Google Books is not a reliable sample of language over time due to shifts in genre representation that are correlated with all kinds of things like university library policies, interactions of OCR with typesetting practices, etc.
Also note this is a “contributed by” paper which means it didn’t go through the usual PNAS review process. (Presumably the authors didn’t think it would make it through.)
Instead of arguing why the data sources they have analyzed is limited or not fully representative, I suggest we get interested in their findings and look further into the matter. The authors are open about the limitations and possible biases in the data sources, and how modern use of language could affect the interpretations. I think they've provided good descriptions on how they have taken this into account in their study.
In this particular case, it's biased because Google Books includes much more fiction and many fewer scholarly works after about the year 2000. Link to a response of a previous article by this same group: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/45/e2115010118.short
It's good to see principle component analysis used to select only two components. Configure the algorithm to give you all statistically significant components and it can come back with 30 or 40 components, which fit the data exquisitely but which are as interpretable as a tarot deck and almost as meaningless.
> Perhaps more importantly, there could be a connection to tensions arising from neoliberal policies which were defended on rational arguments, while the economic fruits were reaped by an increasingly small fraction of societies
The decline of collectivism and the rise of individualism following the near total destruction of unions and the labour movement? Sound like a pretty significant contributor to me.
Unions in the private sector destroyed themselves. They bankrupted nearly every private domestic industry where they predominated.
That is what caused their membership rates to decline. They are now poised to take over the new bright spots of the US economy: Amazon and Tesla, and destroy these golden geese, for the short term benefit of their members, just as they did to the ones before them.
In the one sector where expenses are socialized, and thus which doesn't go bankrupt easily, they have gotten increasingly powerful.
Government social welfare spending has rapidly grown, at the behest of public sector unions who increasingly control the political system:
> 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?
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 two qualified referees, but the author gets to pick them. So a reasonable member should be able to get any sort of interesting or at least non-insane paper in there, by judicious choice of colleagues for review.
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.
>So a reasonable member should be able to get any sort of interesting or at least non-insane paper in there, by judicious choice of colleagues for review.
An easy way to go get interesting papers in does not seem like a reason to be 'down' on it.
These observations are also consistent with the collapse of scientism (I.e. appeal to scientific credibility by making irrational arguments with scientific-sounding words) as a rhetorical technique. The reduction of pseudo-rational terminology might actually indicate an increase in net rational thought.
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 with a tone of judgement something like getting a visit from an evangelical at your door. Listen to NPR: at least around north east cities it's replete and centered on identity politics.
* Those on the right tend to insert race into situations in which it does not naturally arise as I see it. Sometime emphasis here comes as self-righteous anger, feeling excluded, and kind of self-imposed victimization of thought or culture putatively at the hand know-it-all-liberals.
* Older guys on the right side who are pro-Trump, anti-vax tend be the angry individuals spending time recollecting the good-ol-days when guys were hardcore men. I sometimes probe these older guys with questions. What I tend to get is a lot o whining, frustration but little in the way of answers. That's a shame: us older guys are supposed to have some answers standing on the shoulders of our own experience.
My view then is the emotionalism, complaining, putative self-righteous anger, and whining is a layer on top of 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.
Whether it's "stop the steal", deep state, MSM (mainstream media) there's a running sense of we're victums. Look at headlines. You'll see plenty of "The real truth behind..." (i.e. you've been lied to elsewhere), "The dirty little secret at..." (i.e. people have omitted information we're strong enough to tell you).
I yet remain convinced that the majority of Americans (of which I am one) know full-well the solutions are at the center. I also feel like almost all Americans are sick-and-tired of the 24-7 soap opera from the talking heads on TV, and headless voices on AM/FM.
> 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.
I must note "things were more understandable" is an illusion. Ever since the iron age, very few people understood the art of ironmaking. People have been living in magic for a very long time.
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.
I don't think you're saying anything that can't adequately be explained by "more people on social media," and mainstream media more or less using that to stay relevant.
As opposed to some sort of "new" brand of victimization or something. People are telling their own stories in an effort to be seen and to change how we do things.
Compare and contrast with the much narrower mix of "public speaking" which was more driven by classic (yes, mostly white) American Boomer-esque capitalism of before.
Seems pretty natural and expected so far, actually.
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.
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.
Readit News
Also note this is a “contributed by” paper which means it didn’t go through the usual PNAS review process. (Presumably the authors didn’t think it would make it through.)
After all, it’s the data that is widely available to people on the internet.
The decline of collectivism and the rise of individualism following the near total destruction of unions and the labour movement? Sound like a pretty significant contributor to me.
That is what caused their membership rates to decline. They are now poised to take over the new bright spots of the US economy: Amazon and Tesla, and destroy these golden geese, for the short term benefit of their members, just as they did to the ones before them.
In the one sector where expenses are socialized, and thus which doesn't go bankrupt easily, they have gotten increasingly powerful.
Government social welfare spending has rapidly grown, at the behest of public sector unions who increasingly control the political system:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
A couple anecdotes illuminates the kind of power these unions wield:
New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:
https://archive.md/JnJQY
In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year.
California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers.
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?
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 two qualified referees, but the author gets to pick them. So a reasonable member should be able to get any sort of interesting or at least non-insane paper in there, by judicious choice of colleagues for review.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pnas-read-not
An easy way to go get interesting papers in does not seem like a reason to be 'down' on it.
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 with a tone of judgement something like getting a visit from an evangelical at your door. Listen to NPR: at least around north east cities it's replete and centered on identity politics.
* Those on the right tend to insert race into situations in which it does not naturally arise as I see it. Sometime emphasis here comes as self-righteous anger, feeling excluded, and kind of self-imposed victimization of thought or culture putatively at the hand know-it-all-liberals.
* Older guys on the right side who are pro-Trump, anti-vax tend be the angry individuals spending time recollecting the good-ol-days when guys were hardcore men. I sometimes probe these older guys with questions. What I tend to get is a lot o whining, frustration but little in the way of answers. That's a shame: us older guys are supposed to have some answers standing on the shoulders of our own experience.
My view then is the emotionalism, complaining, putative self-righteous anger, and whining is a layer on top of 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.
Whether it's "stop the steal", deep state, MSM (mainstream media) there's a running sense of we're victums. Look at headlines. You'll see plenty of "The real truth behind..." (i.e. you've been lied to elsewhere), "The dirty little secret at..." (i.e. people have omitted information we're strong enough to tell you).
I yet remain convinced that the majority of Americans (of which I am one) know full-well the solutions are at the center. I also feel like almost all Americans are sick-and-tired of the 24-7 soap opera from the talking heads on TV, and headless voices on AM/FM.
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.
As opposed to some sort of "new" brand of victimization or something. People are telling their own stories in an effort to be seen and to change how we do things.
Compare and contrast with the much narrower mix of "public speaking" which was more driven by classic (yes, mostly white) American Boomer-esque capitalism of before.
Seems pretty natural and expected so far, actually.
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.
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.
Dead Comment