I wonder if there's a confounding effect here. The authors basically have a list of N-grams that they have identified as being indicative of cognitive distortions and find that these N-grams have become much more prevalent in the last few decades. But the selection of these N-grams is based on how we, today, would express these cognitive distortions. It doesn't seem that the could rule out the rate of cognitive distortions remaining the same, but the language to express them changing.
To be fair, looking at their table of N-grams, a lot of them seem pretty timeless. For example: everyone, everybody, should, ought, must, worst, best.
But many of the N-grams strike me as being rather modern formulations. For example: a loser, a toxic, OK but, OK yet.
If a team of CBT therapists constructed such a list in 1900 instead of 2020, would we see the prevalence of cognitive distortions decrease as our language changed?
I think they try to control for this by choosing a null set of random N-grams, but the random N-grams were chosen from their entire corpus --- in other words by definition it's representative of the entire time span.
Edit: As an example of this, the authors include in their sample of words indicative of cognitive distortions "everyone" and "everybody." But 200 years ago these formulations were much less popular than "all the world," which is not included in the author's sample. If you just include the modern words, it's no surprise that cognitive distortions are increasing. But if you made the list in 1800 and only included the older formulation, you would conclude that cognitive distortions are decreasing.
I believe they tackle this exact bias. From the Sampling Effects section:
> Second, the choice of CDS n-grams could lead to a "recency bias” in our results, explaining their rise in prevalence in recent decades. We control for this effect with a null model that samples random n-grams more frequently from recent books, due to rapidly increasing publication volume since 1895, thereby inducing a bias toward more recent language. We observe increases of CDS n-gram prevalence well above levels predicted by this null model
> thereby inducing a bias toward more recent language. We observe increases of CDS n-gram prevalence well above levels predicted by this null model
I don't get why this would work? I get the null model predicting a bias X, and I guess they have a greater bias X + Y, but I don't see how that handles their choice of cognitive distortion signifiers being biased? I mean isn't it likely their choice of signifiers matches to Y?
they are claiming that their basket of distortion N-Grams became more common faster than other randomly sampled n-grams from recent works.
This seems like an interesting approach to controlling for the bias, but I'd expect the random sampling would bias lower than a specific sample as a random sampling of n-grams would pick up a lot of english grammar which hasn't changed in many years.
It's the Google N-grams dataset. It covers all the books that Google has scanned in their corpus, which, as I understand it, is virtually every book that's been published in the 20th century (at least for English).
I agree that this might just be measuring increasing informality in published works.
This could also be a bias in the google books dataset. As I recall, the older google books dataset relied heavily on library preservation. It's probable that library curation would filter books for utility, longevity, and educational purpose. These filters would certainly penalize informal books.
My first thought as I scanned the abstract was that since the '90s, the volume of novels with informal dialog has gone through the roof -- especially novels for teens and young adults.
the amount of trashy celebrity autobiographies/books written by self-help gurus/informal-style recipe books being published has almost certainly risen in recent years too
informal and by less educated people. obviously there will be big exceptions, but I would imagine the % of computer-indexed text (i.e. books and newspapers) from between 1895 and 1995 that wasn't written by someone with a degree is not very high. similar to the way you can get a distorted view of the Romans (or nearly any literate historical society) because nearly (if not) all of their literature was written by the educated upper classes
I think the authors acknowledge that. And I agree with you this definitely should be investigated further. Also I have not read ref 17 yet, but I don't know how well established the method of identifying cognitive dissonance through ngrams is.
are "OK but" and "OK yet" new formulations? "Okay" is an Americanism from the early mid 1800s that started to be used in its current form in the late 1800s. are the "but" and "yet" attachments genuinely new or recent?
