[HN Gopher] Historical language records show surge of cognitive ...
___________________________________________________________________
Historical language records show surge of cognitive distortion in
recent decades
Author : gumby
Score : 206 points
Date : 2022-07-08 00:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pnas.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pnas.org)
| [deleted]
| antognini wrote:
| I wonder if there's a confounding effect here. The authors
| basically have a list of N-grams that they have identified as
| being indicative of cognitive distortions and find that these
| N-grams have become much more prevalent in the last few decades.
| But the selection of these N-grams is based on how we, today,
| would express these cognitive distortions. It doesn't seem that
| the could rule out the rate of cognitive distortions remaining
| the same, but the language to express them changing.
|
| To be fair, looking at their table of N-grams, a lot of them seem
| pretty timeless. For example: everyone, everybody, should, ought,
| must, worst, best.
|
| But many of the N-grams strike me as being rather modern
| formulations. For example: a loser, a toxic, OK but, OK yet.
|
| If a team of CBT therapists constructed such a list in 1900
| instead of 2020, would we see the prevalence of cognitive
| distortions decrease as our language changed?
|
| I think they try to control for this by choosing a null set of
| random N-grams, but the random N-grams were chosen from their
| entire corpus --- in other words by definition it's
| representative of the entire time span.
|
| Edit: As an example of this, the authors include in their sample
| of words indicative of cognitive distortions "everyone" and
| "everybody." But 200 years ago these formulations were much less
| popular than "all the world," which is not included in the
| author's sample. If you just include the modern words, it's no
| surprise that cognitive distortions are increasing. But if you
| made the list in 1800 and only included the older formulation,
| you would conclude that cognitive distortions are _decreasing_.
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=everybody%2Cal...
| darkerside wrote:
| Where did they find the text samples? It strikes me that the
| corpus of informal text samples has skyrocketed in the past two
| decades.
|
| Remind me of how most heat maps are just population density
| maps.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Google books it says so in the article
| permo-w wrote:
| >informal text
|
| informal and by less educated people. obviously there will be
| big exceptions, but I would imagine the % of computer-indexed
| text (i.e. books and newspapers) from between 1895 and 1995
| that _wasn 't_ written by someone with a degree is not very
| high. similar to the way you can get a distorted view of the
| Romans (or nearly any literate historical society) because
| nearly (if not) all of their literature was written by the
| educated upper classes
| antognini wrote:
| It's the Google N-grams dataset. It covers all the books that
| Google has scanned in their corpus, which, as I understand
| it, is virtually every book that's been published in the 20th
| century (at least for English).
|
| I agree that this might just be measuring increasing
| informality in published works.
| lumost wrote:
| This could also be a bias in the google books dataset. As I
| recall, the older google books dataset relied heavily on
| library preservation. It's probable that library curation
| would filter books for utility, longevity, and educational
| purpose. These filters would certainly penalize informal
| books.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| My first thought as I scanned the abstract was that since
| the '90s, the volume of novels with informal dialog has
| gone through the roof -- especially novels for teens and
| young adults.
| permo-w wrote:
| the amount of trashy celebrity autobiographies/books
| written by self-help gurus/informal-style recipe books
| being published has almost certainly risen in recent
| years too
| cycomanic wrote:
| I think the authors acknowledge that. And I agree with you this
| definitely should be investigated further. Also I have not read
| ref 17 yet, but I don't know how well established the method of
| identifying cognitive dissonance through ngrams is.
| pedrosbmartins wrote:
| I believe they tackle this exact bias. From the Sampling
| Effects section:
|
| > _Second, the choice of CDS n-grams could lead to a "recency
| bias" in our results, explaining their rise in prevalence in
| recent decades. We control for this effect with a null model
| that samples random n-grams more frequently from recent books,
| due to rapidly increasing publication volume since 1895,
| thereby inducing a bias toward more recent language. We observe
| increases of CDS n-gram prevalence well above levels predicted
| by this null model_
| layer8 wrote:
| They also address this to some degree in the _Language
| effects_ section.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| > thereby inducing a bias toward more recent language. We
| observe increases of CDS n-gram prevalence well above levels
| predicted by this null model
|
| I don't get why this would work? I get the null model
| predicting a bias X, and I guess they have a greater bias X +
| Y, but I don't see how that handles their choice of cognitive
| distortion signifiers being biased? I mean isn't it likely
| their choice of signifiers matches to Y?
| lumost wrote:
| they are claiming that their basket of distortion N-Grams
| became more common _faster_ than other randomly sampled
| n-grams from recent works.
