/32/ -Pining For the Fnords

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File: 1441245076195.jpg (22.12 KB,530x246,265:123,Fnord_logo.JPG)

Pining For the Fnords Anonymous 09/03/15 (Thu) 01:51:16 No.2106

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/24/nydwracus-fnords/

https://nithgrim.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/more-fnords/

>Last week, some Internet magazine published the latest attempt at the genre of Did You Know Neoreaction Exists You Should Be Outraged. A couple of reactionaries wrote the usual boring “actually, nothing you said was true, why would you say false things?” responses. Nydwracu, a frequent commenter on this blog, did something I thought was much more interesting. He wrote a post called Fnords where he removed all of the filler words and transitions between ideas and thin veneer of argument until he stripped the essay down to the bare essentials.

This is a fascinating concept I'd love to see applied in a more objective/methodical manner.

____________________________

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Anonymous 09/03/15 (Thu) 02:52:51 No.2108

This is a way of abusing a human tendency of "getting to the point" (I believe there is a technical term for this but it slips my mind).

Fnords are almost exclusively applied in news articles, be it online or in newspapers. As you might imagine not many people read articles thoroughly.

They see a headline and just glaze over the sentences searching for the most "relevant parts". This is where the magic starts. Since the main interest of the reader

is to get the gist of what's being said in the article as soon as possible and get on with his life, fnords stick out as a sore thumb among the text. Your brain believes

it singled out these words willingly, to speed up the process. when in fact they were put there on purpose for you to notice.

Now, there is most certainly a method to this, and it's complexity depends on how effective you want it to be. The first step is identifying or even creating fnords

out of thin air. News corporations usually have teams that analyze and survey how people react to certain words and phrases. More specifically what emotions and ideas

are associated with them.

But of course, if you're sufficiently in touch with the culture(s) you're working with, using fnords will come quite naturally since you will be able to predict people's

reactions with sufficient accuracy by introspecting your own reactions.

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Anonymous 09/03/15 (Thu) 12:07:48 No.2111

File: 1441282068554.jpg (70.19 KB,570x570,1:1,feel.jpg)

You could create a dictionary giving values to words and phrases of the emotional effect they have in a certain dimension, such as good or bad, and write a program to check text with it. It could even produce new text with a desired emotional effect from a thesaurus. Consider the difference calling something manipulation vs. giving direction.

It goes deeper than just meaning though. For example 'in' gives me a good feeling and 'out' a bad feeling, even though they're seemingly neutral words they're emotionally connected with other powerful concepts and experiences like eating, sleep, sex, and love.

Orwell got it right with double plus ungood. Beginnings and ends are the most strongly felt, so the negative 'un-' becomes lost in 'double good'. You might read 'double plus ungood something' but later after forgetting still feel something unconsciously as 'double good'. This lapse in memory is what's behind the Mandela effect. Reports on Mandela getting tuberculosis in the 1980's were hyped so much people unconsciously felt he died, but he didn't. Gradually people forgot details of the story and their brains filled in the holes from the feeling, so they were shocked when Mandela actually died.

Look at this live example from CNN's front page:

>Clerk who won't issue marriage licenses divorced 3 times

>https://archive.is/4vWWb

They report on the story but people will forget what it was about, or only read the headline, and unconsciously associate the feeling of someone who got divorced 3 times with the clerk who won't issue marriage licenses. The next time it pops in the news they'll be even more resistant to the clerk's Christian viewpoint.

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Anonymous 09/06/15 (Sun) 20:00:54 No.2142

This is a fascinating idea.

My first thought was not to apply this to texts by other people but my own. If I were to reduce my post on this board, for example, to just the "bare essentials", what would they look like? Is there a subconscious emotional tone I use without realizing? Do I follow a pattern regarding how I distribute my emphasis?

Just by writing this text I noticed how much I write in the first person (not only on this post but on many past ones as well). It would be interesting to learn what other text analysis techniques such as this exist.

Now for the problems.

Firstly, how are the "bare essentials" determined? There doesn't seem to be an objective criteria for determining what words are to be kept and which are to be discarded.

Secondly, how does this apply to humorous, parody or otherwise unconventional texts, in which the meaning is implied by the way words are combined, eliciting a response that a computer would be unlikely to detect (such as sarcasm)?

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