

Human Language Is Biased Towards Happiness, Say Computational Linguists - sytelus
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/data-mining-reveals-how-human-language-is-biased-towards-happiness-773df682c4a7

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devindotcom
Doesn't this only suggest that most people are biased towards happy "personal
interpretations" of words? That's a conclusion about people, not "human
language," whatever that is.

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lukasb
there's a huge Sapir-Whorf bias in a lot of philosophy, critical theory and
social science which I totally don't get.

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Kronopath
Interesting how the thesis of the article is the _exact opposite_ of the
thesis of this one, which was posted to HN a few days ago:

[http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/humans-are-wired-for-
nega...](http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/humans-are-wired-for-negativity-
for-good-or-ill/)

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gregwebs
That article talks about vocabulary. One would naturally assume that
vocabulary correlates with frequency of usage, but that may not be the case.

This article talks about frequency of usage. Perhaps someone can dig deeper
and figure out where they get their frequency of usage data from?

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trendoid
If they are scanning novels and lyrics in various languages, there is also an
interpretation that musicians and writers have in general written more
positive words in their work. This can be part of art instead of something
inherit to language.

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kylebgorman
Peter Dodds, the leader of the team in question, isn't a computational
linguist. I just read his CV and he has zero publications in CL journals or
proceedings, and his Ph.D. is in mathematics.

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davidtotoole
Computational Linguists are Biased Toward Computers, Say Happy Humans

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lettergram
If you google search positive term dictionaries vs negative term dictionaries
you'll find the negative term dictionary is 5x - 10x larger.

Point being, we have many more terms to describe negative events. Likely, this
means we have a large biased towards negativity.

As Kronopath mentioned, there is definitely research out there describing the
exact opposite of this article.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
I don't think you can backsolve for Sapir-Whorf.

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gojomo
So very interesting!

I'm sure they got sarcasm right, and all the cases where humans damn with
faint praise.

A gold star for everyone involved!

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kazinator
Four days ago we saw the submission "Humans are wired for negativity":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8275688](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8275688)

But language is biased toward happiness but its users are wired for
negativity.

What does that mean? We are negative, but through language, are trying to kid
ourselves otherwise?

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tedks
This submission is about counting words on Google Books and other online
sources.

The other one reviews a few decades of research in psychology.

I would say that books that are happier sell more, so there are more of them
written.