|
| This seems like an interesting approach to controlling for
| the bias, but I'd expect the random sampling would bias
| lower than a specific sample as a random sampling of
| n-grams would pick up a lot of english grammar which hasn't
| changed in many years.
| permo-w wrote:
| are "OK but" and "OK yet" new formulations? "Okay" is an
| Americanism from the early mid 1800s that started to be used in
| its current form in the late 1800s. are the "but" and "yet"
| attachments genuinely new or recent?
| hansword wrote:
| Neoliberalism isn't actually great for human? Who would have
| thought...?
|
| Living when 'there is no such thing as society' makes you feel
| alone? Such surprise!
|
| Isolating people, destroying communities, and pushing everyone to
| look out for themselves turns out to have negative effects?
| suprisepikachuface.png
|
| (Having said all of that, there needs to be more than one study.)
| edgyquant wrote:
| Everything I dislike is neoliberalism
| the_only_law wrote:
| I think it's both funny and frustrating to see an already
| meaningless word become moreso.
| fho wrote:
| Hey! I don't know if you remember, but I found out what that
| red gravel on playgrounds was about:
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kieselrot (only in German, but if
| you heard about the topic you are probably from here too).
|
| (I couldn't reply in the old thread anymore ... so I hijack
| this comment)
| hansword wrote:
| Yes, I remember that! My childhood football club had their
| pitch in Kieselrot. And now that I read the article it is
| coming back. The pitch was closed for several months, but we
| weren't told why....
|
| Oh, thanks so much! Have a great day!
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Here, we leverage the connection between depression and
| language to investigate whether societies as a whole, similar to
| individuals with depression, can undergo changes in their
| collective language that are associated with cognitive
| distortions.
|
| ...
|
| > We caution that we make no causal claims with respect to the
| relationship between lexical markers, cognitive distortions, and
| internalizing disorders, and the above comments therefore
| constitute speculations that we hope may inspire follow-up
| research.
|
| Hmm, sure seems like exactly what they are trying to imply is
| that whole societies can be diagnosed with depression by lexical
| analysis. Meanwhile, I'm not even sure what it means to say that
| a society has depression. Feels like there is indeed follow-up
| research to do on this, though I'd have liked if it were done
| first.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > Meanwhile, I'm not even sure what it means to say that a
| society has depression.
|
| This is a key question. I'll take a punt: It's not that a
| societal depression is the sum total of individuals feeling
| glum. To say "society is in depression" is more like economic
| depression, rather than "everyone in society is depressed"
| (though that might be a consequence).
|
| In a depressed society things stop functioning. Like
| institutions, health, education, law...
|
| In an economic depression it's a "chemical imbalance" of money
| not circulating.
|
| In a societal depression it's a breakdown of ideas circulating
| (and that includes "ideologies" and "emotional ideas" like
| generosity, and diversity.
|
| There are many enemies of intellectual life that corrode
| innovation, hope, vision and the life-blood a civilisation
| needs to flourish (as opposed to soulless technocratic
| subsistence). The Greeks called that force Thanatos. I do
| believe its ascendency is connected to technology and our
| inability to master it. Valery Legasov, like myself, was a
| stanch opponent of the folly of "technological determinism" and
| said that "people must take control of technology, not the
| other about about, if civilisation is to survive" [1].
|
| [1] In reaction to the Chernobyl disaster.
| karaterobot wrote:
| But none of that is established in the literature they're
| drawing from when they say that certain n-grams are
| associated with cognitive distortions related to depression.
| When they say 'cognitive distortion', they're very
| specifically talking about depression in the psychological
| sense, not the economic sense, or the cultural sense. That's
| why they'd have to establish that whole societies functioned
| like individuals -- not in a poetic sense, but in a literal
| sense. Very hard to do that, and nobody has to my knowledge.
| This is the kind of thing you could say in an opinion piece,
| but not a research paper.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > That's why they'd have to establish that whole societies
| functioned like individuals -- not in a poetic sense, but
| in a literal sense. Very hard to do that, and nobody has to
| my knowledge.
|
| Indeed. I'm (hopefully) clearly extending the
| interpretation well beyond the scope of that paper, which I
| took on face value to be unsatisfactory. I'm not quite sure
| what you mean by "establish" but the analog of "society of
| mind" (not just Minsky's take) as emergent of faculties at
| both neurological and human organisational levels is old
| and appears in many forms throughout philosophy and
| political theory. "Poetry" would be the highest complement,
| but alas I am too clumsy with words for that.
