[HN Gopher] "To our surprise"
___________________________________________________________________
"To our surprise"
Author : _Microft
Score : 426 points
Date : 2021-05-06 09:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (scholar.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scholar.google.com)
| dvirsky wrote:
| My favorite phrases in academic papers are "leaves a lot to be
| desired", and of course "towards a ...." in the title.
| [deleted]
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| To _my_ surprise, i was not aware of this version of Googles '
| search engine.
| glial wrote:
| It is a real lifesaver for graduate students.
| _Microft wrote:
| The Internet Archive has also a full-text article search (for
| older papers, iirc):
|
| https://scholar.archive.org
|
| "Sci Hub" is also popular in the science community. This is a
| shadow library that "collects" articles from other publishers
| websites and makes them available free of charge. Maybe the
| most important feature though is that it has a single search
| field and it does not matter where the article was initially
| published at.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
| newsbinator wrote:
| "counterintuitively"
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=%22...
| mellosouls wrote:
| "It has not escaped our notice", without the famous one (a
| healthy starting point for new studies?)...
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22it+has+not+escaped+o...
| for_i_in_range wrote:
| This is quite brilliant. Essentially querying certain _power
| phrases_ in Google Scholar to see trends across disciplinary
| fields. I haven't thought of doing this until now. Thanks for
| sharing.
| kizer wrote:
| Just ask GPT3 how many papers resulted in proving the negation of
| the hypothesis, and how many papers resulted in reasonably
| proving the hypothesis. And maybe inconclusive results for sake
| of completeness. It would be interesting to see the numbers,
| especially in the field of psychology.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| And how many were written by GPT-3, while at it. Soon this will
| be a thing.
| ExtraE wrote:
| Is that a question GPT-3 can (accurately) answer?
| randogp wrote:
| and patents as well
| https://patents.google.com/?q=%22to+our+surprise%22
| tunesmith wrote:
| Are we making fun of it? Indicating something as surprising is
| valuable because something that is surprising is something that
| has higher informative value. It seems to be a valuable and
| succinct indicator of a relevant point in the paper.
| kbelder wrote:
| I think we're having fun with it, not making fun of it.
| Surprising results are great.
| _Microft wrote:
| Not at all, see here for the reason why I submitted it:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27074980
| tephra wrote:
| Just to put it out there. This is a great title and idea for a
| podcast / blog.
| tbirdny wrote:
| tooursurprise.com domain name is available.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Did we expect that?
| seigando wrote:
| This is one of my favorite posts
| tpoacher wrote:
| I am extremely pleasantly surprised with the results for "source
| codes". I thought it'd be full of people making the grammatical
| error of using "source code" in the plural.
|
| It is happening so often these days that I get more and more
| frustrated by it...
| voxl wrote:
| Language changes with use. What has frustrated me since high
| school is when people get so pedantic over the natural
| progression of language.
|
| Conservative to the bone I guess.
| ausbah wrote:
| does it really matter though?
| Grimm1 wrote:
| We're engineers (or academics), pedantry is occasionally a
| hill we die on.
|
| Trying to be precise in language allows you to communicate an
| idea the most effective way, imo, and at the end of the day
| that's you're goal. At least it should be in technical
| writing. If the reader has to pause when they see "codes"
| instead of "code" because it's just a bit off then that is a
| tiny failing in your communication.
|
| Definitely not the end of the world, definitely not something
| to be an asshole about, but it is something I would maybe
| politely correct if I knew the person well enough.
|
| Also don't take this for me saying I'm perfect in my written
| communication. I still don't know how to use commas and I've
| had them explained to me from all grammatical standpoints
| multiple times. Trying is all you can do.
| _nickb wrote:
| > you're goal.
|
| your
| post_below wrote:
| To my surprise you used you're instead of your in a comment
| about precise language.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| I said I wasn't perfect! But yeah I saw it, unfortunately
| my edit timer had ran out.
| _delirium wrote:
| Comp sci vs the natural sciences have an interesting split
| on this (though blurring more recently). Computer science
| tends to use "code" as a collective noun. Traditional usage
| in the natural sciences and parts of engineering is that "a
| code" (singular) is a single routine or piece of software
| to carry out some kind of numerical calculation or
| simulation. Then "codes" is just the normal plural when
| talking about more than one of them. So you find papers
| talking about things like "a new code for simulating
| preheating" [1] or "benchmarking simulation codes" [2].
|
| [1] https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2008/11/009
|
| [2] https://doi.org/10.1109/PAC.2003.1289206
| Grimm1 wrote:
| That's very interesting, I've limited exposure to
| programming in the natural sciences so I've only really
| experienced the collective noun usage.
|
| I had thought "a code" and then "codes" may have come
| down from the punch card era of programming where as you
| said it would be more of single routine for a specific
| computation which I guess then would have filtered down
| into scientific computing as programming evolved through
| fortran and others and now it seems it's all merging back
| together.
