[HN Gopher] Language records reveal a surge of cognitive distort...
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Language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent
decades
Author : jbotz
Score : 98 points
Date : 2021-07-25 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pnas.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pnas.org)
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| If you look up at the sky and say "oh its sunny today", you are
| overgeneralizing because you haven't seen the rest of the city.
| If you had worn masks or started being cautious before COVID was
| widely acknowledged, you were catastrophizing. If you ever talk
| or act based on a mental model you have of a friend, you are
| mindreading.
|
| "Cognitive distortions" are the only tools we have to reason
| about _anything_ in the presence of limited information (which is
| basically always). Its basically a toolbox to let you discredit
| _any_ thought whatsoever, which is convenient when a patient
| writes down negative thoughts and the psychiatrist can just hand
| them a list. But it would work just as well on positive thoughts
| or any thought whatsoever.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| There's nuance in almost everything. When writing or speaking
| you have to generalize, or you'll just end up rambling.
|
| So when someone says something, you can almost always say
| they're being too general and point out some obscure exception.
| It's better to just take every statement and implicitly "... in
| most cases".
| ajross wrote:
| > "Cognitive distortions" are the only tools we have to reason
| about _anything_ in the presence of limited information
|
| No, clearly they aren't. But you know what does qualify as a
| cognitive distortion? That very statement[1]. The "only" way to
| reason about "anything" based on limited evidence? Really? I
| mean, Kalman and Bayes would maybe like to have words.
|
| [1] I can see a few, but I'll go with "dichotomous" as the
| biggest mistake you made. You lept straight from "Sometimes
| these mental tools produce correct results" (which is true) to
| "These tools are the only way to produce correct results" (a
| ridiculous distortion).
| dalbasal wrote:
| One of the results that stood out to me was that (a)
| dichotomous thinking was the most notable distortion in
| germany during nazism and (2) they (and the rest of us) are
| back to peak levels.
| Swizec wrote:
| > But it would work just as well on positive thoughts
|
| Have you heard of toxic positivity? There's a growing movement
| _against_ incessant positivity that has become endemic to a lot
| of online discourse in particular on Instagram (def not on
| twitter).
|
| Nothing ever sucks, it's a challenge! Nobody is sick, they're a
| fighter! Nobody is a mean prick, you just need to understand
| their perspective! Nothing you do is ever stupid, people are
| just haters!
| austincheney wrote:
| I more frequently encounter toxic negativity on HN in
| subjects that devolve to anything remotely social.
|
| * That parent isn't setting boundaries for a child, they're
| just mean.
|
| * Isn't that they fully acknowledged your thoughts and chose
| something to the contrary, they aren't listening.
|
| * Isn't that they fail to shed tears when trying to
| understand other people, it's that they have no empathy (this
| is actually sympathy, but whatever).
|
| I want to say it's teenagers or highly sheltered people
| having an emotional moment, but these wonderful people claim
| otherwise. Worse, like teenagers, when comes to anything
| remotely social everybody is an expert, never wrong, and
| somehow knows all about other people real life situations.
| Zak wrote:
| The phrases that the study treats as overgeneralizing are:
|
| _all of the time, all of them, all the time, always happens,
| always like, happens every time, completely, no one ever,
| nobody ever, every single one of them, every single one of you,
| I always, you always, he always, she always, they always, I am
| always, you are always, he is always, she is always, they are
| always_
|
| It's not _always_ overgeneralizing to use one of these. "Every
| single one of them wore black" is (potentially) completely
| factual. A large increase in their use in books, however
| suggests that authors are overgeneralizing more than they did
| previously.
|
| Phrase list:
| https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2021/07/22/210206111...
| codingdave wrote:
| You are correct that it is a toolbox. You are also correct that
| the tools could be used inappropriately. Neither of those
| truths invalidates the actual tools. Every tool in the world
| can be used either correctly or incorrectly.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > If you look up at the sky and say "oh its sunny today", you
| are overgeneralizing because you haven't seen the rest of the
| city.
|
| Oh? You have seen the sky over the rest of the city. You can
| see a long way, in the sky.
| [deleted]
| gmuslera wrote:
| Focusing in just authors may make this fall into the Simpson's
| Paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox), if
| you look at the bigger set the clear trend may vanish.