| m0llusk wrote:
| It looks like the steep upward curve starts about when the
| Internet and social media became broadly available. That could be
| involved, though it could also be something less obvious like
| changes to use of language or acceptability of bearing emotions
| in public.
| cs137 wrote:
| The good news is that _some_ of this is publication bias, not a
| devolution of public mental health. Before about 1960, the lower
| classes had almost no chance of getting their words into the
| written record. Did 7th-century serfs see themselves as oppressed
| and miserable, or did they love their masters? We don 't know; we
| have no record of what they actually thought.
|
| Therefore, we aren't _necessarily_ in uncharted territory when it
| comes to lousy public mental health; it 's possible that we were
| worse off in the 1930s and '40s and wouldn't know it by the data,
| because the most put-upon and miserable people weren't writing at
| all.
|
| This doesn't explain the uptick since 1980. Moreover, since then,
| publishing (at least, traditional publishing) has reversed the
| changes of the midcentury and returned to being elite and
| exclusionary (albeit, in a different way) and yet we haven't seen
| this sort of censorship effect (and, to be honest, I'm glad we
| haven't, simply because I'm no fan of censorship). This
| establishes with high confidence that public mental health has
| worsened at least in the past 40 years (which, let's be honest,
| we didn't need a study to prove) and that--perhaps unusually, by
| historical standards--the middle and upper-middle classes are as
| miserable as everyone else, a fact that to me makes a strong
| argument for the Marxist framework in which only two social
| classes--the owning bourgeoisie, and the working proletariat--
| actually matter (since Marx did not deny a middle class's
| existence; he merely chose not to focus on it, believing--
| correctly, present conditions suggest--it to be an innately
| unstable status).
|
| Misery isn't new. Oppression isn't new. War and poverty certainly
| aren't new. What is happening on an unprecedented scale is the
| re-proletarianization of people (the West's former middle class,
| no longer needed in such number due to the end of the Cold War)
| who thought themselves to be part of the bourgeoisie--who
| believed their educational credentials and professional networks
| (paper armor, it turns out) were "as good as" actually having
| capital. Wrong, it turns out. Such people can be making
| $200k/year one day and forced to do Scrum the next; and we're all
| one medical emergency away from ruin. The collapse of a middle
| class isn't nearly as bad a calamity as what nature and history
| have thrown at the poor, but it is the kind of disaster one hears
| about.
| fallingknife wrote:
| In my experience no one is more miserable than the upper middle
| class. For some reason most aren't able to figure out they
| actually are rich.
| sneak wrote:
| It's possible that a majority of people were always depressed due
| to the circumstances of their life, but now they all have access
| to ~free computers and publishing, something that has changed
| drastically for the first time ever in "recent decades".
| YellowStuDregg wrote:
| Also see this paper on the rise and fall of rationality in
| language (previously shared on HN)
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2107848118
| Jensson wrote:
| "Everything is political, if you aren't helping us then you are a
| part of the problem!"
|
| Hostile advertisement messages such as this makes it really hard
| to stay sane. Politicians and companies seems so eager pushing
| people to the brink of insanity, and technology made them much
| more efficient at that than ever before.
| [deleted]
| mellosouls wrote:
| This is a fascinating premise, both for it's core finding and -
| even if that is debunked or unoriginal - another demonstration of
| the potential revelations of large scale analysis of digitized
| versions of both historical records and human activity generally.
| trough wrote:
| My own bias as a person interested and well read in history as a
| science wants me to agree but there is a selection bias at work
| that the authors of this study do not address to my satisfaction:
| We are talking about PUBLISHED language. On the one hand,
| published and distributed works are only a fraction of the
| written literary works of an era and therefore only represents a
| commercially viable subset. On the other hand, the commercial
| viability is determined by the demand in the market of readers
| which would suggest that their language analysis could be more
| sound than not.
|
| I THINK I'm reading more and more abstracts that show
| similarities between our current societal climate and that of the
| late 20s/early 30s of the last century. It will be academically
| interesting to see what the continuation of the current inflation
| and energy crisis which disproportionally hits the lower two
| thirds of the western populace causes in the next 2 years. The
| road to a substantial outburst - be it revolutions as a form of
| inward-directed change or god beware war - is paved at least.
