Amazing, cool, wow: Humans naturally use POSITIVE words, and that is GOOD Unlikely as it may seem to anyone who has ever used the internet, linguistically people really do "always look on the bright side of life," according to a scientific study. The University of Vermont conducted a "big data" study of billions of words across a number of languages and concluded that: "probably all human language …
fluffy, conservatives, tax havens, expenses, daisys, gold bullion, cookie monster, love, smashing, brilliant, insider dealing, fraud, ice cream, fun fairs, whitewash, drones, upbeat, longing, cuddles, dynamic, tinkle.........hows that for positivity?
"If I had to post as AC I'd be unhappy too."
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. It is the quality of each posting that matters - not the track record of the poster.
Displaying a unique handle means that someone might be biassed to pre-judge your post before they've actually read or digested it.
Displaying a unique handle means that someone might be biassed to pre-judge your post before they've actually read or digested it.
And in breaking news, AC rediscovers ethos 2400 years after Aristotle. Good job!
(Eternal September is eternal. And we'll never run out of sophomores, clearly.)
"Mr Smith, the lab has delivered the results of your test in record time. Their service levels are astonighingly high and the quality of their results is unimpeachable. You, sir, are HIV positive."
All positive sounding words, but Mr Smiths life just got flushed down the crapper.
I know some pessimists and I know some optimists. The pessimists are happy for the wild eyed optimists to remain so; the optimists are unhappy that the miserable pessimists aren't more optimistic. Who's right?
re: "The researchers sourced the words from books, news outlets, social media, websites, television and movie subtitles, and music lyrics. They even collected 100 billion words in tweets."
That may be true (for some value of "true") for the sources used, since there is a sales aspect to all of the above. Life can be a brutal slog, most people "self-medicate" with occasional (or more) doses of happy patter, and capitalist industry steps up to sell the "medicine" (or snake oil, given what passes for entertainment) via books, teevee, social media, movies, et cetera, i.e., the sources reviewed. (Plus there's the "happy people buy more stuff" angle, giving advert-supported media an incentive to pump out happy twaddle as an incentive to keep the advert dollars coming.) When the researchers cull data from bars, support groups, crisis lines, therapists' offices, and other places where people spill their true guts then maybe we'll have something. Having said that, if we didn't have a predisposition to optimism (gullibility?), our species would have taken a hard look at the cost-to-benefit ratio and thrown in the towel a long time ago. [cue: Eric Idle, "Bright Side of Life"]
Excellent point. I can't say I've even heard of any modern stories that can compare to the classic tragedies like Hamlet but then I suppose it does limit the ability to do sequels with the same cast.
I was wondering how people rated some of the more frequently used words like "a", "the", "or", "and", etc. as they would seem to be neutral on their own but in different contexts could provoke a different response, e.g. "love and affection" vs "pain and torture".
"I was wondering how people rated some of the more frequently used words like "a", "the", "or", "and", etc. as they would seem to be neutral on their own but in different contexts could provoke a different response, e.g. "love and affection" vs "pain and torture"."
Even less neutral words can mean either something positive or something negative, depending on context: Sick, for example - which some strange people use to convey that something is particularly good. ISTM that a key question therefore is one of how the words were rated - in context, or on their own?
I can't say I've even heard of any modern stories that can compare to the classic tragedies like Hamlet
How about Franz Josef I? ... Brother executed, son committed suicide, wife assassinated, nephew also assassinated, empire disintegrates in the bloodiest war ever seen ...
But, I'm sure Shakespeare would have written it better than what I do.
I can't say I've even heard of any modern stories that can compare to the classic tragedies like Hamlet
What a bizarre thing to say. Not terribly familiar with contemporary literature, then, are you?
but then I suppose it does limit the ability to do sequels with the same cast.
Yes, because there are no TV or film dramas which end with the deaths of major characters.
as they would seem to be neutral on their own but in different contexts could provoke a different response
Shockingly, people who do computational linguistics are already aware of the limitations of unigram models. In a dim sense, I mean - not with the piercing clarity available only to those who post in Reg forums.
It seems that what the boffins have confirmed is simply that those behaviors which conform to the majority use are "correct" and those behaviors which do not conform to the majority are "incorrect".
If trolls use fewer "happy" words, one could conclude that they're less happy than the majority average.
But what if the majority average is heavily skewed by insular, privileged people who are blissfully unaware of their First World status and how it affects their worldview? Might they find someone with a more nuanced and aware perspective as "negative"?
It's possible to be 'dark' and 'positive'. You can stil have a dark world view and still have hope.
Expect the worst, and be pleasantly surprised, expect the best and be disappointed.
Our culture is skewed into a polar world view Good/bad|evil, positive/negative, this is expressed in the language as well as law (if it's not illegal, it's legal). It's probably a lot of contributing factors and not just the result of christianitys inheritence from earlier dark/light confrontational cults.
You characterize our culture as "confrontational," I prefer "dualistic." Recall: "God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness." Not direct creation really but separation, with judgement on the good/bad property of light in the same breath. We must assume that darkness has been deemed bad by default. So yes, Judaism is founded on duality just as the first cell began by finding a way to separate the outer from the inner with that all-important discriminatory membrane. Heck, even our brains have two sides!
