Language is an imperfect model for representing ideas. Million is close to billion, linguistically. Certainly not off by a power of 1000 in the space of language. I’m surprised the author is just coming to this realization.
There are times when people are communicating approximations and feelings, where imperfection is fine, and times when they're communicating precise, technical, numeric concepts where an imperfect model is insufficient.
One interesting application of neural networks is the creation word embeddings. ML models are trained to place words in a vector space, which is useful for measuring distance between words, performing arithmetic on words, or finding the closet word. Using an embedding allows your to formalize the "distance" between words, and perform fun tricks like King + Woman = Queen.
Citation needed. Is this based on any sort of formal linguistic/anthropological reasoning or just like, your opinion?
Also, the article's whole point is "people are bad at numbers" and your argument that "linguistically, all numbers close" isn't really true. Why don't rhyming words in English feel "close"? Also, "duck" and "fuck" are both verbs involving a thing you would do with your body, so why isn't that closeness?
If you're going to point out that language feels arbitrary by making arbitrary points, you're going to be "right" but you're not actually saying much. Language can be both specific and arbitrary (it's a means of expressing both objective and subjective concepts) so an argument in favor of doing your best when seeking to be objective seems pretty reasonable.
This result is intuitively obvious to me, which this article illustrates. Even if the resulting sentence is not factually true, a true-sounding sentence can be constructed by taking a sentence with the word million and replacing it with the word billion (in a majority of cases). This isn't true with duck and fuck, and duck is a noun and a verb used in generally different contexts than the word fuck.
> “Half a million known virus cases”, huh? During the Omicron peak, the US alone exceeded that many cases every day. Clearly they meant half a billion.
I wonder if the New York times knew exactly what they were writing. Both of course are technically correct. And billions/trillions/etc get into unfamiliar/meaningless territory for some with a million being the largest meaningful number so could have more emotional impact as a headline.
That may be so. But, the New York Times can't use that as a excuse for making simple mistakes, nor do I think it wants to. Language is primarily what it relies on to represent ideas. Accurate description of the world through language is the core of its value proposition to subscribers.
Edit: I originally had one extra letter, thanks jrd79
Maybe bbillion pronounced b-billion would be better.
And to add confusion, note that UK English had
1e6 million 1e9 thousand million 1e12 billion (million million)
I think this has mostly consolidated to the US usage now