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Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/abebe-on-language/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19530

ktschwarz reminds me that the NY Times has rebooted On Language:

Written memorably by William Safire for most of its run, the original column was a mainstay of the magazine for 32 years until 2011. Now that social media, online communities and contemporary political discourse are transforming language profoundly — and these new grammars and vocabularies are flowing into large language models that, slowly but surely, are becoming a dominant force — we think it’s high time to bring the column back. The primary writer will be Nitsuh Abebe. His first column published earlier this week, on the word “lethality.” That follows a string of great columns Nitsuh has written in recent months about the em-dash, the neologism “cope,” the suffix “-maxxing” and the reluctance people have to use periods in texts.

I had actually planned to write about it last week, but that “lethality” essay (archived) annoyed me by being so focused on the news of the day. The new one (archived), on “agentic,” is more to my taste, paying greater attention to word history:

There are various reports and they all seem to agree: The tech world is currently awash in the concept of agency. It is, more specifically, extremely into the word “agentic,” which peppers the language of the tech-associated, the tech-adjacent, the tech-adjacent-adjacent.

That’s “agentic” as in, you know, having agency — possessing the capacity “to influence and control outcomes through assertive individual action,” as the Oxford English Dictionary has it. The word holds a lot of meaning in computing, but Silicon Valley aspirants seem just as eager to apply it to themselves. They talk about being agentic people; sometimes they dress up the idea in a little rhetorical suit and talk about the Highly Agentic Individual. They are describing the kind of person who simply acts, assertively, to shape the world, rather than seeking approval or meekly following the herd. Candidates for tech jobs get asked if they’re agentic (good) or mimetic (yuck). On X, people debate whether the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, is in fact “the most agentic person alive.” One poster laments the way a cold can ruin your workday: “You won’t make any deals, you won’t be an agentic person. You’re milquetoast.” Another just needs an adequately agentic aide to help schedule medical appointments.

This sense of agency is hundreds of years old: That O.E.D. entry — II.4, “Ability or capacity to exert power” — features citations from the year 1606 onward, concerning things like “the moral Agency of the Supreme Being” versus that of humanity, or the state’s role in preserving the “personal free agency” of its citizens. But you could be forgiven for thinking it feels new, given how much our understanding of it has been shaped by recent thinking in psychology. In that field, agency is the ability to act independently and, by doing so, to feel control over your own direction — steering your fate instead of watching helplessly as life happens to you. (Children, for instance, are said to gradually develop more “agency and autonomy” as they grow.) Readers of things like feminist criticism will have watched a related usage bubble up from academic thought (1988: Unlike depictions of “women as victims of forces beyond their control,” Emma stands as “Austen’s most agentic heroine”) and eventually cross into everyday speech. […]

Most Americans remain more connected with a different meaning of “agent.” We’re used to the agent as representative — someone who acts on behalf of. Talent agents negotiate deals for actors, writers, models. Travel agents book vacation packages for tour groups. Customer-service agents appear, if you’re lucky, after a minute or two of wearily declaiming the word “AGENT” into a speech-recognition phone system.

The word’s etymology contains both strains: the agent as actor, yes, but also as advocate, instrument, emissary. That double meaning is incredibly handy for the tech industry. It can sound as though agentic A.I. models are meant to assist us — even when the people using the word are boasting that their models are just fine acting without us.

I had actually been wondering what all those people meant by “agentic,” so I’m glad to have it explained, and of course I’m glad the NYT has revived the column.

https://languagehat.com/abebe-on-language/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19530

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/how-citations-ruined-science/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19528

David Oks’s essay on citations is not central to my interests, but I know there are lots of Hatters who do science and will probably have things to say; I myself found it extremely enlightening. I’ll quote the start and let you click through for the rest:

Here are a few headlines from the world of science. […] So scientists are submitting AI-generated papers; reviewers are using AI to assess them; obviously some amount of low-quality AI-generated content will end up getting approved and published. Well-regarded journals have been caught publishing papers with classic ChatGPT-isms like “here is a possible introduction for your topic” or “as of my last knowledge update.” But that’s not all. Many of those AI-generated papers are being cited by articles in other peer-reviewed journals: and many of those articles, unsurprisingly, appear to be AI-generated themselves.

It’s pretty well-known now that science is “drowning in AI slop.” In that regard, it’s not alone: AI slop is steadily infiltrating every school and workplace in the country. But there’s something about all of this that puzzles me.