| xbar wrote:
| Lots of fun. I will avoid eating the uncooked liver of a boar.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| intitle:"algorithm" "orders of magnitude speedup":
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=inti...
| adunk wrote:
| The query "to our surprise" currently shows around 219 000
| results. The query "not surprising" has about 1 620 000 results.
| That's about 7 times as many.
|
| I have no idea if this is surprising or not.
|
| Somewhat more surprising is that the query "italian mad
| scientist" has 4 results in Google Scholar. Those are all due to
| the SCIGen fake scientific paper generator, which sometimes
| outputs this phrase: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
| willvarfar wrote:
| "Italian mad scientist" reminds me of my own markov-chain-based
| document generator in the 90s.
|
| I remember seeing the first screen full of waffle and one
| fragment standing out clearly herbaceous
| border disputes
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > herbaceous border disputes
|
| A concept familiar to anybody with a neighbor who refuses to
| do anything about their blackberry infestation.
| seedboot wrote:
| In their defense, they had great keyboards.
| amichal wrote:
| My first attempt at generated English sentences was while
| avoiding a middle school poetry assignment. I was just
| basically selecting nouns and verbs from quickly hand made
| list of words. It produced: "the duck hit the bus with bike".
| I was a bit excited it meant something, I was totally
| disheartened that in addition to 5th grade grammar I was
| going to need to teach my APPLE II a heck of a lot about what
| concepts make sense together...
| larrydag wrote:
| "alarmed by" has 94k results.
| ajg4 wrote:
| that's an interesting comparison. it shows the ratio between
| people doing actual research and people reproducing what other
| people already did.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| Not really. Reproducing research can create surprising
| results (if it doesn't match what you're trying to
| reproduce), and novel research can be unsurprising (if
| practice matches with the theory).
| adrianN wrote:
| You can do actual original research without finding anything
| surprising.
| algorias wrote:
| I would never write "to our surprise" in a paper. Rather, it
| would be "Surprisingly, ..." which fits the pattern of "Thus,
| ...", "Furthermore, ...", "In contrast, ..." etc, which is a
| nice and compact way of making the structure of an argument
| clearer.
|
| Surprisingly, when I do the same searches as you, I don't get
| anywhere near the same numbers.
| lrem wrote:
| Ah yes, what kind of academic would ever write three words
| where one have the same meaning... And make you this much
| closer to fitting in that darned limit.
| [deleted]
| mountain_peak wrote:
| "Scienziato pazzo italiano" fares slightly better at 16
| results (that's a literal translation; I'm sure there are
| better ones). Amusingly, one of the results refers to "John
| Lithgow", which I instantly recognized from Buckaroo Banzai -
| one of his characters is "Dr. Emilio Lizardo"
| spoonjim wrote:
| "To our surprise" and "surprisingly" do not mean the same
| thing. "Surprisingly" means that something is objectively
| surprising, or that a "reasonable man" would be surprised by
| it. "Surprisingly, hot water freezes faster than cold water."
| That is pretty objectively surprising.
|
| "To our surprise" means only that you were surprised by it.
| It's more humble because it allows for a reader to be
| smarter/wiser and not be surprised. "I thought Frodo was
| going to die at the end of the Return of the King, but to my
| surprise he did not." "Surprisingly" wouldn't be correct here
| since not everyone would have made that prediction.
| brianpan wrote:
| Scientific experiments also try to prove surprising
| results.
|
| "We believed this surprising thing might be true. To our
| surprise, nothing unusual happened."
|
| What's generally surprising is not the same as what is
| surprising given the researchers' prior expectations. (What
| is surprising also changes over time, as a result of those
| experiments!)
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Good distinction. As a scientist, 'to our surprise' is
| exceptionally surprising!
|
| We are already domain experts on the research edge for
| whatever topic, and writing to our peers. What we know is
| already not obvious to non-experts. For something to be
| surprising to the domain experts too, that's where the
| novelty points start, and why we are taking time to
| write/read. So, clever!
| cgriswald wrote:
| I'm struggling with the concept of objective surprise.
| Surprise is a subjective experience usually _brought about_
| by events differing from expectation, but the experience is
| entirely subjective. So my guess is that you mean the fact
| of results differing from expectation.
|
| There can be a difference between results and consensus
| expectation, but there can also be a difference between
| results and personal expectation ( _e.g.,_ results do not
| support hypothesis). In the absence of explicitly calling
| out _who_ holds the expectation, there is either context
| that makes it clear ( _e.g.,_ the audience is experts in
| the field and the expectations are widely held) or the use
| is referring to the author's own surprise.
|
| Simply claiming they are not equivalent is not correct.
| They are equivalent _in the absence of context_. It is only
| when context is considered (and just being a scholarly
| article isn't necessarily enough context) that they might
| be considered non-equivalent.
