[HN Gopher] Who lusts for certainty lusts for lies ___________________________________________________________________ Who lusts for certainty lusts for lies Author : hprotagonist Score : 349 points Date : 2023-09-26 10:50 UTC (12 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.etymonline.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.etymonline.com) | laura_g wrote: | What 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? | thfuran wrote: | That or maths. Though I seem to recall a quote about | statistics... | [deleted] | hprotagonist wrote: | in the case of ngrams, both! | thfuran wrote: | Yes, I think (as the article says) using ngrams can easily | land you in the camp of telling lies with statistics. | tensor wrote: | The 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. | | 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. | coldtea wrote: | A low effort comment. That "said" haven't declined and raised | the way shown isn't what needs evidence. | | It's the extraordinary claim that it has that does. | | That claim is Google's, and before accusing the author of the | blog, maybe how representative their unseen dataset is. Should | we take statistics with no knowledge of their input set at face | value because "trust Google"? | tensor wrote: | Google isn't claiming any such statement. It's merely | providing fun statistics based on their data set. With that | context, when I read a headline claiming that the statistics | are "wrong," it would imply that the counts are somehow off. | Maybe due to a bug in the algorithm or the like. | | Instead, we get a strawman put up where they misrepresent | what the data set is, make up things that its "claiming," | fail to investigate the underlying data sources and look into | "why" they see the trend they see, and also fail to provide | any alternative data. | | It's cheap and snobby grandstanding, ironically complete with | faulty interpretations of the little data they DO present. | mattigames wrote: | But Google is claiming such thing by calling it "trends", | which the dictionary defines as "a general direction in | which something is developing or changing.", if they didn't | want to create such misunderstandings they would just call | it "word frequency on Google books" so the biases of the | data would be a lot more clear. | prepend wrote: | It's hard to present evidence because there's only one source. | So the article basically calls out flaws in the methodology of | Google Books/Ngram. | | I think this is reasonable. As otherwise we end up accepting | things that exist solely, but are flawed. Just because | something exists and is easy to use doesn't mean it's right. | | Just like the answer to "the most tweeted thing is X therefore | it is most popular and important" does not require a separate | study to find the truth. It's acceptable just to say "this is a | stupid methodology, don't accept it just because that's what | twitter says." | lolc wrote: | A 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 wrote: | It'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 wrote: | Yea 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 wrote: | It 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. | lolc wrote: | The way I read it, the article was a rant about how people | shouldn't be using ngrams to prove things. | lolinder wrote: | EtymOnline isn't in the business of tracking shifts in the | popularity of words over time, they set out to track shifts in | _meaning_. So it 's understandable that they don't have any | specific contrary evidence in their listing for "said". | | As for why they don't include the evidence in TFA, as others | have noted, it's the extraordinary claim that "said" dropped to | nearly 1/3 of its peak usage that needs extraordinary evidence | backing it up. It's plenty sufficient for them to say "this | doesn't make any sense at all on its face, and is most likely | due to a major shift in the genre makeup of Google's dataset". | wrsh07 wrote: | I think what you want is for someone (yourself, me, the author) | to review newspapers or some similar source and determine how | the frequency percent changes over time for the word "said". | | This is a reasonable request, but I also think it's fine for | the author to state it _as an expert_ that newspapers continued | using said at a similar frequency. The story they tell us | plausible, and I don't really think the burden of proof is on | them. | vlz wrote: | While 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_star... | | https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=said&year_star... | boxed wrote: | Such a shame too as the point would be equally valid without | the graph-lies. | chefandy wrote: | Kind 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. | [deleted] | stefantalpalaru wrote: | [dead] | nerdponx wrote: | This 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 wrote: | From 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 | gitgud wrote: | Reminds 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 | digitalsushi wrote: | When a measure (certainty) becomes a target, it ceases to be a | good measure (lies) | gniv wrote: | BTW, 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 (that looks more like | an s) | | Edit: But I see it in fixed-width font: s | bradrn wrote: | > 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 wrote: | "Only a fool is sure if anything, the wise man is always | guessing." - MacGuyver | dotsam wrote: | > 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 | | *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' | robertlagrant wrote: | > Who Lusts for Certainty Lusts for Lies | | Well, maybe[0]. | | [0] with thanks to https://xkcd.com/552 | diogenes4 wrote: | At this point I'm waiting for data to show up validating that | google ngrams has use. | taeric wrote: | Is 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 "the", you will | not find a lot of hits. Which, is mostly fair, as historically we | know that "th" 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. | bluetomcat wrote: | You 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. | psychoslave wrote: | That's why I always found so strange that only those with | fame/wealth distorted social representations ends up with a | Wikipedia biography. | not_knuth wrote: | Wikipedia is not meant to be an archive of _all_ information. | It 's meant to be an encyclopedia of things that are | _notable_ [1], which is probably where the confusion comes | from. | | As you can imagine, the topic of what notability is, has been | discussed at length since Wikipedia's inception [2]. | | [1] Notability according to Wikipedia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability | | [2] Oldest Wikipedia talk comments I could find on Notability | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:History. | .. | pintxo wrote: | At one point? Human memory is surprisingly unreliable. | | One example to test for yourself: | https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo?si=16fwk8wG8Yyhim5t | psychoslave wrote: | That 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 wrote: | Exact but the point is still valid. The Mandela Effect is a | great example of it. | ongy wrote: | Serious 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. | djha-skin wrote: | The 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 wrote: | Influence 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 wrote: | I inform, you influence, he propagandizes. | thrdbndndn wrote: | > The text of Etymonline is built entirely from print sources, | and is done entirely by human beings. Ngrams are not. | | I'm confused about this part actually. I assume by "entirely | from print sources" it means it does not include digital | sources? That doesn't sound very relevant to the issues | mentioned in the article though: unless it uses the "complete" | set of _all_ print source, it totally could have the same | skewed-dataset issues too; and humans can make the same mistake | as OCR does. | sudobash1 wrote: | Etymonline compiles the information on etymology and | historical usage from printed books (eg the Oxford English | Dictionary). That is what is being referred to here. They are | not having humans tally up different words from books. That | data is entirely from ngrams. | crazygringo wrote: | The 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. | hyperific wrote: | It 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. | dredmorbius wrote: | And 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. | gmd63 wrote: | Just 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. | thomasfromcdnjs wrote: | Does this criticism of ngrams also translates to keyword trends | when considering SEO/SEM? | andrewflnr wrote: | The 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. | madsbuch wrote: | The title is about certainty and not truth. | | > Who Lusts for Certainty Lusts for Lies | | I think this is one of the one-liners that sound good, but is | bogus at closer inspection. | | That articles talks about history. In that context it might | make sense as it is hard to say something with certainty. | | But in every speech I can say things with certainty without | lying. | | If we furthermore drag the word certainty out of a philosophers | grip and apply a layman meaning to it, then many things are | certain as the word can also mean commitment. | RockyMcNuts wrote: | Who demands certainty demands bullshit would be more | accurate. | Delk wrote: | I don't think it's bogus. | | I've seen people who strongly crave for (a feeling of) | certainty prefer simplified categorizations and false | absolutes to complexity that doesn't offer absolute certainty | and discrete clarity. | | Similarly, some things aren't readily quantifiable, and in | some cases any quantification might be a great | oversimplification at best. In those cases wanting a | quantified and measurable answer instead of a more complex | answer with less (of a feeling of) certainty can amount to | wanting a lie. Or at least to wanting an answer that feels a | lot more certain and true than it actually is. | | I think that's what the post is about. | | Of course the title isn't absolutely true either. Of course | you can say and find things that are true and (to