Cohort succession explains most change in literary culture | Hacker News Reader

Cohort succession explains most change in literary culture

sociologicalscience.com

50 pointsluu23 comments

Reminds me of Plank's "science advances one funeral at a time"

On a smaller scale, this is also true of company cultures. They change when leaders depart for one reason or another, and new leaders arrive or are promoted to fill the vacancies.

I would imagine the same is true for software architecture and interface design; someone should study that!

I submit that architecture may yield to Conway's Law[1].

To your point, language design may have more todo with the cohort of the original language desingers.

That said, languages tend to add more baggage over time; does recent C resemble K&R very much?

Python with full type hinting is a far cry from the 2.4 stuff I first encountered.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

I mean, I'd also posit that organizational/corporate organization--whether you think scrum or agile or whatever makes sense--is also likely related (on average: same as with literature here, not saying "in all cases") to cohort succession.

It's a good idea, and could well be done. The hardest part might be identifying the date-of-birth of the people who wrote the software. Libraries preserve that for books. Code reuse might also be a tricky issue.

I hope I’ll live to see the future generation that fixes UI design. The last decade or so certainly broke it.

A hellscape of hamburger menus, heiroglyphs, and hidden errors.

I'd like to add "everything is controlled through a single button" to the gripe list, but I haven't figured out how to make it snappy and alliterative.

I understand why this happened -- mobile first design and then dogmatic application of space-crunch compromises to interfaces without a space crunch -- but yeah, I really hope we can roll back the worst of it without waiting for AR to reverse the screen real estate dynamics. How many generations of proprietary morse code combinations for single-button interfaces can fit between today and AR landing? Too many. Far too many.

I’ve seen this in the demographic makeup of the city I did my undergrad. Left for a much more work oriented corporate city, then upon returning noticed all the zoomers everywhere, and got hit with the realization that I was a geezer now. That said I (like many generational cuspers) was into the ‘new stuff’ back when it was super uncool among millennials, so at least I’m a hip geezer.

Thomas S Kuhn, anyone?

It probably accounts for changes in business culture, too.

While it may seem distant if your measure of culture is HN commenters, women dominate university graduating classes, and have done for years now. Women will dominate every elite pursuit, including business leadership. Soon.

If tech becomes a last stand of male dominated culture, the tech industry will find itself isolated and out of step.

>> We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,830 works of fiction from 1880 to 1999 and find that slightly more than half (54.7 percent) of the variance explained by time is explained better by an author’s year of birth than by a book’s year of publication.

Ten thousand works! Wow, the authors did some reading!

Oh, no, wait. They used topic modelling. Basically, two people manually labelled a corpus with 10 categories of topic and then they trained a text classifier on that data. Then they used the classification to draw conclusions about the texts in the corpus.

I'm so sorry to be the typical disparaging HN commenter, but trying to understand literature through text modelling is like trying to enjoy nature by counting the trees in the forest. And yes, I'm aware it's common practice. That doesn't make it any more sensible.

Probably my favourite XKCD of all time:

https://xkcd.com/2610

"If I assign numbers to each of these things, then it becomes data and I can do maths on it".

Trying to understand and trying to enjoy are two totally different things.

Came here to say this. To understand the forest's inner workings and mechanisms you likely wouldn't be setting up an afternoon picnic

Yes. Did someone say they're not?

Yes, you did:

> trying to understand literature through text modelling is like trying to enjoy nature by counting the trees in the forest

Where does the text you quote say that trying to understand and trying to enjoy are the same thing?

It implies that they are similar in some important ways and thus comparable in the given context and thus not totally different.

Where does it do that? Show me.

> trying to understand literature through text modelling is like trying to enjoy nature by counting the trees in the forest

Where does that say that enjoying and understanding is the same thing? Show, me.

On the other hand, trying to understand forests by counting trees in them is a well accepted practice. Including manually counting trees in a small area and extrapolating to a larger one.

> If I assign numbers to each of these things...

Heh. I just started Seeing Like a State [1998] by James C. Scott. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

Hearing about failed utopian efforts, like "scientific forestry", what laypersons today might call "tree farms", I can't help but think of so many failed IT projects.

If there's been one constant in my career, it'd be the banality of misapprehended complexity. It must be something like a natural law. Like how humans are turrible at assessing risk.

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