"But they don’t really have any measure of entire societies or depression. The above note by Schmidt discusses why the Google books collection cannot be characterized as a measure of entire societies. There are also problems with the depression measurement. Here’s what it says in the PNAS article:
For example, the 3-gram “I am a” captures a labeling and mislabeling distortion, regardless of its context or the precise labeling involved (“lady,” “honorable person,” “loser,” etc.). These same n-grams were in earlier
research shown to be significantly more prevalent in the language of individuals with depression vs.
a random sample (17).
Note 17 points to this preprint, which states:
Here, we show that individuals with a self-reported diagnosis of depression on social media express higher levels of distorted thinking than a random sample.
How do they define “distorted thinking”?
[W]e define a clinical lexicon of 241 n-grams that a panel of clinical psychologists deemed to form a schema involved in the expression of a particular type of distorted thinking according to CBT theory and practice. For example, “I will never” would be implicated in the expression of a cognitive distortions such as Catastrophizing or Fortune-telling, whereas “I am a _” would be used to express a Labeling and Mislabeling distortion.
This is like a parody of clinical psychology, reminiscent of those sitcom moments when the busy suburban dad is persuaded to go to a shrink, and everything he says on the couch is interpreted as some sort of neurosis. Only this case, instead of everything being a coded statement about his mother, everything’s a coded statement about a cognitive distortion. “I am a statistician.” “There you go with those Labeling and Mislabeling distortions again!”"
Then the paper itself is an example of distorted thinking. Given the prevalence of such forms of mass-analysis, I would argue that the paper is at least ironically true.
Maybe irony with a dash of truth as well, depending on how many people reactively agree with / are angered by the [ obstensibly incorrect ] paper (thus becoming "distorted" themselves.)
My own bias as a person interested and well read in history as a science wants me to agree but there is a selection bias at work that the authors of this study do not address to my satisfaction: We are talking about PUBLISHED language.
On the one hand, published and distributed works are only a fraction of the written literary works of an era and therefore only represents a commercially viable subset. On the other hand, the commercial viability is determined by the demand in the market of readers which would suggest that their language analysis could be more sound than not.
I THINK I’m reading more and more abstracts that show similarities between our current societal climate and that of the late 20s/early 30s of the last century. It will be academically interesting to see what the continuation of the current inflation and energy crisis which disproportionally hits the lower two thirds of the western populace causes in the next 2 years. The road to a substantial outburst - be it revolutions as a form of inward-directed change or god beware war - is paved at least.
I think this section addresses that sort of bias (a limitation of the used data):
>The availability of large-scale historical records of published languages going back centuries may provide a unique opportunity for the quantitative investigation of important cultural and linguistic dynamics (“culturomics”) (21), while acknowledging limitations with respect to verifying hypotheses and testing the causal mechanisms that underlie any observations from these data.
I enjoyed that overall the article does not try to sell the idea that there is/was an actual change in the society, but rather showing how this analysis may be an indicator of that and inciting future work on the topic.
what would be a better subset then? if you take the set of all computer-indexed written text, you would end up simply measuring the rise of the capacity of the unwashed masses to air their thoughts in permanent, public, usually informal form.
Yeah, well much of accepted history from that time is up for debate - from who funded the Germans and Soviets and their ties to industry and banking in the US and Europe. The current energy and inflation crises are caused in parts by similar global forces pursuing agendas today. I don't think revolutions will be forms of inward-directed change, but more as a result of financing by global elites similar to how Lenin and Trotsky's revolutions were funded by wealthy financiers in the US and London. Kennedy's father also helped fund the Germany war machine.
As you pointed out - we find ourselves in a similar political climate but not because of the people who elected these governments but because of the globalists who still run them behind the scenes, just like they were doing prior, during and after WWII.
The English indicator drops from 1914 to 1960. WW1? Great depression? WW2? Nah, that doesn't depress us. Cold war, nuclear threat? Life's great! 1980, the advent of word processors, more personal, psychological literature, and a linguistic style closer to the present? Now we're depressed!
It's beyond me how you can publish findings which are based on correlations with correlations, and validations which took place 100 year later, when other explanations aren't even mentioned.