| Sxubas wrote:
| I think this section addresses that sort of bias (a limitation
| of the used data):
|
| >The availability of large-scale historical records of
| published languages going back centuries may provide a unique
| opportunity for the quantitative investigation of important
| cultural and linguistic dynamics ("culturomics") (21), while
| acknowledging limitations with respect to verifying hypotheses
| and testing the causal mechanisms that underlie any
| observations from these data.
|
| I enjoyed that overall the article does not try to sell the
| idea that there is/was an actual change in the society, but
| rather showing how this analysis may be an indicator of that
| and inciting future work on the topic.
| darkerside wrote:
| The bar for publication has dropped dramatically in the past
| two decades
| hahaitsfunny wrote:
| 100%
| permo-w wrote:
| what would be a better subset then? if you take the set of all
| computer-indexed written text, you would end up simply
| measuring the rise of the capacity of the unwashed masses to
| air their thoughts in permanent, public, usually informal form.
| hahaitsfunny wrote:
| Yeah, well much of accepted history from that time is up for
| debate - from who funded the Germans and Soviets and their ties
| to industry and banking in the US and Europe. The current
| energy and inflation crises are caused in parts by similar
| global forces pursuing agendas today. I don't think revolutions
| will be forms of inward-directed change, but more as a result
| of financing by global elites similar to how Lenin and
| Trotsky's revolutions were funded by wealthy financiers in the
| US and London. Kennedy's father also helped fund the Germany
| war machine.
|
| As you pointed out - we find ourselves in a similar political
| climate but not because of the people who elected these
| governments but because of the globalists who still run them
| behind the scenes, just like they were doing prior, during and
| after WWII.
| penguino_pi wrote:
| I would love to read more about the above claims.
|
| Can you please point me in the direction of some foundational
| books?
| hahaitsfunny wrote:
| Sure - https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fourth-Reich-Societies-
| Threaten/...
|
| Lots of sources and foundational books and researchers are
| laid out in Marr's work.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Not readable without javascript. Does anyone have a link to a
| static version please?
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Wait a minute...
|
| I disabled Javascript (with an extension and by setting it off
| from the browser's settings) and it's perfectly readable.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| YMMV, but before you gave me the link [1] the original link
| [2] yielded only this:
|
| Please turn JavaScript on and reload the page. Checking your
| browser before accessing www.pnas.org. Please enable Cookies
| and reload the page. This process is automatic. Your browser
| will redirect to your requested content shortly. Please allow
| up to 5 seconds... Redirecting... DDoS protection by
| Cloudflare Ray ID: 728----------
|
| Despite not being fully Emacs compliant the link you gave me
| worked in w3m just fine. Thanks! :)
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8325314/?rep
| ort...
|
| [2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2102061118
| jwilk wrote:
| Both pages work for me without JS.
|
| It seems CloudFlare hates you, and its only their DDoS
| protection page that requires JS.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > It seems CloudFlare hates you
|
| Trust me the feeling is absolutely mutual. :)
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Nope, using w3m I too get the same message. Also:
| $ http --print=Hh
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2102061118
| GET /doi/10.1073/pnas.2102061118 HTTP/1.1 User-
| Agent: HTTPie/2.2.0 Accept-Encoding: gzip,
| deflate Accept: */* Connection: keep-
| alive Host: www.pnas.org
| HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
| Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2022 20:14:25 GMT Content-Type:
| text/html; charset=UTF-8 Transfer-Encoding:
| chunked Connection: close X-Frame-
| Options: SAMEORIGIN Permissions-Policy:
| accelerometer=(),autoplay=(),camera=(),clipboard-
| read=(),clipboard-write=(),fullscreen=(),geolocation=(),g
| yroscope=(),hid=(),interest-cohort=(),magnetometer=(),mic
| rophone=(),payment=(),publickey-credentials-
| get=(),screen-wake-lock=(),serial=(),sync-xhr=(),usb=()
| Cache-Control: private, max-age=0, no-store, no-cache,
| must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
| Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT Expect-CT:
| max-age=604800, report-uri="https://report-
| uri.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/beacon/expect-ct" Set-
| Cookie: __cf_bm=qv6dsgda4RMnNWeT1VIRHInJZ1zZUOR8nOf8QcEsp
| lM-1657397665-0-Acn1NnHCTMFqAG0yu80qvOAMdxVlVdo8MN9/BQkNB
| qBe0hiZukolLXQSpxCeK1BuVjjaYeSfvyy90NfVEAA1CGE=; path=/;
| expires=Sat, 09-Jul-22 20:44:25 GMT; domain=.pnas.org;
| HttpOnly; Secure; SameSite=None Vary: Accept-
| Encoding Strict-Transport-Security: max-
| age=15552000 Server: cloudflare CF-RAY:
| 7283b9ce3f93d488-BRU alt-svc: h3=":443";
| ma=86400, h3-29=":443"; ma=86400
|
| And yet server sends the browser an HTML document with
| enough in it to force the redirection even with JS
| disabled.
| jwilk wrote:
| It works for me in Firefox and elinks, but not in w3m.
|
| It doesn't work in curl either, even when I use the same
| headers Firefox does.
| mellosouls wrote:
| PDF:
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2102061118?downloa...
|
| Alternative non-JavaScript link without some figures, etc:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8325314/?report...
