A quirk of LLM generated MCQs is that in the majority of cases, the longest option is the right one.
How many of the 170k English words do you know?
551–560 of 575 posts
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
too many clicks per word. and the distance between click points. that's intentional. well the point would be to see how susceptible you are to that. They're figuring out where your cost vs reward tipping point is.
Can you elaborate? Who are the imagined "they", and in what way are they conducting experiments with or monetizing this investigation?
some people will crawl a mile for a promise. some people get skinny on a diet of promises
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. It is a word which seems to only be used as an example of a long and obscure word. I have never heard it used expressively, other than as a joke.
Yes, breviary is the only word in the first 80 that I hadn't ever seen before but I understand that if you're Catholic it's probably not that much weirder than "rosary" or "Eucharist" or whatever which are words I did know, so fine. In the last batch there were a few words that I was vaguely confident of but a lot more of them seemed like "stunt" words I would never see because every time they'd need defining so why…
In many books from 1800s the priest is always described having his breviary at hand. It's also often featured when priests appear in jokes.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if I can get behind .71 implying "correlates really well" ... that's the issue I had recently with talking with GPT, it was evaluating my logical reasoning ability based on the vocabulary I was employing. You don't need fancy words to be intelligent.
I think people don't often have a good intuition about what different correlation coefficients actually look like or imply.
.71 explains about 50% of the difference, its bigger than the effect size of Advil or Tylenol
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#555I just got 72k words, I most definitely do not know that much I just clicked the longest definition for most of them.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#556"It's a dead language!" they said, "It's a waste of time!" they said, "It's not like you can talk to dead Romans." they said. WHO IS LAUGHING NOW!?
Learning Latin vocabulary is pretty useful. Latin grammar, not so much.
The fun way to learn vocabulary is through extensive reading. Without learning something about grammar, you're stuck learning vocabulary through Anki decks, which is not my idea of a good time.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#557Something is wrong with the estimation method -- I got 100/100 words correct (albeit the second time I did the test -- one word I had gotten wrong the first time occurred again), and it estimated my vocabulary at 85000 words. Given the stated methodology, the correct estimate should be 170000.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#558As others have pointed out, too many clicks per word. I am a sucker for a 'how many words do you know' quiz so I finished anyway. Overall I'm skeptical of the classifications. In broad strokes, the early words are easier and the latter words are more challenging, but the middle is pretty muddied. Some of the words chosen are rather absurd/inappropriate: breviary (which I got wrong but felt like a vaguely religious wo…
I'll contest a few of these, which I thought were good. Breviary: this was, to me, known and not uncommon. It's widely known to Catholics, but also, if you have an interest in medieval art or books, you'd likely know it too. It was one of the main types of books before the invention of the printing press. Think of an image from an illuminated manuscript, 50% chance it's from one. Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia:…
Ucalegon was perhaps the most ridiculous to me, much more a factor of your knowledge of classical literature than vocabulary.
Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you didn't already know what Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia was, it's very easy to guess from four options. I agree there were too many clicks per word, I took me too long to finish. But I also found it too easy to guess the few words I did not know
In particular, I got a bunch of guesses correct because there's a pattern that several options are often related to each other, and either only one is different, (e.g., "Do good", "Do bad", "Be evil") -- in which case the answer is obvious -- or at least there's a contrasting pair which narrows it down to a 50% chance.
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Re: How many of the 170k English words do you know?
#560As others have pointed out, too many clicks per word. I am a sucker for a 'how many words do you know' quiz so I finished anyway. Overall I'm skeptical of the classifications. In broad strokes, the early words are easier and the latter words are more challenging, but the middle is pretty muddied. Some of the words chosen are rather absurd/inappropriate: breviary (which I got wrong but felt like a vaguely religious wo…
I'll contest a few of these, which I thought were good. Breviary: this was, to me, known and not uncommon. It's widely known to Catholics, but also, if you have an interest in medieval art or books, you'd likely know it too. It was one of the main types of books before the invention of the printing press. Think of an image from an illuminated manuscript, 50% chance it's from one. Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia:…
I was, as was gp, confused by “complacent” as I haven’t typically used it or thought of it to include a smugness and immediately went to the ol’ Google only to find that “smug” appears in Oxford Language’s* definition as well. The key though is “smug or uncritical”, so while smug may not be typical for some it does make sense now that I have that added knowledge.
And iirc “gauche” had more than just “socially awkward” in the correct answer but speeding through it again I didn’t get gauche as a word. That said, something gauche, to me, has always been something glaringly “not ok” in a social sense so again, that tracks. Oxford Language defines it as
> lacking ease or grace; unsophisticated and socially awkward.
Which is closer to the quiz’s definition and again, tracks with my internal thinking of the word’s use.
> Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
Was just plain fun - as soon as I saw the “fear of long words” I was like of course that’s it
*I mistakenly put “Merriam Webster” the first time around - while MW doesn’t include the word smug itself, the 1.b definition is simply “self-satisfied”