a good | approximation) certain. But that's not really what the post | or its title are trying to say. | speak_plainly wrote: | There's an entire field of study dedicated to these puzzles: | epistemology. | | https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/certainty/ | AnimalMuppet wrote: | In every speech you can say _some_ things with certainty | without lying. | | But I think the point of the saying is in the other | direction. If you are _listening_ to a speech, the things | that the speaker can say with certainty may not be the ones | where you want certainty. And if you demand certainty on | those things, you will find those who will give it to you. | But the certainty itself is a lie - that 's why the speaker | can't (honestly) say those things with certainty. | | What is the optimum political program for the United States? | There are plenty of people willing tell you with (apparent) | certainty what the answer is. The truth is that nobody knows | with certainty, and so the answers that sound certain are | lies. The actual program may be correct - _may_ be - but the | certainty itself is a lie. | | This is often true in linguistics, and history, and politics, | and economics. Don't demand certainty where there is none. | ta8645 wrote: | This hits close to home with all the appeals to authority over | the last few years. With absolute confidence they were holders | of the truth, "trust the science!". | andrewflnr wrote: | Kinda, but most of the anti-scientific bullshit out there is | a symptom of precisely this phenomenon. _Actual_ science | cannot offer absolute certainly, so people reach for whatever | alternate theory offers the feeling of certainty. Blind faith | in "the science" kind of works, and even gets pretty decent | practical results, but you know what's structurally really | hard to disprove and thus amenable to feeling certain? | Conspiracy theories! | ta8645 wrote: | > Conspiracy theories! | | I hear what you're saying. In the end, we have to believe | _something_ -- on less than perfect information. | | But understanding human nature, isn't a conspiracy theory. | And accepting obviously overreaching statements of "fact", | that literally nobody had the data to state unequivocally, | is not following the science. | | It wasn't so long ago, that most people understood big | pharma was a profit seeking machine, that wasn't primarily | motivated by what is best for humanity. Overstating the | risks of Covid, and pretending that we faced an existential | threat, made everyone forget that truth, and | unquestioningly believe that only the purest of intentions | motivated the industrial/media response. | gilleain wrote: | What does "DVD anyone" mean? | | (Perhaps a roundabout way to say "Make obsolete", as a way to | say "Get rid of"?) | mancerayder wrote: | I just can't CD what that means either. | Tactician_mark wrote: | It's a Blu-ray mystery to me. | psychoslave wrote: | It fades away vinyl from my ens. | | https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ens | compiler-devel wrote: | The 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 wrote: | 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. | decremental wrote: | [dead] | thechao wrote: | Typo insertion where the autocorrect hallucinates a word? | Happens to me sometimes... | andrewflnr wrote: | This. Sorry everyone. | adrianmonk wrote: | It's probably supposed to be "and" instead of "DVD". Both | words have a similar shape on the keyboard, especially if | you're doing swipe-style smartphone keyboard input. | cainxinth wrote: | Agnostics have been saying this for years (jk... sorta). | guardian5x wrote: | You are not wrong there. This title could also be an article | about atheism and religion. | lvass wrote: | Surely you meant to write agnostics. | cainxinth wrote: | Corrected it | ttoinou wrote: | The y-axis do not start at zero. So basically the author doesnt | know how to read a graph.. what am I missing ? | dahart wrote: | > 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 wrote: | The 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. | bee_rider wrote: | Is there no way to filter out particular data sets? This | seems like a pretty huge limitation. | dahart wrote: | That'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. | tantalor wrote: | Why 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 wrote: | HN 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 wrote: | Er 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 wrote: | Both 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> | | 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>. | Also: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36655892> | | - On substituting a phrase from the article: <https://hn.al | golia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...