|
| Even if authors are part of the population and living (some of)
| the influences that the general population have, there are a
| whole ecosystem and pressures that should be taken into account,
| including changes in the editorial ecosystem with time.
|
| There are other sets of public data that may or not track the
| general population, like social networks activity, blog posts and
| comments on different sites. But that is affected by changes in
| culture, population and external influences (including
| disinformation campaings), and the selection of sites may select
| also the kind of users that may add a bias to the results. I
| wonder what deviations would be seen at i.e. slashdot that should
| have around 25 years of comments, with all the previous
| objections that I already said.
| blunte wrote:
| Does this study consider the modern ease of getting a work to be
| publicly available? Publishing, in some form, is so much easier
| now than it was 20 years ago. Is it possible that publishers of
| the past just said, "no, we don't want so much depressing
| stuff."?
| malandrew wrote:
| Now they have the analytical tools given to them by the tech
| industry to say "Yes, we need more of this depressing stuff
| because it's most profitable"
|
| To make matters worse, journalism is not longer a career that
| provides a path to a respectable middle to upper middle class
| life, so you have an entire profession where those working in
| that profession have generally depressive prospects in life.
|
| Want to make society content? Keep journalists content.
| Animats wrote:
| This is a _very_ simple analysis. Here 's the phrase list: [1]
| It's quite short. It's clear how they get the numbers, but not
| clear what, if anything, they indicate.
|
| A big problem is that they only count one side.
|
| "Fortune-telling: Making predictions, usually negative ones,
| about the future" - counts the phrases: "I will not, we will not,
| you will not, they will not, it will not, that will not, he will
| not, she will not".
|
| One would expect that they'd also count "I will, "we will", etc.
| and show a ratio. But no.
|
| This is measuring something, but what?
|
| [1]
| https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/suppl/2021/07/22/210206111...
| api wrote:
| Maybe tangential but I have had the sense for the past ten years
| that something is wrong with human cognition.
|
| When I look at the popular ideas on all sides of the political
| spectrum, the trend seems to have been toward ideas that are not
| only more one dimensional and extreme but more irrational and
| incoherent. I regularly come across online comments that are
| borderline word salad, a blathering incoherent mess of the sort
| that would in the past have immediately led to questions about
| schizophrenia.
|
| It doesn't seem to be a specific idea so much as a decline in the
| lucidity and coherence of cognition itself. The ideas are inane,
| but I can't imagine such inane ideas taking hold to such an
| extent in earlier eras.
|
| I have only two hypotheses that seem like they make sense:
| gamified social media and CO2 concentration impacting metabolism.
| I lean strongly toward the former because around 2010 is when
| algorithmic timelines started to be introduced and it was right
| around then that I remember a tangible sense of sharp decline. I
| had to include the latter for completeness, but I hope not as the
| latter would be far scarier.
|
| Social media companies are the tobacco companies and opiate
| dealers of the information age. The more I see of them the more I
| am convinced they are an objective evil and create net negative
| value. The algorithmic weighting of content for engagement seems
| to be the real problem, but it's at the heart of their business
| model now.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| _The more I see of them the more I am convinced they are an
| objective evil and create net negative value._
|
| With invoking the words, "absolute evil", you seem to also take
| part of your observed trend:
|
| _When I look at the popular ideas on all sides of the
| political spectrum, the trend seems to have been toward ideas
| that are not only more one dimensional and extreme_
| civilized wrote:
| These are interesting data, but heavily sensationalized,
| overinterpreted and editorialized - as per usual from this
| notorious "tabloid journal", as statistics professor Andrew
| Gelman calls them.
|
| For example, the methodology for detecting "cognitive
| distortions" is extremely simplistic, relying on short phrases
| like "I am a", "everyone thinks", and "still feels". It is far
| from clear what an increase in people saying "I am a" means, and
| what it really implies about the rate of genuine cognitive
| distortions or depressive thought patterns in the population. The
| reasoning here is basically "X correlates with Y, X is up,
| therefore Y is up". That's not a strong argument. These data are
| a starting point, not a conclusion.
