Live data from Hacker News

Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

varianceexplained.org

111–120 of 178 posts

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#111
post #101
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Female hero? How boring! That's not what I said. Your example is not of a female rescuing a weak helpless male and then "putting a ring on it". It's of a female hero who rescues herself after discovering her lover betrayed her. Still the bad guy role played by the male. Still the person worth caring about is the female. > How can you consider your views as non-sexist? I'm simply not concerned with whether you consi…

> if I said that women should have _less_ rights than men, then I would be sexist (in a bad way). That isn't the definition of sexism.

Not _your_ definition of sexism, apparently.

If you define sexism in such broad terms that it includes both bad and neutral things, the word will lose its meaning.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#112
post #104
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if her boyfriend is weak and helpless before, during, and after the story.

Not interesting to YOU. And why that is, I'm not sure.

It might be interesting to you, but I would challenge you to find a large audience for it.

And if this audience exists, why aren't there more mainstream stories catering to them? Surely, this could be an untapped market worth millions of dollars. That is, if it were true that most people would find this kind of plot incredibly interesting.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#113
post #78
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it were true that "these kinds of stories are what people are looking for", that doesn't mean it's not "evidence of sexism".

Depends on what you mean by sexism. If you mean unfair discrimination against women, then that's not an evidence for it. If you mean natural difference between men and women that are implicitly understood by people, then yea you can call it sexism but it's not necessarily a bad thing.

[deleted]

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#114
post #111
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I said that women should have _less_ rights than men, then I would be sexist (in a bad way). That isn't the definition of sexism.

Not _your_ definition of sexism, apparently. If you define sexism in such broad terms that it includes both bad and neutral things, the word will lose its meaning.

No, that isn't the OED's definition of sexism. The word already has a specific meaning.

> Prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.

You seem to be making it more specific to exclude things you don't deem important.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#115

The reference at the end talking about comparing changes over time reminded me of a problem I've been kicking around. For this particular system that's not too hard, since you're putting each word on a one-dimensional femininity/masculinity scale, so you could plot a word on a line graph or something. But what do you do if you want to evaluate the changes of more complex relationships over time? Not just mapping word…

I did something like this in a project for my former work at a research group, and it was very difficult to visualize due to the number of variables we needed to communicate in the visualization.

What we were trying to do was use word2vec to model changes in relationships between 700 proteins and one in particular, which is related to cancer/tumor growth. We created multiple word2vec models based on year windows of medical journals (so the 2003 model had input journals from 2000 - 2003).

To visualize the models we used a D3 force graph where the nodes were the 700 proteins and the edges were known discoveries of relationships between proteins that had years associated with them - as in X protein was discovered to be related to Y protein in 2007. The relationship data was curated by people, independently of the word2vec models. The size of each of the nodes was determined by the word2vec model for the particular year's similarity score between that protein and the cancer-related protein we were interested in.

To see the changes between years, we used a year slider which the force graph would respond to by animating the sizes of the nodes in line with the particular year model's similarity score for each protein. In addition, the color of the nodes represented changes in the models' similarities between the proteins - more green meant that the word2vec model's similarity score had increased compared to the previous year's model, and red meant it had decreased.

The visualization is useful, but it is a bit of a mess considering there are 700 . I'll message you the link and if anyone else want the link I can send it, but I'd rather not post it here since it's hosted on my college's CS department server and it's not equipped to deal with a lot of traffic.

Also if anyone has an idea of how else we might have done it I'd be interested to hear it.

Edit: Didn't realize HN doesn't have a PM feature - if there's another way to send it to you and you're interested let me know.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#116
post #73

If you're finding some disonnence between 100K stories and your own interpretation of reality, you've really got to ask yourself where the problem might lie.

Because I should adjust my perception of reality to match fiction?

The kind of fiction that gets popular reflects _something_ about reality.

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#117
post #68

People who have poor understanding of human nature will consider this an evidence of sexism. Think for a minute about why "Fifty shades of grey" is popular among female readers. If there are many stories are filled with males competing over resources and women (in the form of violent criminals kidnapping women and brave heroes rescuing them) then might it be that these kinds of stories are what people are looking for…

Unfortunately, every single difference of any significance is often took to be sexist and (of course) wrong sexist. Why are the top 100 chess players men? Sexism. Why are there more male than female programmers? Sexism. In non-romance movies, why are there more male leads? Sexism. There is legitimate wrongful sexism, but they aren't usually found in first world countries. It's as if we ever agreed there was a signifi…

[deleted]

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#118
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave New World is meant to portray a distopia.

The alpha and beta classes were not living in a dystopia. Seemed quite nice. Freedom to pursue intellectual endeavors, freedom to have sex with whomever you wanted with no consequence, a life of privilege.

Except if they wanted to use their intellect to think critically, or wanted to move anywhere beyond sex...

Re: Gender and verbs across 100K stories: a tidy analysis

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people identify as "attack helicopter".

TIL, and it's even a first page search result. > I’m beautiful. I’m having a plastic surgeon install rotary blades, 30 mm cannons and AMG-114 Hellfire missiles on my body. From now on I want you guys to call me “Apache” and respect my right to kill from above

It's a stupid meme, mocking the trend among Tumblr's sexually confused teenagers to put down "autism", or "zodiac", or "Sherlock Holmes" as their gender and insisting that everyone refer to them using their super special unique pronouns they invented.
Post reply on HN