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The rise and fall of rationality in language

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Re: The rise and fall of rationality in language

#11

Post by mananaysiempre »

earthscienceman wrote: post #2

PNAS: Read It, or Not? The reason people are down on PNAS is the way that members of the National Academy can, if they choose, sort of jam things into the journal through a side entrance. Here are all the details. The unusual thing about the journal is the existence of "Track I". Basically, a member of the NAS can publish up to four of their own papers per year. Each of these have to be submitted with the comments of…

This is, in principle, the standard approach for a periodical of a scientific society, be it Proceedings of the Royal Society, Comptes-rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, Doklady Akademii Nauk, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They come less from a time of ubiquitous formal peer review and more from a time of communicating results in personal letters. In fact, as such societies were originally conceived as a sort of long-running conference crossed over with a social club, the journals were intended as little more than a streamlined way of publishing meeting minutes; that their names still suggest that everything within is supposed to accompany an oral presentation is not a coincidence. Over time, they more or less turned into standard peer-reviewed journals, but these traces of their original form still persist.

Re: The rise and fall of rationality in language

#12

Post by api »

scrubs wrote: post #4

Great HN post. Thank you for OP for supplying the link. Through my various social engagements, I've spent time in many political discussions. Trump, politics, race, and anti-vaccination are recurring themes. Some observations: * Those on the left tend to insert race into situations in which it does not naturally arise as I see it. Here focus is nominally on inclusion/significance of minorities. It periodically comes…

> a more basic problem which is victimization. And that sits on an even deeper layer of lack of competence broadly speaking on what to do about it.

Maybe the issue is that our culture, economy, and technology has become so complex and exotic that very few people understand anything about how anything really works. We are surrounded by layers and layers of "magic." This might feel tremendously disempowering to people, especially older people who recall a simpler era when things were more understandable.

Feeling like a victim seems to be a really common sentiment across the board.

Re: The rise and fall of rationality in language

#13

Post by Hokusai »

ss108 wrote: post #5
scrubs wrote: post #4

Great HN post. Thank you for OP for supplying the link. Through my various social engagements, I've spent time in many political discussions. Trump, politics, race, and anti-vaccination are recurring themes. Some observations: * Those on the left tend to insert race into situations in which it does not naturally arise as I see it. Here focus is nominally on inclusion/significance of minorities. It periodically comes…

Indeed; there is way too much identity politics now. It's all identity politics. Dems had a chance with Trump to rise and be above the identity politics, and to focus on more universal goods, such as the rule of law, having a non-conspiracy based response to covid (Trump lowered the bar so much lol), etc. I don't think they properly seized it.

> there is way too much identity politics now

It's a strategy to divide the working class. With raising inequality you need to do something with the people that are unhappy. Or you give them money, and reduce inequality so they are happier; or you give them an enemy to fight so they forget about the money.

A similar thing happened after the great depression of the 30s and culminated with communism and fascism rising to power. Communism was driven by angry workers that wanted a fair share of the money. Fascism was driven by identity politics and workers more worried about identity than money, they wanted everybody to be like the ideal themselves.

So, or we end inequality, or communism comes back, or identity politics takes over. For me the first option is the best, but it's very difficult to achieve.

Re: The rise and fall of rationality in language

#15

Post by snek_case »

Hokusai wrote: post #13
ss108 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed; there is way too much identity politics now. It's all identity politics. Dems had a chance with Trump to rise and be above the identity politics, and to focus on more universal goods, such as the rule of law, having a non-conspiracy based response to covid (Trump lowered the bar so much lol), etc. I don't think they properly seized it.

> there is way too much identity politics now It's a strategy to divide the working class. With raising inequality you need to do something with the people that are unhappy. Or you give them money, and reduce inequality so they are happier; or you give them an enemy to fight so they forget about the money. A similar thing happened after the great depression of the 30s and culminated with communism and fascism rising…

You can never "end inequality". The best you can hope for is a level playing field, equal opportunity, as much as possible. There's a lot of things we could be doing to make that happen. It probably starts with more fair, universal access to education and trying to make sure that all children have their basic needs met, regardless of age or gender, but I think you are right that identity politics is a distraction for the working class.

The powers that be are trying to make the mob angry at straw men such as "capitalism", "colonialism" and "the patriarchy", but in the mean time, nobody is discussing real, evidence-based measures we could be taking to make the world a better place, there's only posturing and finger pointing.

IMO, we should be ensuring that the best, more positive aspects of capitalism are used to serve the best interests of humanity (i.e. stimulating investments in innovative technologies like electric cars). We should strive to have measures in place to prevent regulatory capture from fucking over startups in favor of inefficient zombie companies... And we should also have more scientists and engineers in the government, looking at evidence-based solutions to make sure we can comfortably provide housing, food, clothing, education and medical care to every child in the world, with a 5-year, 10-year and 25-year plan... Instead we have governments run by ex-lawyers and "activists" inventing new forms of victimhood.

Re: The rise and fall of rationality in language

#17

Post by Karrot_Kream »

Hokusai wrote: post #13
ss108 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed; there is way too much identity politics now. It's all identity politics. Dems had a chance with Trump to rise and be above the identity politics, and to focus on more universal goods, such as the rule of law, having a non-conspiracy based response to covid (Trump lowered the bar so much lol), etc. I don't think they properly seized it.

> there is way too much identity politics now It's a strategy to divide the working class. With raising inequality you need to do something with the people that are unhappy. Or you give them money, and reduce inequality so they are happier; or you give them an enemy to fight so they forget about the money. A similar thing happened after the great depression of the 30s and culminated with communism and fascism rising…

I don't necessarily think it's a strategy specifically designed to divide the working class, but I do agree that it's largely about inequality. The thing is, when you have a large percentage of the population who is economically struggling and a small percentage of the population thriving, then this impoverished majority has nothing to lose with radical change. The middle class offers a huge check on stability in societies as middle classes tend to be less likely to support highly-disruptive revolutions leading to extreme social change. The impoverished have less to lose. When society is composed of the majority impoverished, they'll back revolution with gusto as they reason their lot can only go up from where they currently are.

Re: The rise and fall of rationality in language

#18

Post by starkd »

scrubs wrote: post #4

Great HN post. Thank you for OP for supplying the link. Through my various social engagements, I've spent time in many political discussions. Trump, politics, race, and anti-vaccination are recurring themes. Some observations: * Those on the left tend to insert race into situations in which it does not naturally arise as I see it. Here focus is nominally on inclusion/significance of minorities. It periodically comes…

This victimization is hardly exclusive to the right. You can make a good case it began on the left and is merely being mirrored in some quarters on the right. Probably because of the success it has brougth to trial lawyers as we've become an increasingly litigious society.

Re: The rise and fall of rationality in language

#19

Post by kelseyfrog »

> What ends up in the university libraries used for the Google n-gram data varies with trends in Google’s book-inclusion policy, editorial practices, library policies, and popularity of genres. As none of those effects can be excluded it is important that we find the same trends for word use in the New York Times.

The interesting line of thought here is that NYT articles have fairly clear authorship (and to a lesser degree editorship). Do individual authors follow a similar trend (implying that people are changing) or do authors stay the same (implying that the NYT composition is changing)? In short, how much is personal change, and how much is churn?

Re: The rise and fall of rationality in language

#20

Post by Karrot_Kream »

buzzin__ wrote: post #14

How well do the charts match the point at which bottom 50% of population rationality-wise started mass posting on the internet?

This is irrelevant to the paper. The paper analyzes n-grams from books and the NYTimes. These aren't random internet posts.
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