> | | - On submitter editorialising: | <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8357252> | <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35163133> | | - Distracting titles: | <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37137478>. | Particularly cases where "the thread will lose its mind": | <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176686> | | - "Title fever": (Beginning 4 'graphs in) | <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573> | AugustoCAS wrote: | I'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. | js8 wrote: | Though you should also remember "who lusts for promotion lusts | for telling lies". | CapitalistCartr wrote: | Only one goal can be first. If you want to set absolute dates, | all other requirements must be subordinate to that. In which | case, sure, we can absolutely meet it. | ChrisMarshallNY wrote: | There's that classic poster that you see in almost every auto | mechanic's shop. Good Fast | Cheap Pick 2 | nuancebydefault wrote: | Not so rarely, you even need to settle for picking 1 | jklinger410 wrote: | This title is an absolute banger | [deleted] | d-lisp wrote: | [flagged] | gascoigne wrote: | Surely if you have story pointed and T-shirt sized your epics | correctly that shouldn't be difficult? /s | dumbfounder wrote: | This guy sucks. | [deleted] | fenomas wrote: | And boo, incidentally, to whomever changed the HN title - from | the most memorably evocative title this site has ever seen to | one of the blandest. | etrevino wrote: | What was it? I arrived too late. | fenomas wrote: | Sorry, HN previously had TFA's actual title - "Who Lusts | for Certainty Lusts for Lies". | scubbo wrote: | I, uhhhh.....I would like to know what TFA is meant to | stand for, because I assume it is not "the sucking | article", but that was my first thought. Maybe | "featured"? Google is only giving me "Teach For America" | or "Trade Facilitation Agreement". | klyrs wrote: | Does "fornicating" sound more polite to you? | iudqnolq wrote: | it is the fucking article. or "featured" if you're | feeling classy. | mjochim wrote: | I like to read it as The Fine Article. | idrios wrote: | This is the kind of question that doesnt need to be | answered with certainty. "The fucking article" is | definitely the most fun interpretation of "TFA". | etrevino wrote: | lol, that's pretty good, I agree with you. | djsavvy wrote: | Looks like it's been changed back! What was the "bland" | title in the middle? | Intralexical wrote: | "Google Ngram Viewer n-grams are wrong". | [deleted] | dahart wrote: | The article title is certainly provocative, yes, and that's | the problem. Do you want clickbait titles? The article's | title is a combination of a platitude, an inaccurate and/or | irrelevant statement, and an implied inflammatory accusation. | Swapping the title for the more accurate more informational | less provocative first line is much better for me, but maybe | true that not flinging around the word "lies" could result in | fewer clicks. | fenomas wrote: | I don't think "Ngrams are wrong" is what TFA is about. The | author isn't an expert on Ngrams and he's not sharing any | new information about them; what he's really talking about | is how data about language is unreliable, and why Ngram | images are on his site even though he knows they're flawed. | Personally, I found the original title truer to the article | than the current one. | zem wrote: | the word "clickbait" is flung around way too readily these | days. a good title is _supposed_ to make you want to read | the article, and at its best it is an artistic flourish | that enhances the overall piece. and personally, i love | that. i enjoy seeing how writers (or editors) come up with | good titles, and the fun and interesting ways they relate | to the text of the piece. i enjoy when the title is clearly | an allusion or reference to something, and chasing it down | leads me to learn something new. and i even enjoy when the | title is just a pun or play on words, because writers live | for moments like that :) | | in this case i definitely felt "wow, that's an interesting | quote, and i can see what they are getting at. let's read | the article to see how it's substantiated or used as a | springboard". | | clickbait is more "we have some amazing!!!!! information to | tell you but to find out what you will have to read the | article", e.g. the classic listicle format "10 things we | imagined a beowulf cluster of - number 4 will shock you!", | the spammy "one weird trick doctors don't want you to know" | or the tabloid "john brown's shocking affair!". and yes, | that sort of thing is a plague on the internet and i would | not like to see more of it, but also that is not what is | going on here. | ComputerGuru wrote: | I personally feel like more people will click with this new | title. The old one was far too vague and ambiguous for a news | aggregation site. I thought the old title would be about | scientific papers and trying too hard to get definitive | answers out of them. | dredmorbius wrote: | The title and site reward those who'd click through on the | original rather than the bland substitute. | fenomas wrote: | Horses for courses, but to me the original title was the | forest and the stuff about Ngrams was the trees. As such I | found TFA interesting, even though I have no interest in | Ngrams or whether they're correct (which is why I | definitely would not have clicked on the current title). | setgree wrote: | adding "horses for