|
| The authors also seem to be leaning so far into a desired
| narrative that they can't accurately read their own graphs. The
| rapid rise in CDS clearly begins around 2000 - not the late
| 1970s, which are just the low point of the graph.
| dalbasal wrote:
| In their defense, I tend to think social science is shoehorned
| into an academic formula that it can never really fit into.
|
| You kind of have to have a hypothesis, then "test" it with
| data. A more reasonable approach (IMO) would be "We found this
| interesting phenomenon" followed by inevitably speculative
| interpretation. That's realistically how it works in practice,
| but to be published you need to fit a popperian formula. A more
| ponderous version of this probably wouldn't have been accepted.
|
| I mean, using a method of diagnosing depressed individuals on a
| _collective psychology of a society_ is already veering into
| wtf territory, in terms of interpretation. OTOH, it _is_
| interesting and probably significant somehow.
|
| IDK how or what they could have done better, and this does seem
| like a result worth publishing, assuming the methodology is
| good. Ultimately, I think people reading the paper mostly read
| it that way anyhow. Authors found X. Seems interesting. Here's
| how they're interpreting it. Here's my speculation.
|
| Journalists OTOH, they'll cite the hypothesis verbatim if it
| fits the article they're writing. I think that's where the
| shoehorning is a problem. As long as you're reading the paper
| directly yourself, who cares what order the paragraphs are in.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| >The rapid rise in CDS clearly begins around 2000 - not the
| late 1970s, which are just the low point of the graph.
|
| I don't think this is taking full account of their claim.
| They're saying it's a "hockey stick." If you look at the graph
| like that you can understand what they mean.
| tomaszs wrote:
| Maybe we have red entirely different articles. Because the one
| linked contains whole section indicating the method has
| limitations and they don't try to establish any causal effect.
|
| For me the study is interesting because I observe the very same
| change in music lyrics and movies. They become vividly grimmer
| compared to earlier years.
|
| I have seen a young person explaining it by stating young
| generation expresses emotions in a more toned down way.
|
| On the other side, if we perceive books and other forms of
| expression as a way to share stories receiver can not live by
| himself, it would mean the opposite, that people lives became
| better. And because of this art fills the void of negativity.
| An explanation that is close to my understanding.
|
| Either way there is a collective shift in expression and it is
| interesting to research it.
| rhizome wrote:
| Hmmm, maybe it could be called something like "syllogistic
| materialism?"
|
| It's a predictable badness that these "revelations" are
| specific sentiments about what follows, aka "the nouns" (more
| or less). "Still feels X," "I am a Y," "everyone thinks Z," all
| require that X, Y, and Z all have fixed meanings.
| christophilus wrote:
| Sounds like you're saying the authors suffer from cognitive
| distortions. They're disproving their point by proving their
| own point.
| civilized wrote:
| Their work is definitely an illustration of precisely what
| they're talking about.
| triska wrote:
| A very nicely done and interesting study on a very relevant
| topic, with worrying results. Thank you for sharing this! I found
| the following quote particularly interesting:
|
| _" It is suggestive that the timing of the US surge in CDS
| prevalence coincides with the late 1970s when wages stopped
| tracking increasing work productivity."_
| civilized wrote:
| > _It is suggestive that the timing of the US surge in CDS
| prevalence coincides with the late 1970s when wages stopped
| tracking increasing work productivity._
|
| I don't agree with the authors' summary of their own graphs. If
| you look at the graphs, it's more like "cognitive distortions
| hit an all-time low around 1980, began slowly inching back up
| from 1980-2000, then accelerated more rapidly upwards after
| 2000, leading to a clear trend break by 2005 or so."
|
| I've also heard conflicting info about this and would like a
| more definitive analysis if anyone knows of one. I've seen
| people claim that total comp, including especially health care
| benefits, did not stagnate and continued to track productivity.
| kian wrote:
| It feels quite possible to me that, despite total comp
| tracking productivity, wages ceasing to track work
| productivity could still cause increased anxiety due to a
| lack of choice in how to spend that fraction of compensation.
|
| Health Care as a job benefit ensures that that fraction of
| compensation is always spent on health services, at minimum.
