied/descriptive way of describing that, i.e. "David replied" or "Dora retorted"?
- lolc 3y agoYea there may be a shift in usage hidden in those numbers. As this article laments, we can't use ngrams to measure the develpment of usage between said, replied, and retorted.
- tensor 3y agoIt depends entirely on what the data set is, and to conclude that it's "wrong" you'd have to consider the underlying data too. Google ngrams makes no claim to be a consistent benchmark type data set. Over time the content its based on shifts, which can cause effects like this. To make any sort of claim like "this word's usage changes over time" in an academic sense you'd need to include a discussion of the data sources you used and why those are representative of word usage over time. The fact that they'd even try to use google ngrams in this way shows how little they actually researched the topic. Google ngrams is a cute data set that can sometimes show rough trends, but it's not some "authoritative source on usage over time" and it doesn't claim to be. The authors, on the other hand, are claiming to be authoritative and thus the burden of evidence on their claims is far far far higher. I didn't even get into their completely unobjective and vague accusations of "AI" somehow doing something bad. Ngrams don't involve AI, it's simple word counting.
- hyperific 3y agoIt seems to me that Google Ngram isn't wrong. It's reporting statistics on the words it correctly identified in the corpus. The problem is the context of the statistics. You may somewhat confidently say the word "said" dips in usage at such and such time in the Google Books corpus. You can more confidently say it dips at such and such time for the subset of the corpus for which OCR correctly identified every instance of the word. But you can't make claims in a broader context like "this word dipped in usage at such and such time" without having sufficient data.
- gmd63 3y agoJust as "it depends" is a meme for economists, "need more data" is the galaxy-brain statistician meme. Until you've solved the grand unified theory, you can never be fully confident in the completeness of your data or statistical inferences. What's wrong is misleading the public away from this understanding.
- dredmorbius 3y agoAnd this is why sampling methodology is so much more vastly important in drawing inferential population statistics than sample size. Sample 1 million books from an academic corpus, and you'll turn up a very different linguistic corpus than selecting the ten best-selling books for each decade of the 20th century.
- crazygringo 3y agoThe n-grams aren't wrong, but it is a real problem that the underlying corpus distribution changes massively over time (in this case, proportion of academic vs. non-academic works). This is a really devilish problem with no easy answer. Because on the one hand, it's certainly easy enough to normalize by genre -- e.g. fix academic works at 20%, popular magazines at 20%, fiction books at 40%, and so forth. But the problem is that the popularity of genres changes over time separately in terms of supply and demand, as well as consumption of printed material overall. Fiction written might increase while fiction consumed might decrease. Or the consumption of books might decrease as television consumption increases. So there isn't any objectively "right" answer at all. But it would be nice if Google allowed you to plot popularity by genre -- I think that would help a lot in terms of determining where and how words become more or less common.
- thomasfromcdnjs 3y agoDoes this criticism of ngrams also translates to keyword trends when considering SEO/SEM?
- ttoinou 3y agoThe y-axis do not start at zero. So basically the author doesnt know how to read a graph.. what am I missing ?
- labrador 3y agoI'm happy to have LLMs now but in the future I'm going to be more concerned about the source of their training. I can see regulation coming that requires that LLM companies reveal those sources.
- ftxbro 3y agoI feel like this title would have gotten a lot less attention here if it wasn't for all the lusts.
- tomcam 3y agoI normally restrict myself to garden variety lust.