[Noisebridge-discuss] [HAIRSPLITTING] Re: 5 geek fallacies

[Kelly]

google-dowsing?

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 19:45, Michael Shiloh
<michaelshiloh1010 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a word for the practice of using Google to acquire a feeling
> for relative popularity?
>
> Professor Feinschmeker
>
> Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson wrote:
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> Hash: SHA1
>>
>> On Feb 26, 2010, at 3:39 PM, Jesse Zbikowski wrote:
>>> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 11:56 PM, Sai Emrys <noisebridge at saizai.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>> Unlike your search, Seth's is not attempting to use popularity to
>>>> determine historical facts, but to determine the *popularity* of a
>>>> collocation.
>>> Well, the idea was to determine the *correctness* of the collocation,
>>> not how many times it's been repeated on the Internet. Trial By Google
>>> represents a familiar kind of confirmation bias: you form a
>>> hypothesis, and test it in a way that can only turn up supporting
>>> evidence. People may well employ this collocation, but that does not
>>> preclude the possibility that there is a different and preferred
>>> construction which doesn't reveal itself in such a search.
>>>
>>> All kidding aside, there are a number of forums (mainly geared toward
>>> non-native English speakers) which can offer much more satisfying
>>> analyses of grammatical questions, for the truly curious. However I
>>> suppose meta-grammatical discussions along the lines of "does grammar
>>> have a logical and prescriptive component, or does it merely describe
>>> how people use language" are more or less par for this list.
>>
>> Grammatical analysis and descriptive linguistics are different though:
>> certainly, one could seek out an appropriate language geeks forum, and
>> sit down for erudite analysis of what the current models for
>> describing English grammar or word usage make of a given phrase; but
>> this ends up being a comparatively prescriptive approach relying on
>> the preciseness of past analyses.
>>
>> What Seth was doing is something I've often seen linguistics
>> researcher do (and even cite in research reports) - namely use Google
>> to acquire a feeling for relative popularity of different
>> collocations. It's a cheap and low labour approach to what otherwise
>> means either digging through a couple of thousand newspapers (or other
>> textual corpus source) by hand, or - preferred to that - using an
>> already established corpus; which tend to come with licenses that make
>> them less than accessible for casual research.
>>
>> Sure, it has confirmation bias. But on the other hand, is [Noisebridge-
>> discuss] really a venue you expect peer-review grade research from?
>>
>>
>> Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson, Dr.rer.nat
>> Postdoctoral researcher
>> mik at math.stanford.edu
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
>> Version: GnuPG v2.0.10 (Darwin)
>>
>> iEYEARECAAYFAkuIk1MACgkQtUmpDMB8zM2w7QCcDUStDbYAg0Ft9auMT+Hm4ncB
>> ACoAn2gUFhhrsHa8fcV2DGyWtr/MFJfy
>> =UlpF
>> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>> _______________________________________________
>> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
>> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
>> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>>
>
> --
> Sent from my ASR-33
> _______________________________________________
> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>