What do you mean? There are small effects for the depression and WW2. I would argue that the nuclear threat and the cold war really only started to have a significant impact on the overall psyche of societies after the 70/80s. The peace movements really only started in the early 80s (except for the opposition to the Vietnam war which is actually reflected in the record). The 50/60s were generally characterised by an broad optimism and believe in the future (look at all the things they thought we could do).
More generally you seem to dismiss the work largely because it does not match your preconceived notions of what should have been major effects. Maybe the question is to ask why they might not have. Or at least bring up evidence that they had a great impact on the language used.
I also wonder what the effect is of effectively a much richer/convenient overall population, and the ability to reach what is basically the top in the Maslows hierarchy of needs (self actualization) and how it maybe that many more people write about their mental states. The amount of coaches has boomed in the last decade!
From a US perspective, I think there are major differences between WWI/WWII and 1968/perhaps recent years.
In the WWs you had a society perhaps more structured and united for a common national and patriotic cause.
In 1968 (since it's mentioned) and perhaps in recent years you have a society that arguably is less structured and people having issues with society itself and the state of the country.
It also seems to me that it was during the 70s that the US started to feel that things and the country were going down.
I suppose there is a parallel in the UK, for instance. Things were hard during WWII but people came together and had a sense of purpose and of fighting for their homes.
But then factories close, you lose your job, inflation picks up, society changes... now you may perhaps really feel depressed.
Not really a fan of militarism, but WWII had a lot of people working alongside a lot of other people they wouldn't usually spend time with. And a desperate need to innovate new technology and new industrial and managerial processes. So there was unity in the face of a common threat.
Also, GI Bills allowed intelligent individuals to get an education without worrying about debt as well as discounted mortgages and business loans.
That need dissipated after the 60s and there was more emphasis on hedonism and competitive individual ambition. Then in the 80s competitive economic individualism started to dominate everything else.
The result was a classic race to the bottom - with a few extreme winners who are indulged and beatified, a productive but often hamstrung professional underclass, and a huge precariat of economic losers.
At the same time the media landscape started promoting division and tribalism for profit.
So now we have a dysfunctional culture which is unable to cope with challenges like Covid, gun violence, and climate catastrophe because it has been groomed to be more emotional than rational, and the tone has affected everyone from the top down.
> So now we have a dysfunctional culture which is unable to cope with
challenges like Covid, gun violence, and climate catastrophe because
it has been groomed to be more emotional than rational, and the tone
has affected everyone from the top down.
The arc of cultural history you describe seems spot on. But I don't
think splitting between "emotional" and "rational" is useful or even
the root of what you describe.
Emotion is a kind of reason too, only it yields affect. Much of what
we reason out "emotionally" is the really important stuff - who we
marry, whether to have kids, when to change jobs.
I'd rather say, if it's true, that the quality of emotive and
positivist thought has been equally corroded. I think if you truly
take on board the thrust of the Trilateral Commission's action on the
"Crisis of Democracy", the attack on emotional literacy has been even
more vicious, and vital to the their aims, than the so-called "dumbing
down of education".
Because “social sciences” aren’t science. These stories come up on HN and there’s always lots of smart left brain people trying to puzzle through this as if it’s not just based on reading tarot cards.
I had to think of my grand dad. As a (german) child he fled from war in his early childhood. Back in the days there was no psychological help for people like him. Going to a psychiatrist had the reputation of going to the madhouse and back in the 40's to 70's you really would not want to end up there.
He and his whole generation never talked about what happened in war. There were some exceptions in literature but the tenor in the general public was to 'get on' and leave it all behind. Now his past is coming back at him and he tries to open up about it.
What I'm trying to say is: he never grew up with an accepting society or internet forums to easily find like minded people in anonymity. Publishing on a widely accepted and discussed topic seems more obvious than publishing on topics that are considered taboo. After WW2, germans discussed and published about the guilt of their parents. There was little room for compassion for those who "started war", but there was no room at all for those who suffered from it.
