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The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

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Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#81

Post by perihelions »

Startup idea: create a synthetic subset of natural language in which it's difficult to write annoying comments, to simplify social media moderation. Sell it as an API.

All extant moderation* is of the form "start with the set of all text strings, and remove unwanted things incrementally". What if we tried it the other way around -- start with *absolutely nothing*, and incrementally add words / production rules which are "probably safe"? You could build up a restrictive, stilted "internetspeak" that's much safer / cheaper to moderate, allowing text comments in places where otherwise the costs would exceed the benefits. Or allow big tech platforms who have too much text to effectively control, much of which they don't want, to grasp firmer control of that.

I'm imagining the UX to be something like autocorrect, that takes real-time text input and projects it onto the closest-matching strings in the subset language, which are output as suggestions / prompts. But ideally it'd be a language users could quickly learn to master, without needing continuous assistance / nagging which disrupts the flow.

Is this doable now, or is natural language just too insidiously nuanced?

*(Broadly interpreted: everything from "humans manually reading / removing things" to "word / regex badlist" to ML approaches -- they're all "default allow").

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#83

Post by JasonFruit »

the_af wrote: post #70
JasonFruit wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take the past tense as meaning the book was a fait accompli , not as an analysis from a fictional future.

A solid argument against this is that the analysis itself isn't written in Newspeak but in the kind of thoughtcrime it seeks to prevent. It's also self-incrimination if it was written by someone in the regime, and while it could be argued that O'Brien employs similar discourse in the novel, the ruling party at that time is far from perfect and still hasn't achieved its goals. A future where this is a fait acompli wou…

I mean that the essay is not written in the fictional world of 1984, but in the real world. It's outside the work of fiction, a piece of literary criticism by the author of the work being discussed.

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#84

Post by antiterra »

hashkb wrote: post #72
boxed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a language regular and less broken isn't the same as reducing it's cognitive power though. Think of it like this: if we made English even less regular would it make us better and freer thinkers? Of course not! It would probably make it harder to think clearly. A good example is how counting is hard to learn because the words are weirdband illogical. It's like converting between roman and Arabic numerals.

Or it'd give us way more options for clever poetry and songwriting. Which tends to make us better and freer thinkers. The weirder your language is, the weirder art you can make with it. The more the audience understands your nuances, the better the art, the more emotional the experience, the more happiness and empathy and connection (or fear and sadness and despair) you can project.

No, you don’t need weird language for weird art, and there are amazing poems written in languages far less muddled than English.

Much of art is about transcending limits, and often those limits are intentionally imposed. (See Oulipo)

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#85

Post by mdp2021 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #76
mdp2021 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I used "over" to suggest dominance. Surely you "do something better with something", but I wanted to express "the acquired capacity of "advanced doing" covering the subject" ("get advanced-doingness over").

I just sprang into existence to fulfil the internet's promise to correct someone who mentions correct language on the Internet. I shall now disappear.

:)

Ah, but I never said «correct language» [though in some cones of meaning - "well-tailored hence right" - I also mean that]: I said "out-of-awareness language".

You need that to bend it, so you somehow need that to use it.

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#86

Post by bellyfullofbac »

joophro wrote: post #74
genera1 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, COVID-19, technical name for a respiratory disease, totally in the same category as Gestapo

>technical name In an era where almost all viruses/diseases have been referred to by non-technical names, the rapid switch to a technical mouthful of “COVID-19” or “SARS CoV 2” is absolutely political. I remember sitting at an airport last year watching newscasters denigrating the use of the term “Wuhan virus” as I had just walked past a sign warning about MERS (Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome) just on the other…

Geez, how hard is it to just call it Covid rather than moan about it?

What next, do you want to complain about having to call the HIV-caused disease AIDS, do you prefer "gay cancer"? "Gay plague"?

As to where the hotbed for Delta variant is: nowadays, everywhere!

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#87

Post by BurningFrog »

> "It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought–that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc–should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words."

2021 reminds of this more often than I'd like.

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#88

Post by the_af »

JasonFruit wrote: post #83
the_af wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A solid argument against this is that the analysis itself isn't written in Newspeak but in the kind of thoughtcrime it seeks to prevent. It's also self-incrimination if it was written by someone in the regime, and while it could be argued that O'Brien employs similar discourse in the novel, the ruling party at that time is far from perfect and still hasn't achieved its goals. A future where this is a fait acompli wou…

I mean that the essay is not written in the fictional world of 1984, but in the real world. It's outside the work of fiction, a piece of literary criticism by the author of the work being discussed.

When I first read 1984 I also thought like you, that this was just Orwell writing an essay about his invention, but there are some passages in this essay that show it's being written from an "in universe" perspective, i.e. by someone who lives in the same universe that 1984 "happened".

Just an example:

> "Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation [to Newspeak]: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century."

There are many tell-tale phrases there, but to pick an example: "it was not expected that they would be finished before [...]". "Expected" by whom? This means very little if it's just Orwell saying so, and it makes more sense if our fictional narrator is actually describing the history of his/her world.

Once you accept this, you must also accept Newspeak failed, which in turn hints at Ingsoc being defeated.

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#89

Post by quietbritishjim »

mynameishere wrote: post #78
dbattaglia wrote: post #4

This appendix, along with the chapters that are except from "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism", are actually my favorite parts of 1984. I enjoyed how "Principals of Newspeak" is written in a past tense when describing the language and the events of year 1984, it feels like a glimmer of hope that somehow mankind did indeed escape the horrific dystopian world otherwise presented in the book.

1984's original title was 1948. He was describing his time in the BBC and the general squalor and shifting loyalties of post-war Britain. Like most dystopian fiction the point is to criticize the current day, not gamble on being a prophet.

The Wikipedia article includes a quote that debunks this:

> There's a very popular theory—so popular that many people don't realize it is just a theory—that Orwell's title was simply a satirical inversion of 1948, but there is no evidence for this whatsoever. This idea, first suggested by Orwell's US publisher, seems far too cute for such a serious book. [...] Scholars have raised other possibilities. [His wife] Eileen wrote a poem for her old school's centenary called "End of the Century: 1984." G. K. Chesterton's 1904 political satire The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which mocks the art of prophecy, opens in 1984. The year is also a significant date in The Iron Heel. But all of these connections are exposed as no more than coincidences by the early drafts of the novel Orwell was still calling The Last Man in Europe. First he wrote 1980, then 1982, and only later 1984. The most fateful date in literature was a late amendment.

— Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984 (2019)

Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)

#90

Post by UncleSlacky »

pwdisswordfish8 wrote: post #39
dalbasal wrote: post #28

Esperanto probably inspired Orwell on this, at least to an extent. He knew several Esperantists. Most of the "A vocabulary" rules are similar, like valuing regularities. I wonder if he hated esperanto, or just conveniently borrowed the feel of an artificial language from it. To me, the euphemisation aspects of newspeak are the most "orwellian." IE, they're most likely to trigger that reference. Orwell himself complai…

Which politicians are euphemisms?

Santorum: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Santorum
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