courses" to my lexicon, TY :) | 1970-01-01 wrote: | At first glance, I thought it was a translated Latin phrase. | | desiderat certum, desiderat falsitates | PaulHoule wrote: | Don'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 wrote: | And 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 | Karellen wrote: | > politicians want to stay in power first, and only | secondarily want to improve things. | | The politicians who want to be in power first, and only | secondarily want to improve things, tend to be the | politicians in power. | | Politicians who want to improve things first do exist, but | they tend not to achieve power, because power is not their | goal, and they are out-maneuvered by the first type. | | Notably, politicians who want to improve things are easily | side-tracked by suggesting that their proposed policy is not | the best way to improve things, and that some other way would | be better. This explains to some degree a lot of infighting | on the left, because many do want to genuinely help, but it's | never 100% clear what the best way to help is. It also | explains why the right can put aside major differences of | opinion (2A is important to fight the government who can't be | trusted, but support the troops and arm the police!) to | achieve power, because acquiring and maintaining power is | more important than exactly what you plan to do with it. | Vt71fcAqt7 wrote: | >2A is important to fight the government who can't be | trusted, but support the troops and arm the police! | | I fail to see the contradiction here. 2A proponents would | say that 2A is there for when the government goes wrong, or | "when in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary | for one people to dissolve the political bands which have | connected them with another." At all other times, however, | it would be up to the government to enforce the law and | protect the people. Destroying the state is a different | ideology. | | (To be clear, the last few wars may not have been about | protecting the people. But that the US has not been | attacked since Pearl Harbor may be a result of the | investment made in "defence" since then, as well as | favourable borders ect.) | | In any case 'both sides' have people who people who actualy | care about society. And there are people on the left who | may simply want power, and complex people who seem to be a | bit of both (for example perhaps Lyndon Johnson depending | on how you see him). | bilbo0s wrote: | _politicians 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. | PaulHoule wrote: | That's as close as you will get to a master narrative but it | isn't all of it. | | Politicians aren't always sure what will win for them, often | face a menu of unappetizing choices and have other | motivations too. (Quite a few of the better Republicans have | quit in disgust in the last decade: I watched the pope speak | in front of congress flanked by Joe Biden, then VP and John | Boehner, then House Speaker when the pope obliquely said they | should start behaving like adults and then Boehner quit a few | days later and got into the cannabis business.) | | I was an elected member of the state committee of the Green | Party of New York and found myself arguing against a course | of action that I emotionally agreed with, thought was a | tactical mistake, and that my constituents were (it turns out | fatally) divided about. It was a strategic disaster in the | end. | paulsutter wrote: | You're right, I should have added that politics is also | extremely difficult and filled with unpalatable choices. | Each of the politicians I have met are intelligent, caring | people with a clear grasp of the issues. | | And then you see what they do, and you wonder, what the... | phkahler wrote: | Classic 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. | mattkrause wrote: | Am I alone in thinking that the graph was okay and the text was | just indulging in a bit of hyperbole? | | It's a sudden ~50% dip, following nearly a century of apparent | stability. | PaulHoule wrote: | On 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 wrote: | Sure you do, why not? If you don't, show the deviation values | (plus and minus) centered around zero again. | PaulHoule wrote: | Not if it means the line looks flat. | slenk wrote: | Sometimes the data is flat... | thfuran wrote: | And many times small variations matter. | slenk wrote: | Yes, the CMB for instance. | PaulHoule wrote: | It sure feels like the temperature in Upstate NY varies | by more than 10%! | Scubabear68 wrote: | Exactly. A lot of investment market charts are zoomed in like | that because small deviations can matter a lot, and you don't | want the base price (or whatever measure you're looking at) | to swamp the signal. | lolinder wrote: | Including zero would have helped the "said" graph but not | solved it--it just would still look like "said" dropped to | almost 1/3 of its prior popularity, when what actually happened | is the makeup of the sample changed dramatically. | jgalt212 wrote: | The words of Colonel Nathan R. Jessup come to mind. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-09-26 23:00 UTC)