Fascinating study. It would carry more currency with me if the ngrams used were learned through ML and corpus training rather than heuristics. It is assumed these ngrams are particularly useful markers today. The significance in their absence doesn’t seem to be part of the research. When there is such dramatically “off the chart” data such as this, you need to start looking under the hood at other factors. Studying individual authors would be a good start. Other factors may also include the editorial process. Publishers tend to have common nuances they like to conform to. Could the editorial process explain why some of these nuances are widespread? It’s also worth considering that technical language (computing, for example) made great leaps around this same time period and bled into common parlance. Social media, which is cited here only as a loose correlation, also altered the brevity of writing, which changed how we use and communicate language - but it’s a far stretch to call these subtle changes distortions, at least beyond letting Jack Dorsey fuck up our use of language. The authors argue that the meaning of these ngrams hasn’t changed, but their application sure has. Overall it feels like a great area to study, and as good science does, presents more questions than it does answers. There is much more to explore here though before we can conclude the entire world is depressed. I am not an expert in linguistics, but I do feel as though there is a modern element missing from this research.
> Fascinating study. It would carry more currency with me if the ngrams used were learned through ML and corpus training rather than heuristics.
I would have significantly less confidence. How would you learn such a set? You then would need a set of texts that are clearly labeled from people with cognitive dissonance and without. I don't think such a set exists. Also note that the n grams have been tested previously for individuals (ref 17 in the paper)
Your post points to another interesting line of research (and maybe that is what you meant), can we find correlations between the language used in previous periods of unrest, e.g. in Germany the period of WW2 and other periods.
> It’s also worth considering that technical language (computing, for example) made great leaps around this same time period and bled into common parlance.
The authors specifically mention this, but it should bias the results in the other direction, i.e. technical work has less prevalence of the ngrams according to the authors (I'm unsure if they tested this).
>. Overall it feels like a great area to study, and as good science does, presents more questions than it does answers. There is much more to explore here though before we can conclude the entire world is depressed.
Note that the authors are very cautious about making any such claims and in fact acknowledge the question if applying these markers to societies is valid
> I am not an expert in linguistics, but I do feel as though there is a modern element missing from this research.
I'm not sure I understand. To me it seems like quite solid research (although I admit I don't know much about CDS markers...) without using some hype methods like ML just for the sake of it.
> Studying individual authors would be a good start.
Or even taking a random sample of the ngrams to manually verify their usage hasn't changed over time, plus a random sample of texts to check that depressive sentiments weren't previously expressed in different language.
The methodology is interesting, though I'd simply call it "thematic
analysis". Psycholinguistics is much more complex than trigram
frequency though, as simple spam filtering proves. I suppose the
schtick here is "Big Data", with a corpus that earlier researchers
could never approach "by hand".
I didn't find much new here at the conceptual level. This is what
"Zeitgeist" means, and many epochs have been characterised as joyous
or depressive.
However the framing of the study is important for me, because I
broadly agree with the hypothesis that we are in a depressive epoch.
In fact we are in an interregnum, which themselves go through phases
in the gap between "a world that is dead and one still waiting to be
born".
Why might the psyche of the Anglosphere be battered more than other
groups or nations? Sure, we've had industrial revolution, slavery, two
world wars, decades of proxy wars, environmental and financial
disasters... but is our lot any worse than the long suffering people of
Russia, China or Africa who carry traumatic histories?
I would argue that what ails "the West" is a loss of sense of positive
future. That is actually a symptom of clinical depression too. The
Fukuyaman conceit of the "end of history" is actually a dark and
troubling stuckness. For me the prevalence of words like "inevitable",
"ubiquitous" and "inescapable", especially around technology, are
markers of a profound loss of creative vision and optimism.
