Comment by ljd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ljd | Hacker News Reader

What an interesting reflection on who we are as a species.

We build systems to organize who we are (urbandictionary) but hate it when the systems use that information tell us who we are (watson).

It feels so much like the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

Perhaps an appropriate response would be for the computer to measure the tension in the human voice response to it's queries and optimize for lower tension.

So it can pick three words: Bullshit -> 80% confident; Sham -> 70% confident; Fallacy -> 50% confident;

Within limits, it will pick the less optimal word and measure the tension in the response and find a way of influencing confidence based on responses.

Think multi-armed bandit problem but with social situations. I mean, to be honest, isn't that what we all did when we were in middle school? We used as many bad words as possible measuring the response we got from others? None of us were born with a binary understanding of when to use certain words it was more trial and error.

I have to disagree.

I'm not an "angel" by any means, but any time I visit Urban Dictionary, I come away feeling filthy. I typically go there to look up some abbreviation I heard on reddit or IRC or a blog post somewhere and what I look up usually ends up being middling-dirty, but the stuff that I see there "on my way" to the word I'm looking for makes me cringe and gives me a bleak vision of what the next generation is going to be like should Urban Dictionary actually be representing the majority of the population (I firmly hold that it does not).

What are you disagreeing with? It sounds like you're demonstrating the point: You find it distasteful to be told a bunch of stuff that was already true.

It is the difference between getting a useful definition and getting a useful definition surrounded by expletives conveniently packaged, in a sample sentence, forcefully ramming into some orifice.

The point is that the urban dictionary is full of bullshit joke/shock-value definitions that are basically not used. To call it as a whole 'true' is rather misleading.

I'm skeptical. My expectation is that the majority of definitions on Urban Dictionary are in fact attested uses of slang-- mainly on the basis that however many people are out there spending their time coming up with "bullshit" slang, there are billions of people making real slang every day. Whatever kind of crazy made-up definition you come up with, someone will come along tomorrow and use an even sillier-sounding word to mean something even weirder.

Keep in mind that that a piece of slang is attested does not necessarily make what it describes real. To choose a rather mundane example, "dick in a box" is defined as a gift-wrapped box with a hole cut in one side, into which a man's penis is inserted, which is then presented as a gift. I'm sure since the term was coined a few people have tried it out, but in general it's not a real thing, just something from a TV show; regardless, that is what a dick in a box is.

Right, but you get very misleading impression if you try to treat a word used by a handful of people as a 'normal' word. If you adjust each one down 10000x to factor in how many people would actually use them then you no longer have this horrible distasteful revelation by reading urbandictionary. You only have a couple distasteful words, per region, but each region has a unique set.

People are always quick to pull a small subset of data to brand the younger generation as failures. It happens all through the ages: drugged up hippies, punk rockers, pill popping clubbers, internet trolls....

Yet the younger generations are growing up, getting degrees, decent jobs and generally giving the old guard a run for their money.

It's more like they couldn't have Watson using them on national television. Many a company, even if it weren't showcasing a machine like Watson, would want to avoid that language on a huge television event like the Jeopardy challenge. I think you might be looking a little too deeply at this.

Every decision made by a company can be evaluated in the context of the culture that influenced that decision. The fact that Watson's babysitters got embarrassed when it learned a new word from the Internet says something about society, IBM, and the Internet.

Why couldn't they have Watson curse on national television? Cultural expectations. Why avoid any words at all? They're all just phonemes strung together with no inherent meaning.

Not looking deeply is not looking at all.

Why not have Watson kill people? They are just carbon molecules strung together.

Are you saying being unable to whore out to good, clean and 100% trivial family entertainment, is actually equivalent to killing people?

Why not have Watson investigate murder cases? Or even better, make sense of the words vs. actions of actual people holding power and influence right now? Why am I not holding my breath for this? Because it's hard, or because it's not ever going to be a priority in a million years?

Picasso was perfectly correct when he said "computers are useless, they only give answers". They could be useful, if we programmed them to give answers to interesting questions. But unfortunately most humans are useless as well; they don't ask any questions, ever.

No, I was just responding to the parents reductionist attitudes.

To be honest, I realized you probably were halfway through my rant, but ranted anyway. I'm not sure if I would agree that "bad language" can do all that much damage, but I do agree that "it's just words" is generally not an argument.

What I was saying was that it's not a perspective on us not wanting a machine to reflect our language and how we us it back at us, as you originally said. It's just the normal clean decent image that companies prefer to present most of the time.

Or as a culture. It seems to me that the gap between what language is acceptable in informal vs formal settings is fairly large in the US, while in other countries, using words like 'bullshit' in more formal settings is less taboo.

Wonder if there's any research on this.

I've worked at some VERY major US companies, and there was generally no hesitance to throw around significant profanity in engineering department meetings, that's for sure!

I am not sure if engineering meetings count as a formal setting though. :)

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