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| thank you, both
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8325314/?rep
| ort...
|
| Beware, there's no assurance it was written with Emacs.
| xelxebar wrote:
| Here's the PDF:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8325314/pdf/pna...
| smitty1e wrote:
| This came off as a dry cheap shot =>
|
| "This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word
| meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books
| sample."
| mikewarot wrote:
| Given working class wages have been slowly declining in real
| value since the late 1960s, it's understandable that the stress
| that causes would lead to the effects identified.
|
| We're on the downward slope of a one time pulse in stupendously
| cheap and easy to reach fossil fuels. We're also running out of
| easy to reach groundwater resources.
|
| If the grown ups among us don't take over and start steering
| things in the right direction, we're headed towards
| civilizational collapse.
|
| Reality is depressing, and apparently this study confirms it
| showing up in our language.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| It has become much more socially acceptable to communicate ones
| emotions in the last few decades. This, added to the fact that
| female authors have tended to communicate differently (and I see
| no attempt to control for that in my admittedly quick scan of the
| write-up) makes me think that they may just be detecting a
| cultural trend in favour of honest emotional self-expression.
| jjt-yn_t wrote:
| tgv wrote:
| Too nonsensical to even consider.
|
| The English indicator drops from 1914 to 1960. WW1? Great
| depression? WW2? Nah, that doesn't depress us. Cold war, nuclear
| threat? Life's great! 1980, the advent of word processors, more
| personal, psychological literature, and a linguistic style closer
| to the present? Now we're depressed!
|
| It's beyond me how you can publish findings which are based on
| correlations with correlations, and validations which took place
| 100 year later, when other explanations aren't even mentioned.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| From a US perspective, I think there are major differences
| between WWI/WWII and 1968/perhaps recent years.
|
| In the WWs you had a society perhaps more structured and united
| for a common national and patriotic cause.
|
| In 1968 (since it's mentioned) and perhaps in recent years you
| have a society that arguably is less structured and people
| having issues with society itself and the state of the country.
|
| It also seems to me that it was during the 70s that the US
| started to feel that things and the country were going down.
|
| I suppose there is a parallel in the UK, for instance. Things
| were hard during WWII but people came together and had a sense
| of purpose and of fighting for their homes.
|
| But then factories close, you lose your job, inflation picks
| up, society changes... now you may perhaps really feel
| depressed.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Not really a fan of militarism, but WWII had a lot of people
| working alongside a lot of other people they wouldn't usually
| spend time with. And a desperate need to innovate new
| technology and new industrial and managerial processes. So
| there was unity in the face of a common threat.
|
| Also, GI Bills allowed intelligent individuals to get an
| education without worrying about debt _as well as_ discounted
| mortgages and business loans.
|
| That need dissipated after the 60s and there was more
| emphasis on hedonism and competitive individual ambition.
| Then in the 80s competitive _economic_ individualism started
| to dominate everything else.
|
| The result was a classic race to the bottom - with a few
| extreme winners who are indulged and beatified, a productive
| but often hamstrung professional underclass, and a huge
| precariat of economic losers.
|
| At the same time the media landscape started promoting
| division and tribalism for profit.
|
| So now we have a dysfunctional culture which is unable to
| cope with challenges like Covid, gun violence, and climate
| catastrophe because it has been groomed to be more emotional
| than rational, and the tone has affected everyone from the
| top down.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > WWII had a lot of people working alongside a lot of other
| people they wouldn't usually spend time with.
|
| To some extent, but the military was still segregated by
| race.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > So now we have a dysfunctional culture which is unable to
| cope with challenges like Covid, gun violence, and climate
| catastrophe because it has been groomed to be more
| emotional than rational, and the tone has affected everyone
| from the top down.
|
| The arc of cultural history you describe seems spot on. But
| I don't think splitting between "emotional" and "rational"
| is useful or even the root of what you describe.
