There's no evidence from this article that the idea space is decreasing. Vocabulary is becoming somewhat more similar: the measurement is on individual words. Suppose an institution decides that the faculty is using overly obscure language (or a grant-making agency decides this) and asks that grant submitters reduce the amount of jargon, include more background, etc. Wouldn't this measurement then show a significant drop in the distance measure? Note that I am not saying that this is what is happening (I seriously doubt it, in fact), but I think too much is being concluded based on this measurement.
Language homogenization at Harvard
21–30 of 87 posts
Re: Language homogenization at Harvard
#22Noam 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…
> bombastic Esoteric synonyms, perhaps? :-)
Synonyms for the word bombastic, not synonyms having a bombastic character.
Re: Language homogenization at Harvard
#23My dad, a science prof, used to joke his grants were intro'd "In order to stay ahead of the Russians we should..."
Now he terms them "In order to stay ahead of China we should..."
Re: Language homogenization at Harvard
#24> Rasmussen connects the decline in lexical diversity with an increase in diversity words - equity, diversity, inclusion, gender, marginalize, underrepresented, and disparity. You know it can't be right--too good to be true.
There is no field in which the prevailing language is more rigid and robotic.
Re: Language homogenization at Harvard
#25Noam 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…
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Re: Language homogenization at Harvard
#26Reminds me of grad school where there was literally only one correct way to write a particular sentence or paragraph in a manuscript according to multiple advisors over the years. Frequently that way is synonymous with what was originally written, but apparently the original doesn't have the correct "feel," or whatever. For a physical sciences paper, where no one is a particularly good writer. Basically, communities…
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Re: Language homogenization at Harvard
#27> Rasmussen connects the decline in lexical diversity with an increase in diversity words - equity, diversity, inclusion, gender, marginalize, underrepresented, and disparity. You know it can't be right--too good to be true.
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Re: Language homogenization at Harvard
#28Maybe 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.
But, how does that explain the decline from, say, 1900 to 1990? The decline appears fairly steady over the 120 year period.
It totally doesn't, which is why it's baffling that (either!) author goes into so much detail about "diversity words."
I can put a chart of lexical similarity over a chart of the number of employed airplane mechanics and probably pontificate that by golly, we need to stop fixing airplanes for the sake of intellectual diversity!
And that would be about as well-reasoned.
Re: Language homogenization at Harvard
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
But, how does that explain the decline from, say, 1900 to 1990? The decline appears fairly steady over the 120 year period.
It totally doesn't, which is why it's baffling that (either!) author goes into so much detail about "diversity words." I can put a chart of lexical similarity over a chart of the number of employed airplane mechanics and probably pontificate that by golly, we need to stop fixing airplanes for the sake of intellectual diversity! And that would be about as well-reasoned.
Doesn't the article say basically this?
"The diversity words are new (new-ish). Anything else newish would be inversely correlated with cosine distance too. For example, I repeated the same experiment with "tech" words like Google, YouTube, iPhone, browser, and so on. Those tech words correlated at -0.6 with cosine distance"
Re: Language homogenization at Harvard
#30I would guess that the increased rate of information transmission across society has contributed to this trend. Copying is a key mechanism in how culture develops and propagates, and information moving more easily makes it easier for different groups to copy the dominant examples for any particular activity or discipline. A lot of information systems and cultural phenomenons have winner-take-all / power-law dynamics.…
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