| spion wrote:
| What might be surprising for the authors might not be
| surprising to others.
| cgriswald wrote:
| When someone writes, "Surprisingly, ...," they are
| expressing their own surprise. It is equivalent to "To our
| surprise...," except it is more succinct. Absent other
| context, there's no implication that anyone else is
| surprised or should be surprised.
| spion wrote:
| It paints an additional layer of scientific precision /
| courtesy / modesty, IMO. Not the style of all scientists,
| but its very common.
| harles wrote:
| It also dates the paper - even if it was generally
| surprising 10 years ago, it won't be today. Although I
| doubt papers with this language are standing the test of
| time anyways.
| krono wrote:
| > Surprisingly, when I do the same searches as you, I don't
| get anywhere near the same numbers.
|
| Are you honestly not aware that your behavioural data is used
| to target specific search results?
| oceliker wrote:
| It's likely that they just forgot to include the quote
| marks in the search. I don't think Google Scholar does
| behavioral targeting.
| krono wrote:
| I missed the Google Scholar part, indeed less likely
| there but you can never be sure
| jcims wrote:
| Just want to thank you for the total HN-esque tangent this
| comment launched.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| It seems you prefer passive voice.
| toxik wrote:
| No no no.
|
| The passive voice is preferred.
| umanwizard wrote:
| "Surprisingly" vs. "to our surprise" is not a passive vs.
| active voice distinction.
| teachingassist wrote:
| In the sense that "to our surprise" identifies "us" with
| identity and agency, it is.
|
| How would you describe this difference, otherwise?
| hunter2_ wrote:
| At first, I fully agreed with you. Then I saw another
| comment using "an experiment was conducted" as an typical
| example of passive voice, and I find that to be far more
| passive:
|
| "...was conducted" suggests no information about the
| conductor. It could be the author, and in the specific
| context of an academic paper it implies the author, but
| it could just as well be anyone else on Earth especially
| outside of this context.
|
| "Surprisingly" (or "the results were a surprise," etc.),
| on the other hand, doesn't leave anything to the
| imagination. I can't think of a way this word could
| potentially mean that another party but the author was
| surprised.
|
| Passive voice could hide the party responsible for
| surprising someone (active "Alice surprised Bob" becomes
| passive "Bob was surprised"), but in the original
| scenario, the party causing the surprise (the subject,
| which could be hidden by passive voice), is the
| experiment. The surprised party is the direct object, not
| the subject... passive voice is not a term to describe
| hiding the direct object; that's transitive versus
| intransitive.
| teachingassist wrote:
| The definition of passive given on Wikipedia here: https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_voice#Defining_%22pass...
| does not seem to be prescriptive in that particular way.
|
| My question was: If we prefer not to use the word
| 'passive' to describe this difference, what should it be
| called instead?
| rossitter wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree that a distinction needs to be made
| between the two, certainly not on lines of agency. The
| "our" in "to our surprise" may or may not correspond to
| an agent, patient, etc., in the modified clause.
|
| To an agent: "To our surprise, we found them. To our
| surprise, group A was found by us first."
|
| To a patient: "To our surprise, they found us. To our
| surprise, we were found by group A."
|
| To neither: "To our surprise, group A found group B. To
| our surprise, group B was found by group A."
|
| I suppose "to our surprise" is explicit about whose
| expectations weren't met in a way that "surprisingly" is
| not. But in a first-person narrative, I imagine most
| readers would understand "surprisingly" to mean "to
| my/our surprise."
| teachingassist wrote:
| This suggestion is precisely comparable to the passive
| voice.
|
| There is an intended agent experiencing surprise, and we
| might under some circumstances agree that we know who the
| agent is (just as we expect that "the experiment was
| conducted" by the author as researcher).
|
| But, technically, the agent is obscured and not written,
| so we can't be completely certain about the writer's
| intent. Maybe Rosalind Franklin conducted the experiment:
| we are only led to infer that the author was responsible.
|
| Personally, I generally understand "Surprisingly," to
| mean "An attentive reader should now be surprised
| that...".
|
| There's an expectation of general surprise relative to an
| earlier claim in the text; the writer assumes the reader
| will be surprised (whether or not the writer was
| truthfully surprised). I find myself annoyed by this
| style, whenever I am unsurprised.
| rossitter wrote:
| Comparable to one use case of the passive voice, maybe.
|
| What do you mean by "intended agent"? "Agent" has a
| common definition in linguistics, and an agent is only an
| agent in the context of a verb, not an overarching
| narrative. The same referent can be an agent in one
| sentence but not the next: "We hid. To our surprise we
| were found by group A." "Group A" is the only agent in
| the second sentence.
|
| There may be other definitions of "agent" in other
| contexts, but we're talking about grammatical voice here.