|
| Emotion is a kind of reason too, only it yields affect.
| Much of what we reason out "emotionally" is the really
| important stuff - who we marry, whether to have kids, when
| to change jobs.
|
| I'd rather say, if it's true, that the quality of emotive
| and positivist thought has been equally corroded. I think
| if you truly take on board the thrust of the Trilateral
| Commission's action on the "Crisis of Democracy", the
| attack on emotional literacy has been even more vicious,
| and vital to the their aims, than the so-called "dumbing
| down of education".
| tgv wrote:
| > From a US perspective, I think there are major differences
| between WWI/WWII and 1968/perhaps recent years.
|
| The UK's literary output is probably also included among the
| English books of that period. It should show up, shouldn't
| it?
|
| > But then factories close, you lose your job, inflation
| picks up, society changes... now you may perhaps really feel
| depressed.
|
| Then it should go down in the 90s, right?
| uplifter wrote:
| They paper says the English sample is from the United
| States of America, U.K. publications are presumably
| excluded.
| mellosouls wrote:
| _...when other explanations aren 't even mentioned._
|
| I did a quick "find in page" and "war" is mentioned 22 times.
| cycomanic wrote:
| What do you mean? There are small effects for the depression
| and WW2. I would argue that the nuclear threat and the cold war
| really only started to have a significant impact on the overall
| psyche of societies after the 70/80s. The peace movements
| really only started in the early 80s (except for the opposition
| to the Vietnam war which is actually reflected in the record).
| The 50/60s were generally characterised by an broad optimism
| and believe in the future (look at all the things they thought
| we could do).
|
| More generally you seem to dismiss the work largely because it
| does not match your preconceived notions of what should have
| been major effects. Maybe the question is to ask why they might
| not have. Or at least bring up evidence that they had a great
| impact on the language used.
| prox wrote:
| I also wonder what the effect is of effectively a much
| richer/convenient overall population, and the ability to
| reach what is basically the top in the Maslows hierarchy of
| needs (self actualization) and how it maybe that many more
| people write about their mental states. The amount of coaches
| has boomed in the last decade!
| permo-w wrote:
| it's entirely possible that those events didn't have the
| depressing effect you might expect. it's also possible that
| you're right
| rayiner wrote:
| Because "social sciences" aren't science. These stories come up
| on HN and there's always lots of smart left brain people trying
| to puzzle through this as if it's not just based on reading
| tarot cards.
| palmetieri2000 wrote:
| Do you include economics in this judgement?
| rayiner wrote:
| Macroeconomics, yes, but they're at least trying.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| Andrew Gelman wasn't impressed by the paper:
| https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/07/03/historical...
|
| "But they don't really have any measure of entire societies or
| depression. The above note by Schmidt discusses why the Google
| books collection cannot be characterized as a measure of entire
| societies. There are also problems with the depression
| measurement. Here's what it says in the PNAS article:
|
| _For example, the 3-gram "I am a" captures a labeling and
| mislabeling distortion, regardless of its context or the precise
| labeling involved ("lady," "honorable person," "loser," etc.).
| These same n-grams were in earlier research shown to be
| significantly more prevalent in the language of individuals with
| depression vs. a random sample (17)._
|
| Note 17 points to this preprint, which states:
|
| _Here, we show that individuals with a self-reported diagnosis
| of depression on social media express higher levels of distorted
| thinking than a random sample._
|
| How do they define "distorted thinking"?
|
| _[W]e define a clinical lexicon of 241 n-grams that a panel of
| clinical psychologists deemed to form a schema involved in the
| expression of a particular type of distorted thinking according
| to CBT theory and practice. For example, "I will never" would be
| implicated in the expression of a cognitive distortions such as
| Catastrophizing or Fortune-telling, whereas "I am a _" would be
| used to express a Labeling and Mislabeling distortion._
|
| This is like a parody of clinical psychology, reminiscent of
| those sitcom moments when the busy suburban dad is persuaded to
| go to a shrink, and everything he says on the couch is
| interpreted as some sort of neurosis. Only this case, instead of
| everything being a coded statement about his mother, everything's
| a coded statement about a cognitive distortion. "I am a
| statistician." "There you go with those Labeling and Mislabeling
| distortions again!""