I get why students, for example, would want to avoid doing homework. But I don’t really understand why scientists would want to avoid doing science. Or, rather, why they’re so eager to use AI to produce a huge number of shoddy papers. No one forced them to become scientists. I imagine that most people who work as scientists chose to do so out of something like love for the subject. So why are scientists using AI to produce and submit so much garbage?

I don’t think that the answer actually has much to do with AI. It has to do, instead, with the incentives that govern scientific institutions. You could boil it down to one word: citations.

Over the last few decades, science has undergone a “citation revolution.” Scientific life used to be structured by personal reputation and mutual acquaintance; now it is defined by quantitative assessments derived from citations.

And this reward system has warped scientific life in dramatic ways. It has resulted in the obvious and widespread gaming of citation metrics; but, more insidiously, it has pushed scientists toward risk-averse, incremental, and above all unambitious research. The logic of institutional science has become increasingly divorced from actual knowledge and discovery. In a system governed by these perverse incentives, the inevitable endpoint is simply AI-generated slop at scale. […]

But we should start, first of all, with a moment very much like our own, the origins of the citation revolution: the “information crisis” of the 1960s.

He talks about the idea of precedent, and says:

In the 1870s, a salesman of legal books named Frank Shepard realized that this represented a good business opportunity. Lawyers always needed to trace the subsequent history of a ruling. So Shepard started producing books with gummed strips of paper, listing every subsequent case that cited a given decision. With Shepard’s books—called Shepard’s Citations—you could quickly learn whether a given case was still good law. Shepard’s innovation was tremendously successful. It did so well, in fact, that his name became a verb: “to Shepardize” meant to consult Shepard’s Citations to check on the status of a precedent.

In 1953, long after Shepard had died, a retired vice president of Shepard’s Citations named William C. Adair, living at his ranch in Colorado Springs, was reading a newspaper article about scientific documentation. Science, the article said, was “swamped in a sea of literature,” and a group of researchers at Johns Hopkins wanted to see how machine methods could fix that.

Adair’s curiosity was piqued. The answer seemed obvious. Why not just apply citation indexing to science?

There’s lots more, and I knew nothing about any of it.

https://languagehat.com/how-citations-ruined-science/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19528

Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/how-roll-rolls/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19525

I’ve been saying things like “that’s how I roll” for quite a while now, and it occurred to me to wonder about the history of the phrase. As it happens, there’s a 2013 Stack Exchange post about it; most of the suggested answers are guesswork and contradictory, but there’s one that cites the OED:

The OED says it’s US slang originally in the language of rap and hip-hop. It’s sense VII.36.f. (and sense VII.36.e. is “Let’s roll”), under sense VII:

To move or convey on wheels or rollers, and related senses.

This is their first quotation of the phrase:

1991 ‘Hammer’ & F. Pilate (song title), This is the way we roll.

So I checked the OED, which does indeed have it as sense VII.36.f.:

intransitive. U.S. slang (originally in the language of rap and hip-hop). To act, behave (in a certain way). Frequently in that’s how (also the way) I (we, etc.) roll.

But it’s not clear to me that they’re deriving it directly from the sense “To move or convey on wheels or rollers,” and when I checked Green’s I found 4 (f) “in fig. use, to exist, to conduct one’s life”:

1972 [US] R. Kahn Boys of Summer 297: My younger brother Roy [. . .] had good ability, but he was too hardheaded. He had to roll separate.
2007 [US] UGK ‘Int’l Player’s Anthem’ Baby you been rollin’ solo, time to get down with the team.
2016 [US] T. Robinson Rough Trade [ebook] ‘We don’t know how Byron rolls’.
2021 [US] J. Ellroy Widespread Panic 237: ‘No heavy petting, Janey. I don’t roll in that direction’.

But there’s also 6 (b) “(US black) to survive, to live, to conduct oneself” (first cite 1988 [US] Ice-T ‘Heartbeat’ Just rollin’ thick as hell, champagne I sip as well); why is that a different sense? And how far back does it date? One of the Stack Exchange commenters says:

I was born in 1968, and my family and community in San Diego regularly used the term “cause that’s just how we roll” and variations. My father, Black and Chippewa, and spoke Spanish, was born in 1916 and was raised in Los Angeles. He was originally from Texas. But the phrase has been around a long long time. I believe it’s from Black slang.

Which makes sense to me; I’m pretty sure it predates hiphop. Anyway, what do y’all think?

https://languagehat.com/how-roll-rolls/

https://languagehat.com/?p=19525