|
| The passive voice is quite simple: the grammatical
| subject is filled by the patient or theme of a clause,
| not e.g. the agent. There are many use cases for the
| passive voice apart from obfuscation, and obfuscation is
| hardly a necessary result.
|
| I might call "surprisingly" in your interpretation a
| weasel word in the broad sense. The inference is that the
| author wants the reader to take up an attitude but is not
| being forthright about it.
|
| Of course some passive clauses may be weaselly in their
| own right, but the passive voice is not weaselly by
| definition.
| faldore wrote:
| To our surprise, the nerdiness of some hacker news
| commenters seems to have no upper bound.
| umanwizard wrote:
| That definition of passive voice is extremely general and
| abstract because it's meant to apply to all human
| languages.
|
| The Wikipedia definition of English passive voice is more
| instructive:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_passive_voice .
|
| The term distinguishes between sentences where the
| _semantic_ agent is the _syntactic_ subject, and those
| where it is the object.
|
| For example: "Bob threw a ball at Suzie" (active, Bob is
| the syntactic subject) vs. "A ball was thrown at Suzie by
| Bob" (passive, Bob is the object of a preposition and "a
| ball" is the subject).
| jhgb wrote:
| The word 'deagentization' is quite unsurprisingly my
| second favorite Czech word after 'defenestration'.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| I edited the tail end of my previous comment to touch on
| this, which is to say that omitting the direct object
| typically involves using intransitive instead of
| transitive. For example, the intransitive "today I ate"
| instead of the transitive "today I ate pie" leaves you
| guessing what I ate. The verb "surprise" does seem to
| have an intransitive syntax per https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/dictionary/surprise which gives a similar
| sentiment as "surprisingly."
| rossitter wrote:
| "To our surprise" is an adverbial. It has no voice. It
| can modify passive or active constructions, but it does
| not prefer one over the other.
|
| Active: To our surprise, they had left the door open.
|
| Passive: To our surprise, the door had been left open.
| [deleted]
| vanviegen wrote:
| Isn't that just the norm for scientific papers?
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Not in mine!
|
| I think you're right; it's my impression that passive
| voice has been the traditional style for scientific
| papers. However, the winds of change have been blowing
| for the last 15 or 20 years. Editors of most scientific
| journals now recommend using active voice wherever
| possible.
|
| I frequently fight with my collaborators over this. In a
| nutshell I think the passive voice style of science
| writing is unclear, and dishonest in that it pretends the
| researcher was not involved in the research.
|
| Check out p12 and p13 here: https://www.acs.org/content/d
| am/acsorg/events/professional-d...
|
| and: http://blogs.nature.com/nautilus/2007/01/active_is_b
| etter_th...
| newsbinator wrote:
| "at 17 minutes, the reagent was added" ... by god or
| universal happenstance.
| kergonath wrote:
| Or the PI, or a technician, or a grad student. The point
| is, it does not matter who did it.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Exactly. The only "right" way to choose active vs.
| passive is to decide what you want to emphasize.
|
| When describing an experimental method, it literally does
| not matter if a Nobel laureate, fresh-faced undergrad,
| robot, or zombie added the reagent. The point is that it
| was added, and so the passive voice works fine.
|
| However, perhaps it is important that the reader
| understands how carefully patients were evaluated, rather
| than the fact that they were evaluated at all. Then, you
| might choose the active voice and write "A panel of 17
| experts carefully evaluated each patient" instead of
| "patients were evaluated by 17 experts."
| version_five wrote:
| My high school science classes taught the "an experiment
| was conducted..." passive style of lab report writing as
| mandatory for science writing. That, and the idea of
| long, clause ridden, sentences. It wasn't until 20 years
| later when I went into industry that I realized how bad
| "traditional" scientific writing is. Clear, short
| sentences. Active voice. No flowery or euphemistic
| language. All make things so much more readable. But I
| think many of us were raised to associate simple writing
| with simple ideas, and taught we had to write things that
| only smart peopl could understand. I'm happy to see
| science writing trying to be more readable.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I find that clear and simple writing correlates with high
| quality work on the technical level. Especially at the
| top of the respective field.
|
| For example in AI if you read the papers coming from the
| best labs the writing tends to be on the point, short
| sentences, almost informal-sounding, actually someone
| telling you what and why they did and what they found.
| Not merely conforming to arbitrary rules set up by bitter
| mediocre "scholars".
|
| But yes, people who are afraid they have nothing to say
| try to hide it behind long sentences with
| incomprehensible nested structures and overjargonized
| vocabulary. Plus equations that are designed to impress
| rather than enlighten.
| version_five wrote:
| > Plus equations that are designed to impress rather than
| enlighten.
|
| Interesting, I don't think I've seen any discussion
| before about clear, unpretentious presentation of math.
| I'll have to consciously evaluate this better as I read
| papers.