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Then the paper itself is an example of distorted thinking.
| Given the prevalence of such forms of mass-analysis, I would
| argue that the paper is at least ironically true.
| ccvannorman wrote:
| Maybe irony with a dash of truth as well, depending on how
| many people reactively agree with / are angered by the [
| obstensibly incorrect ] paper (thus becoming "distorted"
| themselves.)
| giantg2 wrote:
| "whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future
| in overly negative and inaccurate ways."
|
| I wonder how they ensure that the standards they set for accuracy
| and the "right" amount of negativity don't have any bias or
| inaccuracy. For example, someone's language patterns may match
| the N-grams because they are being consistent with the language
| patterns they were taught or exposed to in society, but their
| actual thinking could be much more nuanced.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| The methodology is interesting, though I'd simply call it
| "thematic analysis". Psycholinguistics is much more complex than
| trigram frequency though, as simple spam filtering proves. I
| suppose the schtick here is "Big Data", with a corpus that
| earlier researchers could never approach "by hand".
|
| I didn't find much new here at the conceptual level. This is what
| "Zeitgeist" means, and many epochs have been characterised as
| joyous or depressive.
|
| However the framing of the study is important for me, because I
| broadly agree with the hypothesis that we are in a depressive
| epoch. In fact we are in an interregnum, which themselves go
| through phases in the gap between "a world that is dead and one
| still waiting to be born".
|
| Why might the psyche of the Anglosphere be battered more than
| other groups or nations? Sure, we've had industrial revolution,
| slavery, two world wars, decades of proxy wars, environmental and
| financial disasters... but is our lot any worse than the long
| suffering people of Russia, China or Africa who carry traumatic
| histories?
|
| I would argue that what ails "the West" is a loss of sense of
| positive future. That is actually a symptom of clinical
| depression too. The Fukuyaman conceit of the "end of history" is
| actually a dark and troubling stuckness. For me the prevalence of
| words like "inevitable", "ubiquitous" and "inescapable",
| especially around technology, are markers of a profound loss of
| creative vision and optimism.
| Mezzie wrote:
| > I would argue that what ails "the West" is a loss of sense of
| positive future. That is actually a symptom of clinical
| depression too. The Fukuyaman conceit of the "end of history"
| is actually a dark and troubling stuckness. For me the
| prevalence of words like "inevitable", "ubiquitous" and
| "inescapable", especially around technology, are markers of a
| profound loss of creative vision and optimism.
|
| Agree. In addition to creative vision and optimism, I would add
| a sense of agency has almost completely vanished from the
| Anglosphere starting with Gen X. The average person (and now a
| disturbing portion of those with power) believes that there is
| no way they can influence the trajectory of their life.
|
| This is not good. That's where desperate, angry people come
| from.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > no way they can influence the trajectory of their life.
| This is not > good. That's where desperate, angry people come
| from.
|
| Indeed. It's also the antithesis of what I understand to be
| the "American Dream", perhaps synonymous with "freedom" in
| our time. The kind of thing people will fight wars to hold on
| to. Really not good. So in my opinion worth courageously
| fighting for *now" rather than waiting for things to get that
| bad again.
| themisto wrote:
| Love learning about words and ideas like "interregnum". It's
| uncomfortable to think of a global societal interregnum -- at
| what point we may be in it, where it will end up, and if things
| will be "better" on the other side.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| It's a good concept isn't it. I prefer it to talking about a
| "crisis" of this or that - because the idea that a society or
| humankind might "Just not know what's going on any more" is
| less loaded than a "crisis" which implies some correct way of
| being that we deviated from. But beware. There's a half-dozen
| varying accounts of what it really means and when our journey
| into the wilderness started. By Nietzsche's account it was
| the 1900s.
| uplifter wrote:
| > By Nietzsche's account it was the 1900s.
|
| I'm confused by this because Nietzsche died in 1900. Was it
| a prophecy? Or did you mean the 1800s?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > Or did you mean the 1800s?
|
| Yes, silly me. He was talking about the times he saw
| around him (late 1800s) rather than prophesising. In
| Beyond Good and Evil he poses the open question "what
| sacred games shall we have to invent?". It was Freud and
| Jung who were possessed with visions of awful wars to
| fill the vacuum.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Rather than society being more depressed etc, society is more
| willing to directly address depression. This is a side effect of
| basic material needs being solved, for a wide swath of the book
| writing world anyway. We're just looking for the next big jump in
| standard of living and all the low hanging fruit is inside us.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| I didn't read the full article but ctrl + f indicates they didn't
| comment on neither the editing nor publishing process
|
| do the same analysis for online fanfiction and see if that flows
| the same, publishers have a heavy hand in what they want to
| publish a lot of the time. taking a sample from the online
| community should be less biased
|
| you might even be able to visualize what different publishers are
| biased for if they collected that information, but alas, this is
| more information I don't see in the articles figures
| astrange wrote:
| Is "cognitive distortions" a standard term? I thought those were
| the dungeons in Persona 5.