| In many ways it is more of a subsidy to health insurance
| companies and health care providers.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Corresponds with the large drop in testosterone levels seen in
| the past 4 decades, which the authors did not consider in their
| discussion. Revise and resubmit
| Hokusai wrote:
| Looking at the graphics it seems that the start of the pattern is
| closer to Reaganomics than Facebook for the English speaking
| world. For German and Spanish started way later, closer to social
| media.
|
| So, maybe in the USA it started early and the it spread to other
| parts of the world thru social media. One way or another it seems
| important to study the reasons and the effects of such change of
| language.
| lrdswrk00 wrote:
| Social media invented by US industry, that was mutated by
| Reaganomics.
|
| Interesting.
| malandrew wrote:
| One thing to consider is that cable TV with many channels
| proliferated 1-2 decades earlier in the US than most other
| countries. We had 40+ channels and the resultant social
| splintering of interests much earlier as a result. It wasn't
| until satellite TV became a thing that many parts of the world
| could get more than a handful of over the air channels.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It is an incredible result, my first thought is that it depends
| so much on the sampling of what books get published, and what
| books wind up in the maw of google books.
|
| I have done things like look at specific dates that turn up in
| Wikipedia and you see some things that are real but when you get
| close to the time frame Wikipedia existed sampling effects are
| strong.
|
| It would be fun to look at 'I am a *' though.
| eyelovewe wrote:
| I blame it all on that one Beck song, plus that one Radiohead
| song
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Has there been a surge, or were previously such things
| suppressed? Also, most books are marketed via publishers which
| means there is filter (read: bias) in what gets published and
| what does not.
|
| It's an interesting idea (i.e., analyze books) but the context is
| going to influence the results.
| ris wrote:
| Complete sidenote, but when did google n-grams start getting
| attention again? Last I looked at it it seemed pretty dead and
| unlikely to see any further updates. Now not only is it updated
| but it has a lot of features I don't remember seeing before e.g.
| wildcards and part-of-speech wildcards
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/info
| curation wrote:
| It is because the only logic we have left is Market Logic and the
| only ethical barrier we have left between us and violence is The
| Economy. The Economy is entirely faith based. And our faith is
| waning, and among younger generations, is gone. To survive in
| Market Logic we must act as though we believe we are fully
| individuated and on our own with bootstraps tugged. But how we
| actually live is totally, globally interdependent. The pandemic,
| on top of this, insists on it. This is the source of cognitive
| dissonance. ( JP Dupuy The Economy and The Future)
| voidhorse wrote:
| Quite a few theorists have stated things along the same lines,
| and I think the analysis is generally correct.
|
| After the "death of god", man lost a common frame of reference
| and replaced highly spiritualized modes of existence for highly
| economic modes of existence. Well, now we are facing the "death
| of the market" and finally realizing that it is a destructive
| fiction and that it is not reasonable to reduce everything to
| exchange value and calculation insofar as it leads to the
| actual existential crisis that is climate cataclysm.
| yissp wrote:
| What will we replace it with this time?
| Animats wrote:
| I don't know. We're running out of sources of trust.
| Lawyers? No. Bankers? No. Political leaders? No. Captains
| of industry? No. Journalists? Almost extinct.
|
| We hit bottom when the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts
| both turned out to have thousands of pedophiles in
| positions of authority.
| mvc wrote:
| > We hit bottom when the Catholic Church and the Boy
| Scouts both turned out to have thousands of pedophiles in
| positions of authority.
|
| Of course prior to 1980, the church had never done
| anything to harm those it claimed to care for. Not sure
| why Catholics are singled out here.
| [deleted]
| dalbasal wrote:
| The data is quite interesting, but the hypothesis (imo) is far
| from the only plausible explanation. I'm not saying this to
| disparage the work, just to frame.
|
| _" Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns
| of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think
| about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative
| and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked
| changes in an individual's mood, behavior, and language. We
| hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their
| collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of
| language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual
| markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books..._"
|
| Interesting result:
| https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/30/e2102061118/F4.larg...
|
| So... the finding is that language patterns typically associated
| with depression have rapidly become common in book language.
| Interesting. The interpretation is up for debate, I suppose.
| Maybe its just writers are more depressed.