> I would argue that what ails "the West" is a loss of sense of positive future. That is actually a symptom of clinical depression too. The Fukuyaman conceit of the "end of history" is actually a dark and troubling stuckness. For me the prevalence of words like "inevitable", "ubiquitous" and "inescapable", especially around technology, are markers of a profound loss of creative vision and optimism.
Agree. In addition to creative vision and optimism, I would add a sense of agency has almost completely vanished from the Anglosphere starting with Gen X. The average person (and now a disturbing portion of those with power) believes that there is no way they can influence the trajectory of their life.
This is not good. That's where desperate, angry people come from.
> no way they can influence the trajectory of their life. This is not
> good. That's where desperate, angry people come from.
Indeed. It's also the antithesis of what I understand to be the
"American Dream", perhaps synonymous with "freedom" in our time. The
kind of thing people will fight wars to hold on to. Really not good.
So in my opinion worth courageously fighting for *now" rather than
waiting for things to get that bad again.
Love learning about words and ideas like "interregnum". It's uncomfortable to think of a global societal interregnum -- at what point we may be in it, where it will end up, and if things will be "better" on the other side.
It's a good concept isn't it. I prefer it to talking about a "crisis"
of this or that - because the idea that a society or humankind might
"Just not know what's going on any more" is less loaded than a
"crisis" which implies some correct way of being that we deviated
from. But beware. There's a half-dozen varying accounts of what it
really means and when our journey into the wilderness started. By
Nietzsche's account it was the 1900s.
Yes, silly me. He was talking about the times he saw around him (late
1800s) rather than prophesising. In Beyond Good and Evil he poses the
open question "what sacred games shall we have to invent?". It was
Freud and Jung who were possessed with visions of awful wars to fill
the vacuum.
It has become much more socially acceptable to communicate ones emotions in the last few decades. This, added to the fact that female authors have tended to communicate differently (and I see no attempt to control for that in my admittedly quick scan of the write-up) makes me think that they may just be detecting a cultural trend in favour of honest emotional self-expression.
> Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways.
I am convinced for many reasons that social media is a major player in many mental health issues, but I wouldn't pin 100% of the blame there. For a start, the effect predates mainstream social media. But more importantly, the financial and political rewards for making people think negatively have never been higher. I think once the corporate/government/activist influencers caught onto the “make them feel bad, then offer them an alternative” trick, we were destined to see the hockey stick even if Twitter had never happened.
Sentences that apparently mark cognitive distortion:
"The quality of our product is not acceptable yet.",
"I won't go to this meeting, because I feel nauseous.",
"Children should go to school."
"whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways."
I wonder how they ensure that the standards they set for accuracy and the "right" amount of negativity don't have any bias or inaccuracy. For example, someone's language patterns may match the N-grams because they are being consistent with the language patterns they were taught or exposed to in society, but their actual thinking could be much more nuanced.
"Everything is political, if you aren't helping us then you are a part of the problem!"
Hostile advertisement messages such as this makes it really hard to stay sane. Politicians and companies seems so eager pushing people to the brink of insanity, and technology made them much more efficient at that than ever before.
> Here, we leverage the connection between depression and language to investigate whether societies as a whole, similar to individuals with depression, can undergo changes in their collective language that are associated with cognitive distortions.
...
> We caution that we make no causal claims with respect to the relationship between lexical markers, cognitive distortions, and internalizing disorders, and the above comments therefore constitute speculations that we hope may inspire follow-up research.
Hmm, sure seems like exactly what they are trying to imply is that whole societies can be diagnosed with depression by lexical analysis. Meanwhile, I'm not even sure what it means to say that a society has depression. Feels like there is indeed follow-up research to do on this, though I'd have liked if it were done first.
> Meanwhile, I'm not even sure what it means to say that a society has
depression.
This is a key question. I'll take a punt: It's not that a societal
depression is the sum total of individuals feeling glum. To say
"society is in depression" is more like economic depression, rather
than "everyone in society is depressed" (though that might be a
consequence).