|
| Personally I think mathematical clarity is tougher to
| evaluate because I would not be confident enough to
| always know if it's the author or just me.
| llarsson wrote:
| That sounds like a good indication that the math you are
| thinking of was written to impress, rather than
| enlighten, you as a reader. I've seen far too much of
| that stuff in computer science papers, where dense math
| seems to be used defensively, rather than to bring
| clarity.
| codethief wrote:
| IMO there's a good reason for passive voice in scientific
| literature: It's (literally) less subjective and creates
| some distance between the reader and the matter of
| investigation, which I personally find very useful.
| Besides, it's also often unclear who personal pronouns
| refer to in the first place. I have stopped counting the
| times I've seen single-author papers with phrases like
|
| > We investigated X
|
| (Who's we?)
|
| and
|
| > From equation (1.2.3) we see that,
|
| (Who is "we"? The author? The author and other readers
| who are smarter than me? It cannot possibly be "the
| author and I" because I don't "see that" at all.)
| kergonath wrote:
| > (Who is "we"? The author? The author and other readers
| who are smarter than me? It cannot possibly be "the
| author and I" because I don't "see that" at all.)
|
| I would tend to prefer "we can see" (or "we can deduce",
| or something to that effect) rather than "we see". In the
| first case, it's a statement that it is possible for you
| to see it too, if you think about it for a while. As you
| say, the latter is a statement of fact that is often
| wrong and can come across as condescending.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| This is a good point. I have been guilty of using "we"
| when I carried out the experiment entirely alone. I
| suppose it's a lie intended to increase credibility, but
| I never really thought about it before.
| yongjik wrote:
| It's just a stylistic tradition in academic papers,
| similar to the royal "we". It's just a shorthand for "an
| author, or a group of authors, or the whole
| team/organization behind the research presented in this
| paper". You may think it's weird, but all traditions are
| weird when you think about it too much.
|
| Also, your second "we" isn't even that, I think that's
| just good old-fashioned generic pronoun (because English
| normally doesn't allow a sentence without a subject).
| Basically the same as in sentences like:
|
| > In Elbonia you are not allowed to drive after dark.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Also, your second "we" isn't even that, I think that's
| just good old-fashioned generic pronoun (because English
| normally doesn't allow a sentence without a subject).
|
| I don't think I've ever seen "we" used as an indefinite
| pronoun. It's usually "one", "you", or "they", depending
| on formality and context.
|
| In this context, it seems obvious to me that it stands
| for the author(s) and the reader, in a (maybe misguided)
| attempt to reduce the distance between them and involve
| the reader in the narrative.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| I was a doc reviewer in a commercial organisation,
| checking both technical reports and commercial writing
| (bids and contracts).
|
| I recommended to authors that they should use active
| voice because it usually made it easier to explicitly
| identify the intended actors and avoid ambiguity about
| who should do what. E.g. a bid author should prefer
| "$COMPANY will do X" rather than "X will be done" because
| it avoids confusion over whether X is a $COMPANY or
| $CUSTOMER responsibility. Obviously authors could still
| write "X will be done by $COMPANY" but I found that they
| would often forget to identify the actor if they chose
| passive voice.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| I fought so hard with that in grad school 10 years ago. A
| number of newer papers in my field were written in the
| active voice, and I dramatically preferred that approach.
| My supervisor, however, was adamant that everything
| needed to be in the passive voice. He won, naturally,
| because I needed him to sign off on things. I do wonder
| how different that conversation would be today.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Don't follow rules blindly though, in either direction.
| Passive can be a better fit sometimes. Long sentences can
| be okay sometimes.
|
| I'd be pissed at a prof for having such rigid
| overgeneralized rules.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Actually, using the passive voice should have been more
| clear, because in most sentences encountered in
| scientific papers the patient is the topic of the
| sentence, not the agent.
|
| Unfortunately, in English, if you want to make the
| patient the topic of the sentence you are forced to use
| the passive voice, because there is no marker for the
| direct object of a verb, and then the sentence becomes
| less readable, because in English the passive voice is
| constructed with auxiliary verbs, so it is more complex
| than the active voice.
|
| These are defects of the English language, so the
| recommendation to avoid the passive voice is specific to
| English and also to a few other modern European
| languages, which have also lost the features that enable
| a free order of the words.
|
| In an ideal language, it should be possible to use a
| standard order of the words to express their syntactic
| roles without additional words, but there should also
| exist some optional prepositions or postpositions marking
| each possible syntactic role, to enable an arbitrary
| order of the words when desired.
|
| In such a language you could choose freely the topic of a
| sentence without being constrained because some choices
| are awkward, like when using the English passive voice.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Thanks. Can you recommend where to read more about it -
| the whole chain of argument about English, direct object
| 'markers', etc.?