|
| Financial events are labeled, but they don't seem to have
| impacted the data much. Internet usage, OTOH, seems (at a glance)
| highly correlated to whatever they're measuring. Maybe online
| culture moved language in this direction with no real
| relationship to depression. Maybe the internet made people more
| depressed. Maybe the internet made writers more depressed. Maybe
| some complicated knot of those. IE, the internet popularized
| maladaptive language, which has made us all more depressed.
|
| In any case, assuming the methodology is reasonable, it does look
| like they've found _something_ here. Worth a discussion.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I'd be tempted to say the language patterns could be the most
| interesting thing. They're something that you could was more
| widely and objectively measurable than "depression". Starting
| with language patterns and seeing what they're most strongly
| associated with might be interesting.
| ma2rten wrote:
| I don't think the methodology is showing anything conclusively.
| The peak could be due to a linguistic shift or due to a
| difference in the type of work being published. Even if books use
| phrases like "I am a" more often I don't think that necessarily
| means people have more cognitive distortions and if people have
| more cognitive distortions that doesn't necessarily mean they are
| more depressed (only the inverse has been shown afaik).
| malwarebytess wrote:
| Did they consider that the influx of normal people into the realm
| of writing & publishing? It use to be a lot more exclusive.
| jgilias wrote:
| An interesting effect. It's just that the naming could somehow be
| better. It feels weird to call a cognitive _distortion_ some
| collective zeitgeist that apparently correctly identifies a
| situation when shit has really hit the fan.
|
| I mean, why would it be a 'distortion' to be somewhat fatalistic
| about the current climate change trend that may actually lead to
| civilizational collapse and an extinction event.
| overton wrote:
| Exactly. This article comes with the typical psychiatrist bias
| that depression is indication of some personal deficit
| (cognitive distortions or faulty brain chemistry) when in my
| personal view, given the state of the world there are many good
| reasons to be depressed.
| mikeiz404 wrote:
| I see your point and I used to think this too to an extent but
| I think it's worth appreciating that we are looking from the
| outside in to a highly specialized domain and like most of
| these domains it has developed its own unique set of language
| and definitions. And that paper is written for people in that
| domain / community, not for those outside of it.
| airhead969 wrote:
| I would posit increased population, shift to cities, fewer close
| friends, less family relationships, less community, declining
| interdependency, lower standards of living, and less hope for the
| future all contribute to depression and so cognitive distortions.
| derbOac wrote:
| It's telling that a search for the term "sentiment" in the
| article yields nothing. It's an obvious companion analysis.
| ignoranceprior wrote:
| I'd be curious to see how sentiment analysis of contemporary
| writing has changed over time. That would be easier to
| interpret than this metric too.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| The data seems to support that people in America who write books
| are depressed.
| cryptica wrote:
| The economy is a negative sum game and so, while the rich keep
| getting richer and their friends keep getting richer,
| opportunities for the majority of people are drying up. It
| becomes increasingly easy for the rich to earn money and
| increasingly difficult for the poor to earn money.
|
| Almost everyone who rich people interact with are at least
| relatively well off and doesn't have to work too hard for their
| money so they don't see or relate to the suffering and
| hopelessness of the poor who are desperately competiting for
| their attention.
|
| Wherever the rich look, things start improving - But where they
| don't look (which is most places), things are always getting
| worse.
|
| In this crony-capitalist system, the attention of a rich person
| is as good as money.
|
| The monetary system is to blame for this. When currency isn't
| backed by anything, the economy and society becomes 100% about
| capturing the attention of rich people. You cannot compete in
| this system without the approval of rich people. No matter how
| much better value your products or services may be; you can never
| compete because their earnings are mixed in with easy money
| straight from the money printers, yours aren't - You can never
| beat the margins of a big corporation which has direct currency
| pipelines to hedge funds, governments, etc...
|
| Money should not be so important but when you are far from the
| money printers, it's the only thing a rational person can think
| about. Getting the attention of rich people is the only way to
| get closer to the money printers. It's not a distortion to see
| things as negative or bleak. Things really are bleak for most
| people. The real distortion is thinking that everything is fine.
| briefcomment wrote:
| What I'm interested in seeing is the types of phrases that
| dropped during this time period. What is not considered a sign of
| "cognitive distortion"?
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