In a depressed society things stop functioning. Like institutions,
health, education, law...
In an economic depression it's a "chemical imbalance" of money not
circulating.
In a societal depression it's a breakdown of ideas circulating (and
that includes "ideologies" and "emotional ideas" like generosity, and
diversity.
There are many enemies of intellectual life that corrode innovation,
hope, vision and the life-blood a civilisation needs to flourish (as
opposed to soulless technocratic subsistence). The Greeks called that
force Thanatos. I do believe its ascendency is connected to technology
and our inability to master it. Valery Legasov, like myself, was a
stanch opponent of the folly of "technological determinism" and said
that "people must take control of technology, not the other about
about, if civilisation is to survive" [1].
But none of that is established in the literature they're drawing from when they say that certain n-grams are associated with cognitive distortions related to depression. When they say 'cognitive distortion', they're very specifically talking about depression in the psychological sense, not the economic sense, or the cultural sense. That's why they'd have to establish that whole societies functioned like individuals — not in a poetic sense, but in a literal sense. Very hard to do that, and nobody has to my knowledge. This is the kind of thing you could say in an opinion piece, but not a research paper.
> That's why they'd have to establish that whole societies functioned
like individuals — not in a poetic sense, but in a literal
sense. Very hard to do that, and nobody has to my knowledge.
Indeed. I'm (hopefully) clearly extending the interpretation well
beyond the scope of that paper, which I took on face value to be
unsatisfactory. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "establish" but
the analog of "society of mind" (not just Minsky's take) as emergent
of faculties at both neurological and human organisational levels is
old and appears in many forms throughout philosophy and political
theory. "Poetry" would be the highest complement, but alas I am too
clumsy with words for that.
It's possible that a majority of people were always depressed due to the circumstances of their life, but now they all have access to ~free computers and publishing, something that has changed drastically for the first time ever in "recent decades".
Difficult to disentangle the fact that the n-grams talking about these topics have become highly profitable as an industry unto itself. Not just click bait and doom scrolling of recent years but the books, TV shows, and especially medications that talk about and claim to address the ill effects of modern life. Prozac Nation was published in 1992. Oprah was launching in 1986. People have been getting paid and made focusing on these topics in ways it’s difficult to find a historical precedent. And let’s not forget that depression as a medical condition was marketed by a Pharma company with the first SSRI cleared by the FDA in 1987.
Given working class wages have been slowly declining in real value since the late 1960s, it's understandable that the stress that causes would lead to the effects identified.
We're on the downward slope of a one time pulse in stupendously cheap and easy to reach fossil fuels. We're also running out of easy to reach groundwater resources.
If the grown ups among us don't take over and start steering things in the right direction, we're headed towards civilizational collapse.
Reality is depressing, and apparently this study confirms it showing up in our language.
I didn't read the full article but ctrl + f indicates they didn't comment on neither the editing nor publishing process
do the same analysis for online fanfiction and see if that flows the same, publishers have a heavy hand in what they want to publish a lot of the time. taking a sample from the online community should be less biased
you might even be able to visualize what different publishers are biased for if they collected that information, but alas, this is more information I don't see in the articles figures
Rather than society being more depressed etc, society is more willing to directly address depression. This is a side effect of basic material needs being solved, for a wide swath of the book writing world anyway. We're just looking for the next big jump in standard of living and all the low hanging fruit is inside us.
It looks like the steep upward curve starts about when the Internet and social media became broadly available. That could be involved, though it could also be something less obvious like changes to use of language or acceptability of bearing emotions in public.
This is a fascinating premise, both for it's core finding and - even if that is debunked or unoriginal - another demonstration of the potential revelations of large scale analysis of digitized versions of both historical records and human activity generally.