| adrian_b wrote:
| Unfortunately, I do not remember right now some good
| titles, but there are various books about comparative
| linguistics, which analyze the similarities and
| differences between languages and the various existing
| ways of expressing the same content.
|
| Most ancient languages, including most ancient Indo-
| European languages, like Latin or Ancient Greek, allowed
| a free order of the words, because there were markers for
| each syntactic role, like agent, patient, instrument,
| beneficiary and so on (i.e. the so-called cases).
|
| Nevertheless, at the stage where the old Indo-European
| languages became attested in writing, they had a very
| serious defect. Even if the so-called case terminations
| of the words were originally a small set of post-
| positions corresponding to the syntactic roles, due to
| various phonetic evolutions conditioned by the adjacent
| sounds present in words, the original small set of
| markers had diverged into a very large set of word
| terminations with many distinct variants for each
| syntactic role, the so-called word declensions.
|
| Because remembering such a large set of word terminations
| became too difficult, most modern European languages have
| abandoned the old declensions. Some languages use enough
| prepositions, possibly together with some remnants of the
| old case terminations, to allow a free order of the
| words.
|
| English however, depends a lot on the standard order of
| the words to convey their syntactic roles and it has only
| limited means of expression for supporting a different
| word order.
|
| While in the Indo-European languages the too irregular
| word declensions could not persist, there are other
| language families with a much more regular structure for
| the syntactic role markers, while still having enough
| markers to allow a free word order.
|
| It is weird that the European linguists of the previous
| centuries considered the regular languages (the so-called
| agglutinative languages or isolant languages) as
| "primitive" while considering the "flexionar" classic
| Indo-European languages as "superior" and "advanced".
|
| In fact even if the flexionar classic Indo-European
| languages evolved from some older agglutinative language,
| their irregular declensions were a serious defect and not
| a sign of progress.
|
| Unfortunately, because the language changes have always
| been done mostly by the less educated people, without
| having any kind of grand plan of how to best improve the
| language, the necessary simplifications of the language
| have also been frequently accompanied by a loss of
| expressiveness, like in English.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Thanks! When I was pretty young, I studied a language
| that used word terminations (and other means) without
| word order. I was too young too appreciate the linguistic
| differences, nor did I understand why a certain word
| order was chosen. It would give a lot more flexibility.
|
| I am going to lookup what you wrote about the evolution
| and use of active voice in English - something I always
| wondered about.
| codethief wrote:
| Having written a 100+ pages paper in passive voice in
| German whose writing style my supervisor called "very
| elegant and readable", I'm not sure it's the construction
| using auxiliary verbs. German is very similar when it
| comes to passive constructions but for some arcane reason
| in English passive voice doesn't sound as good or
| natural. (Not that passive voice is natural in German -
| it isn't. But it still sounds orders of magnitude better
| than in English.)
| data_acquired wrote:
| When I taught writing in grad school, I actively (pun
| intended) pushed students away from passive voice. Active
| voice is generally easier to read, and typically forces
| the writer to clarify more things within a sentence.
| There are, of course, certain instances where passive
| voice better suits the context.
|
| Academic writing is needlessly dense for all kinds of
| reasons other than passive voice though.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Interesting that there was teaching on how to write at
| all. In my technical PhD in Germany we had zero
| instruction on writing other than feedback from the prof
| near deadlines. You're just supposed to pick it up by
| reading papers (plus the experience of having written a
| bachelor and master thesis where you're guided by a PhD
| student who may themselves not be great at writing).
| data_acquired wrote:
| Oh good god :) Picking up writing from reading the
| average paper is likely injurious to the health of your
| future readers. Few papers are well-written and you're
| likely to unknowingly pick up bad habits from reading the
| average paper. If your advisor was actively training you
| in good writing and providing you critical feedback on
| sentence construction, paragraph organization, the flow
| of ideas from one section to the next, then sure, you
| wouldn't really require a class. But I doubt the average
| advisor has the bandwidth for such feedback, esp. in my
| field of biology.
|
| In the context where I taught, most students coming into
| the PhD program had no training in writing whatsoever.
| The first round of essays that people turned in were
| typically very poorly written. Most folks really needed
| the training in my view.
| Jiocus wrote:
| When I went to uni in Sweden, there was a mandatory
| course in _academic writing_ as part of CS program. The
| learning objectives was more than just a styleguide
| proofreading by supervisors though, as methodologies,
| data collection and paper structures was covered. Pretty
| much the scientific process really.
|
| This seemed to be quite needed for students to get up to
| speed. I was from Finland, where this subject was brought
| up before uni.
|
| For what it's worth, I remember my supervisor calling
| bullshit on my then dense and overly academic writing and
| I thank them for it. It was a process of un-learning bad
| patterns or preconcieved notions about the writing
| process.
|
| Recommend.
| codethief wrote:
| > typically forces the writer to clarify more things
| within a sentence.
|
| Hmmm I don't think that's the case at all - if at all,
| active voice is less clear and "sloppy". (See the
| examples I mentioned here[0].) But maybe we interpret the
| term "clarify" in different ways?