Lets get this straight. Here in Michigan there are two kinds of people. Those that live above the bridge in the upper part of Michigan called Yuppers (you pers). And those of us that live under the bridge in lower Michigan called Trolls. So this load mouthed, ignorant brain dead person should at least try to engage his brain before flapping his jaws, and show a little respect for his fellow Americans.
UP'ers -- for Upper Peninsula -- pronounced, as indicated above, "YOO-pers". The state of Michigan has two parts, the main "mitten" and the UP that is to the northwest and looks like an appendage of Wisconsin (which it is NOT, I hasten to add; stand down, esteemed Michigander commentards) separating Lakes Michigan and Superior. UP Michigan and mitten Michigan are separated by a bridge that I had cause to discuss with a colleague recently (can not remember why) but that conversation veered to the extremely tasty pierogies and other Russian/Slavic ethnic yummies in the UP.
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My friends and colleagues think me a very pessimistic person in that I always have a Plan "B"...and "C"...and....
When things go wrong I fix them with almost ghoulish delight. After nearly 50 years in IT development, and especially IT support, it has evolved as the only way to stay sane.
We are the Cassandras of the modern world. We are doomed to warn of the misfortunes ahead - we are ignored - and then we are the ones who have to suffer the pain of digging the optimists out of their self-made hole.
Wasn't it a clinical psychologist who said...
Yes, but this study was put together by social psychologists, an altogether different breed. I cannot imagine a shrink coming up with the following:
"We also show how our word evaluations can be used to construct physical-like instruments for both real-time and offline measurement of the emotional content of large-scale texts."
WTF? Does this mean they have a script that can filter data from both online and local sources? That's what, three or four lines of code?
Then it means liberals post/write more frequently than conservatives. Which may well be true but seems a little counterintuitive.
I recall [sorry no reference] a study suggesting the baffling 50/50 right/left split in most democracies over time is due to instinct (or genetic make-up if you will). Since the right generally complain and are disgusted more about /everything/ than the left, on balance, ceteris paribus, you'd expect the opposite of this study.
[flame away]
""liberals post/write more frequently than conservatives."
Conservatives are often the ones with the unbounded optimism that everything will continue as before and nothing can go wrong. Conservatism implies a need for certainty - and a need for certainty implies delusions about the nature of reality.
Absolutely false. Liberals are the utopian optimists who think nothing can ever go wrong with their plans to improve people other than themselves. We conservatives take quite a dim view of that because we've had to clean up so many of their utopian failures. Hitler for instance, even though you keep trying to fob him off on us. He had a utopian vision for the future of his people. And of course Mao with the Great Leap Forward. Then there were Lenin and Stalin. I could go on, but there's really no need.
Well that study was flawed wherever you found it. The numbers are more like 35 right/25 left/40 center. Where it gets skewed is that the 25% who are left want to get in everybody's face about their morality while the 35% just want to be left alone. The 40% are ambivalent and take no interest one way or the other.
"Where it gets skewed is that the 25% who are left want to get in everybody's face about their morality while the 35% just want to be left alone. The 40% are ambivalent and take no interest one way or the other."
The outer reaches of right and left are effectively the same totalitarian mindset. Most of the middle 80% will go along with whoever bribes them or twists their arms the most - the method is immaterial..
There is an xkcd for everything. And sometimes there are two...
As quite a few of the fellow commentards here pointed out in so many words already, the study has a small, but fatal flaw.. : Words are used in context , with inflection, changing their value in conveying meaning.
Which, as the above comments show, is pretty self-evident.
Now ordinarily this kind of...research would be hailed with a resounding and quite endearing categorisation of "trick-cycling" which strangely enough seems to be lacking in the article. I wonder if all the post-pub neckfilling preamble has incapacitated the editorial staff, or that they've simply fallen asleep at the desk.
Your comment has a small, but fatal, flaw: It has nothing to do with the goal or primary conclusions of the study in question.
Even from the abstract, it's clear they're talking about the unigram model. They identify a positivity bias in the use of individual words. They're not making claims about statements. Everyone doing linguistics research is aware that grammatical structure affects meaning.
Or in other words, from the actual paper, which is freely available from the PNAS site:
our major scientific finding is that when experienced in isolation and weighted properly according to use, words, which are the atoms of human language, present an emotional spectrum with a universal, self-similar positive bias
Now, it is certainly possible to raise issues with their methodology and conclusions. Unfortunately "duh, they don't know that words go together" is not a valid one.
But please feel free to repeat the misinterpretations already proudly displayed by your fellows. Better to be popular than right, eh?
The only thing I'm positive about is my level of nihilism. And that humane make absolutely fuck all sense to me. Yes, I've been extant on this foetid space-pimple for long enough to be 100% positive (or near enough) that I'm not Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens doesn't understand me, nor I them, ergo how can we be the same species…?
I am, in every sense of the word, except the literal, well and truly FUCKED.
Prob guarantees I'll never win COTW/QUOTW now…
Sadly, your lack of understanding of humanity, and humanity's lack of understanding of you does not indicate a species diversion;quite the opposite. H.Sapians understand far more about the migrating habits of the Arctic Turn than they understand about ..frankly anything as it applies to an individual.
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