YMMV, but before you gave me the link [1] the original link [2]
yielded only this:
Please turn JavaScript on and reload the page. Checking your browser
before accessing www.pnas.org. Please enable Cookies and reload the
page. This process is automatic. Your browser will redirect to your
requested content shortly. Please allow up to 5 seconds…
Redirecting… DDoS protection by Cloudflare Ray ID: 728----------
Despite not being fully Emacs compliant the link you gave me worked in
w3m just fine. Thanks! :)
Hey! I don't know if you remember, but I found out what that red gravel on playgrounds was about: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kieselrot (only in German, but if you heard about the topic you are probably from here too).
(I couldn't reply in the old thread anymore ... so I hijack this comment)
Yes, I remember that! My childhood football club had their pitch in Kieselrot. And now that I read the article it is coming back. The pitch was closed for several months, but we weren't told why....
The good news is that some of this is publication bias, not a devolution of public mental health. Before about 1960, the lower classes had almost no chance of getting their words into the written record. Did 7th-century serfs see themselves as oppressed and miserable, or did they love their masters? We don't know; we have no record of what they actually thought.
Therefore, we aren't necessarily in uncharted territory when it comes to lousy public mental health; it's possible that we were worse off in the 1930s and '40s and wouldn't know it by the data, because the most put-upon and miserable people weren't writing at all.
This doesn't explain the uptick since 1980. Moreover, since then, publishing (at least, traditional publishing) has reversed the changes of the midcentury and returned to being elite and exclusionary (albeit, in a different way) and yet we haven't seen this sort of censorship effect (and, to be honest, I'm glad we haven't, simply because I'm no fan of censorship). This establishes with high confidence that public mental health has worsened at least in the past 40 years (which, let's be honest, we didn't need a study to prove) and that--perhaps unusually, by historical standards--the middle and upper-middle classes are as miserable as everyone else, a fact that to me makes a strong argument for the Marxist framework in which only two social classes--the owning bourgeoisie, and the working proletariat--actually matter (since Marx did not deny a middle class's existence; he merely chose not to focus on it, believing--correctly, present conditions suggest--it to be an innately unstable status).
Misery isn't new. Oppression isn't new. War and poverty certainly aren't new. What is happening on an unprecedented scale is the re-proletarianization of people (the West's former middle class, no longer needed in such number due to the end of the Cold War) who thought themselves to be part of the bourgeoisie--who believed their educational credentials and professional networks (paper armor, it turns out) were "as good as" actually having capital. Wrong, it turns out. Such people can be making $200k/year one day and forced to do Scrum the next; and we're all one medical emergency away from ruin. The collapse of a middle class isn't nearly as bad a calamity as what nature and history have thrown at the poor, but it is the kind of disaster one hears about.
Because they're not. One bad professional turn, health problem, or lawsuit and they are thrown out like garbage.
They're detested by both sides. The regular poor proletarians see them as kapos (and, quite often, it's the case) who have sold them down the river in order to get themselves temporarily pampered. The upper class, of course, has no respect for them. They've rejected their own tribe (the proletariat, the 99.9%) in the hopes of ascending into a new tribe that will almost certainly never actually accept them.
To be fair, looking at their table of N-grams, a lot of them seem pretty timeless. For example: everyone, everybody, should, ought, must, worst, best.
But many of the N-grams strike me as being rather modern formulations. For example: a loser, a toxic, OK but, OK yet.
If a team of CBT therapists constructed such a list in 1900 instead of 2020, would we see the prevalence of cognitive distortions decrease as our language changed?
I think they try to control for this by choosing a null set of random N-grams, but the random N-grams were chosen from their entire corpus --- in other words by definition it's representative of the entire time span.
Edit: As an example of this, the authors include in their sample of words indicative of cognitive distortions "everyone" and "everybody." But 200 years ago these formulations were much less popular than "all the world," which is not included in the author's sample. If you just include the modern words, it's no surprise that cognitive distortions are increasing. But if you made the list in 1800 and only included the older formulation, you would conclude that cognitive distortions are decreasing.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=everybody%2Cal...