A Person Paper on Purity in Language, by William Satire (alias Douglas R. Hofstadter)

patrissimo writes:

Hofstadter's classic essay on gender bias in language

I know many of you have seen this before, but for those that haven't, just because its so striking:

A Person Paper on Purity in Language, by William Satire (alias Douglas R. Hofstadter)

Many years ago, this single-handedly convinced me that our language is biased towards male supremacy in an unpleasant way which subtly affects our thoughts. While I'm generally pretty skeptical that culture, rather than genes, is the source of gender discrimination, this sort of thing demonstrates how the two can reinforce each other. A genuine genetic power imbalance (ie women are wired to defer to men more than vice versa) leads to a set of assumptions embodied in language which strengthens and reinforces that power imbalance. Which is bad.

At least, that's how I see it.

Yeah, what he said. Saves me from writing it.


behind the cut is my translation key
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human randomness game

You know those Memory Championships?

I'd like to make a Randomness Championship, where people produce a long string of numbers/letters. People are really bad at producing random things, and tend to reuse the same kinds of patterns. Maybe it's because we can't behave as if we were memoryless.

Your performance would be measured by how much can be compressed. If your string can be compressed to less than 5% of the original size, then you've done a bad job. If you achieve higher than 90% incompressibility, that's probably better than most people.

The problem is that people could easily memorize a long random string, and so this would become really just another memorization test... unless you demand that they produce really, really long strings. Can you think of any other way to prevent this sort of cheating, besides brain-scans that would accuse any long-term memory retrieval?

I know I've already played a very simple binary guessing game, where the computer was "truly random" while learning my patterns. Obviously a game you can't expect to win.