| layer8 wrote:
| It is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_distortion
| jl6 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I am convinced for many reasons that social media is a major
| player in many mental health issues, but I wouldn't pin 100% of
| the blame there. For a start, the effect predates mainstream
| social media. But more importantly, the financial and political
| rewards for making people think negatively have never been
| higher. I think once the corporate/government/activist
| influencers caught onto the "make them feel bad, then offer them
| an alternative" trick, we were destined to see the hockey stick
| even if Twitter had never happened.
| jzdziarski wrote:
| Fascinating study. It would carry more currency with me if the
| ngrams used were learned through ML and corpus training rather
| than heuristics. It is assumed these ngrams are particularly
| useful markers today. The significance in their absence doesn't
| seem to be part of the research. When there is such dramatically
| "off the chart" data such as this, you need to start looking
| under the hood at other factors. Studying individual authors
| would be a good start. Other factors may also include the
| editorial process. Publishers tend to have common nuances they
| like to conform to. Could the editorial process explain why some
| of these nuances are widespread? It's also worth considering that
| technical language (computing, for example) made great leaps
| around this same time period and bled into common parlance.
| Social media, which is cited here only as a loose correlation,
| also altered the brevity of writing, which changed how we use and
| communicate language - but it's a far stretch to call these
| subtle changes distortions, at least beyond letting Jack Dorsey
| fuck up our use of language. The authors argue that the meaning
| of these ngrams hasn't changed, but their application sure has.
| Overall it feels like a great area to study, and as good science
| does, presents more questions than it does answers. There is much
| more to explore here though before we can conclude the entire
| world is depressed. I am not an expert in linguistics, but I do
| feel as though there is a modern element missing from this
| research.
| sideshowb wrote:
| > Studying individual authors would be a good start.
|
| Or even taking a random sample of the ngrams to manually verify
| their usage hasn't changed over time, plus a random sample of
| texts to check that depressive sentiments weren't previously
| expressed in different language.
|
| It's a great start, though.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > Fascinating study. It would carry more currency with me if
| the ngrams used were learned through ML and corpus training
| rather than heuristics.
|
| I would have significantly less confidence. How would you learn
| such a set? You then would need a set of texts that are clearly
| labeled from people with cognitive dissonance and without. I
| don't think such a set exists. Also note that the n grams have
| been tested previously for individuals (ref 17 in the paper)
|
| Your post points to another interesting line of research (and
| maybe that is what you meant), can we find correlations between
| the language used in previous periods of unrest, e.g. in
| Germany the period of WW2 and other periods.
|
| > It's also worth considering that technical language
| (computing, for example) made great leaps around this same time
| period and bled into common parlance.
|
| The authors specifically mention this, but it should bias the
| results in the other direction, i.e. technical work has less
| prevalence of the ngrams according to the authors (I'm unsure
| if they tested this).
|
| >. Overall it feels like a great area to study, and as good
| science does, presents more questions than it does answers.
| There is much more to explore here though before we can
| conclude the entire world is depressed.
|
| Note that the authors are very cautious about making any such
| claims and in fact acknowledge the question if applying these
| markers to societies is valid
|
| > I am not an expert in linguistics, but I do feel as though
| there is a modern element missing from this research.
|
| I'm not sure I understand. To me it seems like quite solid
| research (although I admit I don't know much about CDS
| markers...) without using some hype methods like ML just for
| the sake of it.
| robg wrote:
| Difficult to disentangle the fact that the n-grams talking about
| these topics have become highly profitable as an industry unto
| itself. Not just click bait and doom scrolling of recent years
| but the books, TV shows, and especially medications that talk
| about and claim to address the ill effects of modern life. Prozac
| Nation was published in 1992. Oprah was launching in 1986. People
| have been getting paid and made focusing on these topics in ways
| it's difficult to find a historical precedent. And let's not
| forget that depression as a medical condition was marketed by a
| Pharma company with the first SSRI cleared by the FDA in 1987.
| Flocular wrote:
| Sentences that apparently mark cognitive distortion: "The quality
| of our product is not acceptable yet.", "I won't go to this
| meeting, because I feel nauseous.", "Children should go to
| school."
|
| I can't say I agree.
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