Comment by djha-skin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by djha-skin | Hacker News Reader

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The best part of this article is perhaps the following critique of ngrams and by extension their popular use in modern algorithms:

> The text of Etymonline is built entirely from print sources, and is done entirely by human beings. Ngrams are not. They are unreliable, a sloppy product of an ignorant technology, one made to sell and distract, one never taught the difference between "influence" and "inform."

> Why are they on the site at all? Because now, online, pictures win and words lose. The war is over; they won.

One never taught the difference between "influence" and "inform". What a scathing rebuke of our modern world and the social media that is part of it. Algorithms that attempt to quantify human speech and interaction and get it wrong most of the time in their quest to maximize their owner's profits.

This somber warning is especially poignant in an age more and more ruled by generative AI, which I'm told is essentially an ngram predictor.

> The text of Etymonline is built entirely from print sources, and is done entirely by human beings. Ngrams are not.

I'm confused about this part actually. I assume by "entirely from print sources" it means it does not include digital sources? That doesn't sound very relevant to the issues mentioned in the article though: unless it uses the "complete" set of all print source, it totally could have the same skewed-dataset issues too; and humans can make the same mistake as OCR does.

Etymonline compiles the information on etymology and historical usage from printed books (eg the Oxford English Dictionary). That is what is being referred to here. They are not having humans tally up different words from books. That data is entirely from ngrams.

Influence and inform are two sides of the same moral coin, where we claim others ideas aren't their own, whereas we are the virtuous informed ones who draw our own conclusions.

The low-pass filter of the mind only allows in what fits somewhere inside the existing framework. If you don't reject something, then being informed by it and being influenced by it are the same thing. In that framework, people who claim to be informed come off as high and mighty and a little lacking in self consciousness.

I inform, you influence, he propagandizes.

Disagree, influencing someone and informing someone are orthogonal.

Influencing someone just means changing their behavior and/or beliefs. This can be done with either the truth or lies, or even just opinion (green is better than blue - neither true nor false).

Informing someone specifically means giving them true information, which may or may not influence them.

If we think more along the lines that truth is in itself always a moral judgement, then in that light, influencing and informing again become the same thing.

For instance, if I were to say something and you were to disagree, you don't get to say that you're the one that's right and that you're the one that's informing people, and that I'm the evil influencer, without it being a moral judgement.

And if you think that you are actually some sort of oracle of truth, then calling your judgements truths is still a moral judgement, predicated on the belief in your infallibility.

The highest knowledge is still in print and is still generated by people.

Electronics are like a devouring spirit, they don't produce, they eat.

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