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27078738
| data_acquired wrote:
| Right, I would say that's just sloppy writing in general
| and not sloppy because of the use of active voice (and
| certainly an example where passive voice is better).
|
| You're right in terms of what I meant by "clarify", which
| was more about writing that looking less "sloppy". The
| examples I think about aren't ones where the
| investigators are referring to themselves by "We" but
| where you're writing a paper about molecules interacting
| with each other. So something like "A activates B, which
| in turn inactivates C" reads more smoothly than any of
| its passive-voice counterparts.
| kergonath wrote:
| > So something like "A activates B, which in turn
| inactivates C" reads more smoothly than any of its
| passive-voice counterparts.
|
| Yes, because there is a clear subject and the fact that
| one thing activates another is important (at least in
| scientific papers, causality is kind of the point). Using
| the passive voice in this case is clumsy and awkward. On
| the other hand, there are legitimate cases for the
| passive voice when the subject is
| unclear/unknown/unimportant. Forcing the active voice
| then results in the overuse of meaningless pronouns or
| vague words just because there needs to be a subject.
| Good writing is using the right construct, which depends
| on context.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| A lot of writing guidance at the academic level
| discourages passive voice and prefers royal We's. Passive
| voice also gets boring really quick.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| The norm changes wildly from field to field: the voice,
| style, pronouns, etc...
|
| Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword is a good book on
| the subject.
| psychometry wrote:
| I wouldn't use either. People tend to overuse adverbs, in my
| opinion, perhaps thinking that by adding them it strengthens
| the statement in some way. To me, though, it just sounds weak
| and forced.
| bravura wrote:
| It's wonderful to explore the cadence of the English
| language. Don't relegate yourself to rules, prescriptively.
| devin wrote:
| It is often discouraged to use -ly words.
| jMyles wrote:
| > It is often discouraged to use -ly words.
|
| ...whereas passive voice is widely endorsed.
| SKCarr wrote:
| Whenever I come across a typo in something I've published or in a
| paper I'm reading I'll do a google scholar search with quotes and
| see how many other people have made it. E.g. "expensively
| studied",
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22expensively+studied%...
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| "We expensively studied the behavior of one hundred dollar
| bills when burnt at varying high temperatures" would be
| accurate and not a typo.
| Cerium wrote:
| That reminds me - when I was younger I had trouble
| remembering how to spell definitely vs defiantly and would
| often get it wrong on my papers. So, I spent some time trying
| to think of a situation where it would not matter. I came up
| with the following: "My dad said I can't go to the party to
| night, but I'm [definitely/defiantly] going anyway.".
| hluska wrote:
| In Canada, the next sentence would be:
|
| "NSERC had temporarily suspended our funding so if you have
| any questions, I'll be pulling double shifts at Tim
| Horton's."
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Sounds like a very scientific rap video.
| flakiness wrote:
| OT: My pet search on HN is "Disclosure I work" [1] (or
| "Disclaimer I work" [2]). You'll see a few company names pop up
| much more often than others. I've been wondering why.
| [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&quer
| y=%22Disclosure%20I%20work%22&sort=byDate&type=comment [2]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%2
| 2Disclaimer%20I%20work%22&sort=byDate&type=comment
| rbinv wrote:
| Employee count, internal policies and (negative) brand
| perception are factors that come to mind.
| atombender wrote:
| My pet peeve is people writing "disclaimer" when they really
| mean "disclosure".
|
| A disclaimer denies responsibility. So if you're including a
| disclaimer that you work for Google, you're essentially saying
| that you take no responsibility for the consequences of your
| comment because of your employer.
| senbarryobama wrote:
| I always notice this with Googlers.
| ironmagma wrote:
| This is sometimes required if the company is publicly traded or
| a subsidiary thereof. To do so otherwise could be construed as
| stock manipulation.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Some companies encourage you to to do this when you're
| discussing the company online. Even if you work on something
| totally unrelated at a company, it's a bad look if you sing the
| praises of a product and someone digs through your comment
| history and replies "Hang on, you work for the company that
| makes that product". Better to be upfront about any biases or
| caveats
| jonas21 wrote:
| You'll notice a great deal of those are from jefftk, who
| discloses who he works for in almost every comment.
|
| But in general, I think it's just that certain tech companies
| are big -- so they get discussed a lot on HN, and also employ a
| lot of HN users, thus requiring more disclosures.
| H8crilA wrote:
| > requiring more disclosures
|
| Just so we're clear, this is not actually "required". It's a
| combination of bragging rights, post credibility boost and
| (rarely) actual, official, authorized communication from the
| company.
