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Noam Chomsky on suicide watch In my point of view this is actually good news; Since I'm not a native english speaker and since this language has become the world's lingua franca it's very nice being able to understand an article just because the author's didn't waste time looking for bombastic synonyms just to sound smarter. I applaud this and projects like Simple English Wikipedia which allows us, non-native english…
Esoteric synonyms, perhaps? :-)
> Suppose we were going to rate words on a scale of one to ten in two dimensions. First, we are going to rate how old fashioned a word is. Second, we will rate how funny the word seems to us. > For example, if we wanted to rate "poppycock" we might say that it's a 9 for "old fashioned" and an 8 for "Funny". Poppycock would be 9, 8. Another word, like snail, isn't especially old fashioned or funny. Though, the word ha…
I suppose "old fashioned" is much more of a subjective measurement than an objective one. At first I was going to rate "snail" as not at all old fashioned, since we still use the word. But then, I thought of medieval snail drawings, and felt like the word has some element to it that does harken back to older days. "Citadel" is kind of a similar example. There is a modern hedge fund named Citadel and we still use that…
It's more interesting than you might think! Turns out snail is a diminutive form of snake[1], from a root referring to creeping over the ground.
The other aspect of judgments of old-fashionedness is that things that are really old-fashioned, like being named Etheldreda, will tend to be rated as less old-fashioned than things that are pretty recent but out of current fashion, like being named Gertrude. The old old things are too forgotten to be "old".
My other question would be "why 'cosine similarity' rather than 'correlation'?". Same thing, but people are a lot more familiar with the term 'correlation'.
[1] OE snaca preserved the /k/ sound, but OE snægl voiced it, and the /g/ then predictably turned into a Y sound (compare "yard" / "day"), giving us the I of modern snail.
You know it can't be right--too good to be true.
Maybe we've discovered diversity etc is worth studying, in part because it does have such a profound effect on the world. There's a reason these words and studies are considered "politicized" and that's because understanding them threatens the status quo. Just because something is politicized doesn't mean it isn't worth studying.
It also wouldn't surprise me a huge amount if the idea space was constricting, but just looking at the cosine distance is not enough to establish that. There probably are meaningful ways to exploit and analyze the representations inside language model transformers to better capture the idea-space geometry, but that's a big research project.
Also, the author may be over-interpreting the result: it's odd that very different fields are showing roughly the same change in cosine difference, and it is a measurement over individual words. I think a deeper analysis is needed to figure out in more detail what is going on.
Lexical homogenization is not the same as idea homogenization, and it does not surprise me that as time goes on the word choice in a given category of writing (esp an insular one like grant applications) would constrict. It also wouldn't surprise me a huge amount if the idea space was constricting, but just looking at the cosine distance is not enough to establish that. There probably are meaningful ways to exploit a…
It’s reinforcement learning over decades
> Suppose we were going to rate words on a scale of one to ten in two dimensions. First, we are going to rate how old fashioned a word is. Second, we will rate how funny the word seems to us. > For example, if we wanted to rate "poppycock" we might say that it's a 9 for "old fashioned" and an 8 for "Funny". Poppycock would be 9, 8. Another word, like snail, isn't especially old fashioned or funny. Though, the word ha…
I think that's why they say "old-fashioned" instead of "has an extremely old (attestable) etymology." As a native English speaker, "poppycock" sounds more "old-fashioned" (maybe "quainter") than "snail," even though "snail" might actually be older.
But see also my observation about the English female names Gertrude and Etheldreda. Which one is more old-fashioned?