Comparative Illusion

77 points by wizzzzzy 4 years ago | 23 comments

LanceH 4 years ago |

Every new major patch of Path of Exile, someone runs the patch notes through a markov chain generator and comes up with new notes. If you're not familiar with the game they may not make sense. If you are familiar with the game, they bounce between things which almost make sense like in the linked article and things which could actually be in the patch notes.

"Blood chieftains can now hurl blood apes at you." -- I think this was highly requested after the fake notes came out.

link to a previous set of patch notes: https://www.facebook.com/pathofexile/photos/we-ran-the-patch...

josephcsible 4 years ago |

I don't understand how "In Michigan and Minnesota, more people found Mr Bush's ads negative than they did Mr Kerry's." is an example of this. To me, that unambiguously parses like this:

   peopleInMichiganAndMinnesota.filter(foundMrBushsAdsNegative).length() > peopleInMichiganAndMinnesota.filter(foundMrKerrysAdsNegative).length()

upwardbound 4 years ago | |

Good question. I followed the citation in wikipedia and it points to this article: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1997 In the comment thread there, people are discussing the question you raise.

Essentially, it's the inclusion of the word "they" which makes the sentence incorrect. If the word "they" was removed it would be valid and would mean what you read it as.

wizzzzzy 4 years ago | |

'More people' needs to be compared to a differenet group but the use of 'they' means the 'more people' are being compared to themselves.

woliveirajr 4 years ago | |

And, for me (non-native and barely-speaker), comments like yours raise the real point: it seems that the "problem" is kind of nitpicking the words of the sentence. People just listen-and-correct (or read-and-correct) considering that there was good faith from the author, not that it was created to be non-parseable.

eru 4 years ago |

The linked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_embedding is also interesting. German is famous for its centre embeddings of Nebensätzen, where you end your whole sentence with a pile of verbs.

motohagiography 4 years ago |

These remind me of other writing techniques (without names) I use to create surprise, leverage presumptions, structure jokes, and even inject new ideas. If you think of someones train of thought like the staves or horizontal lines in musicial notation, but each line is a layer of attention or abstraction, notes outside those lines aren't obvious, but they have a resonance or dissonance with the base ideas between them, and then a sentence or a paragraph can play over them, creating and resolving tension and leading to the conclusion you had hoped to express. A comparative illusion in this view would be something you would use as a transition, for a change of conecptual key, or to bend the ends of an idea into an loop, inescapable without extra cognitive load, and the mind prefers to accept what it is being presented with instead of epstein didn't kill himself. Comparative illusions can have a very hypnotic and distracting effect, and they are an effective tool of persuasion.

rwoerz 4 years ago |

"Nachts ist kälter als draußen." Not sure if this really works in English: "At night is colder than outdoors."

albert_e 4 years ago | |

I wonder if there is an element of implied location (wherever the speaker is usually present physically "at night" -- presumably at home) and time (usually day time for "outdoors") that might make the sentence meaningful and good enough for every day communication?

deltaonefour 4 years ago | |

It could work.

"The temperature at night is much much more colder then the temperature outside.

petercooper 4 years ago |

I didn't know the term at the time but I experienced something like this from Karl Pilkington years ago. He was talking about how two examples of a newly discovered species were found at the same time and: "They were discovered the same distance apart from each other."

BoardsOfCanada 4 years ago |

I don't see how "More people have been to Russia than I have" can initially seem acceptable. I assume it's being parsed as something that makes sense, but what is that? "Many people have been to Russia, but I haven't" or what?

IIAOPSW 4 years ago | |

"Number of people who have been to Russia" is an integer. "I have been to Russia" is a boolean. Is 5 > True? Depends on what language you work in. Is it useful to overload "greater than" to apply to numerical and booleans like this? Sure. It is not I alone who has been to Russia. There's a great multitude of people who have been to Russia and could tell you more than I could. More people have been to Russia than I have.

gryn 4 years ago | |

you can parse it as 'I have been to Russia' => integer representing the number of times you've been to Russia.

with the original boolean meaning being a special case, and this being a context-dependent generalization to be inferred by the listener.

---

this kind of sentence would kinda make sense (in the sense of being informative to the reader and not just a tautological statement) if you, for example are a researcher who have access to a native island where most people are forbidden from entering and have been there multiple times since you were given an exemption from the rule.

here is a list of islands you probably wont have access to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples

tux3 4 years ago | |

My initial parsing is "than I have" -> number of times I've been to russia, so this'd be comparing the number of people who went to Russia with how many times I did.

Nonsensical, but that's my initial intuitive parse

galaxyLogic 4 years ago |

Similarly in computer programming some code just seems like it should work, but it does not compute

deltaonefour 4 years ago | |

However if you think about it, a lot of this type of code has errors and yet still ends up not being able to run at all.

dalmo3 4 years ago | | |

What if the program runs perfectly but the errors don't?

labster 4 years ago |

More people have been to Russia than I’ve.

marginalia_nu 4 years ago | |

My brain extracts the meaning

  Other people have been to Russia than I.

rixed 4 years ago | | |

Try again with -Wall

/usr/include/english/4.6/bits/stl_algo.h:166:4: error: no match for ‘operator==’ in ‘__first.__gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator::operator* [with _Iterator = std::vector*, _Container = std::vector >, __gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator::reference = std::vector&]() == __val’ /usr/include/english/4.6/bits/stl_algo.h:166:4: note: candidates are: /usr/include/english/4.6/bits/stl_pair.h:201:5: note: template bool std::operator==(const std::pair&, const std::pair&) /usr/include/english/4.6/bits/stl_iterator.h:285:5: note: template bool std::operator==(const std::reverse_iterator&, const std::reverse_iterator&) /usr/include/english/4.6/bits/stl_iterator.h:335:5: note: template bool std::operator==(const std::reverse_iterator&, const std::reverse_iterator&) /usr/include/english/4.6/bits/allocator.h:122:5: note: template bool std::operator==(const std::allocator&, const std::allocator&) /usr/include/english/4.6/bits/allocator.h:127:5: note: template bool std::operator==(const std::allocator&, const std::allocator&) /usr/include/english/4.6/bits/stl_vector.h:1273:5: note: template bool std::operator==(const std::vector&, const std::vector&) /usr/include/english/4.6/ext/new_allocator.h:123:5: note: template bool __gnu_cxx::operator==(const __gnu_cxx::new_allocator&, const __gnu_cxx::new_allocator&) /usr/include/english/4.6/bits/stl_iterator.h:805:5: note: template bool __gnu_cxx::operator==(const __gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator&, const __gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator&) /usr/include/english/4.6/bits/stl_iterator.h:799:5: note: template bool __gnu_cxx::operator==(const __gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator&, const __gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator&) /usr/include/english/4.6/bits/stl_algo.h:170:4: error: no match for ‘operator==’ in ‘__first.__gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator::operator* [with _Iterator = std::vector*, _Container = std::vector >, __gnu_cxx::__normal_iterator::reference = std::vector&]() == __val’ /usr/include/english/4.6/bits/stl_algo.h:170:4: note: candidates are: /usr/include/english/4.6/bits/stl_pair.h:201:5: note: template bool std::operator==(const std::pair&, const std::pair&) /