| hoten wrote:
| That's rather cynical. If an employer says I'm fine to talk
| about the company in public forums, but they only request I
| give a disclosure, then that's why I give a disclosure. Not
| some pointless brag. You can argue that legally or
| ethically I'm not required, but it seems a minor thing to
| do.
|
| Also, if you _don't_ disclose, there's a non-zero chance
| someone goes through your post history and finds you work
| at the company of interest, and what follows could be an
| accusation of shilling and attempting to deceive people by
| not making the connection apparent. Just as with a
| journalist, putting your biases upfront allows you and the
| reader to have a chance at a trustworthy dialogue.
| [deleted]
| Morizero wrote:
| My favorite search highlights a good pub's influence on academia:
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22muddy+charles%22
| praptak wrote:
| Try searching for "this should never happen" in a bug tracker.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| My favourite is still Experimental Brian Research
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22experimental+brian+r...
| (taken from https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/feeling-stupid - it
| now has "about 103 results")
| chris_wot wrote:
| I limited the search to "brian research", the first link takes
| me to a "Brian Research Centre".
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22b...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Dragert, K. , & Zehr, E. P. (20 1 2). High-intensity
| unilateral dorsiflexor resistance training results in bilateral
| neuromuscular plasticity after stroke. Experimental Brian
| Research, 225, 93- 1 04.
|
| > Attwell, D., & Laughlin, S. B. (2001). An energy budget for
| signaling in the grey matter of the brian. Journal of cerebral
| blood flow metabolism, 21(10), 1133-1145
|
| Poor Brian!
| dkasper wrote:
| "A novel approach"
| _Microft wrote:
| I discovered the idea for this search a few days ago and found it
| intriguing. It is both broad as it is not restricted to a
| particular area of research and specific (for unexpected results)
| at the same time and seems to be directly probing the edge of our
| knowledge (At least I would call it that when researchers are
| being surprised by something in their fields).
|
| There is also the scientific article search of the Internet
| Archive if you are looking for another one to search through:
|
| https://scholar.archive.org/
| plaidfuji wrote:
| It's great because you don't even have to click in to read the
| "surprising" result, even if it's 100% jargon...
|
| > to our surprise, only one nonlinear method was superior to
| Salzer summation, namely the Wynn rho algorithm
|
| GASP!
| ppod wrote:
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q="app...
| michaelhoffman wrote:
| "strikingly"
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=strikingly
| amelius wrote:
| "to our excitement"
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22to+our+excitement%22
| plaidfuji wrote:
| "Contrary to our expectation"
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C21&q="co.
| ..
| slver wrote:
| "This escalated quickly"
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C21&q=%E
| 2...
| ExtraE wrote:
| "meta"
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C21&q=
| %E2...
| valarauko wrote:
| "and my axe"
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=
| %22...
| _Microft wrote:
| "unexpectedly"
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=unexpectedly
|
| "astonishingly"
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=astonishingly
| amelius wrote:
| "holy crap"
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="holy+crap"
| [deleted]
| ______- wrote:
| "Against all odds"
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22a...
| [deleted]
| ______- wrote:
| Evidence that science is mostly this:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fuck-around-and-find-out
|
| Although that Know Your Meme article focuses on politics, science
| has always been about professional mistake-making.
| geocrasher wrote:
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22little+did+he+...
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| "thoroughly debunked" can also make for an interesting read.
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22thoroughly+debunked%...
| b450 wrote:
| This search is amusing because among the first few results is
| one referencing another:
|
| > Although the pristine myth has been thoroughly debunked, too
| many biodiversity researchers fail to incorporate historical
| ecology into their analyses.
|
| > Overall, we reject the notion that "the pristine myth has
| been thoroughly debunked" by archeological evidence, and
| suggest that the environmental impacts of historical peoples
| occurred along gradients[...]
| pradn wrote:
| "exercise to the reader"
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=%22...
| pnt12 wrote:
| The first paper seems like a critic of the attitude, which is a
| welcome change.
| einpoklum wrote:
| In one of the top 10 results, Wu and Liu say in 2004 that:
|
| > To our surprise, except from those applications in > graphics
| itself, GPU finds its applications in general > purpose
| computations in other fields, and it comes up as a > hot topic
| for research in recent 2 - 3 years.
|
| I don't see how this was very surprising even in 2004. A GPU
| accelerates regularly-parallel computation where bandwidth is
| more important than latency.
|
| On the other hand, you had to think in terms of "shaders", which
| is not very intuitive, and tooling was barely existent, so maybe
| it was a bit surprising.
| aflag wrote:
| "according to collected data" - 1330 results
|
| "according to my mom" - 400 results
|
| "according to my dad" - 364 results
|
| Nice to see that nearly double of the data doesn't come from the
| researcher's parents.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| To be fair, Google scholar does not just search scientific
| works, I suspect many of these are from humanities journals.
| williesleg wrote:
| I'm surprised!
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