> Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of.
IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly.
I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited.
But if I'd have accepted all of Grammarly's changes, the book would have been much worse. Grammarly is great for sniffing out extra words and passive voice. But it doesn't get writing for humorous effect, context, deliberate repetition, etc.
The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.
> The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results
Thanks for your words of wisdom, which touch on a very important other point I want to raise: often, we (i.e., developers, researchers) construct a technology that would be helpful and "net benign" if deployed as a tool for humans to use, instead of deploying it in order to replace humans. But then along comes a greedy business manager who reckons recklessly that using said technology not as a tool, but in full automation mode, results will be 5% worse, but save 15% of staff costs; and they decide that that is a fantastic trade-off for the company - yet employees may lose and customers may lose.
The big problem is that developers/researchers lose control of what they develop, usually once the project is completed if they ever had control in the first place. What can we do? Perhaps write open source licenses that are less liberal?
The problem here is societal, not technological. An end state where people do less work than they do today but society is more productive is desirable, and we shouldn't be trying to force companies/governments/etc to employ people to do an unnecessary job.
The problem is that people who are laid off often experience significant life disruption. And people who work in a field that is largely or entirely replaced by technology often experience permanent disruption.
However, there's no reason it has to be this way - the fact people having their jobs replace by technology are completely screwed over is a result of the society we have all created together, it's not a rule of nature.
> the fact people having their jobs replace by technology are completely screwed over is a result of the society we have all created together, it's not a rule of nature.
How did the handloom weavers and spinners handle the rise of the machines?
> However, there's no reason it has to be this way - the fact people having their jobs replace by technology are completely screwed over is a result of the society we have all created together, it's not a rule of nature.
I agree. We need a radical change (some version of universal basic income comes to mind) that would allow people to safely change careers if their profession is no longer relevant.
So it's simple: don't do anything at all about the technology that is the impetus for these horrible disruptions, just completely rebuild our entire society instead.
I think you’re describing the principle/agent problem that people have wrestled with forever. Oppenheimer comes to mind.
You make something, but because you don’t own it—others caused and directed the effort—you don’t control it. But the people who control things can’t make things.
Should only the people who can make things decide how they are used though? I think that’s also folly. What about the rest of society affected by those things?
It’s ultimately a societal decision-making problem: who has power, and why, and how does the use of power affect who has power (accountability).
> Grammarly is great for sniffing out extra words and passive voice. But it doesn't get writing for humorous effect, context, deliberate repetition, etc.
> But then along comes a greedy business manager who reckons recklessly
> The big problem is that developers/researchers lose control
if these developers/researchers are being paid by someone else, why should that same someone else be giving up the control that they paid for?
If these developers/researchers are paying the research themselves (e.g., a startup of their own founding), then why would they ever lose control, unless they sell it?
You're trying to put out a forest fire with an eyedropper.
Stock your underground bunkers with enough food and water for the rest of your life and work hard to persuade the AI that you're not a threat. If possible, upload your consciousness to a starwisp and accelerate it out of the Solar System as close to lightspeed as you can possibly get it.
Those measures might work. (Or they might be impossible, or insufficient.) Changing your license won't.
Alternatively, persuade the AI that you are all-powerful and that it should fear and worship you. Probably a more achievable approach, and there’s precedent for it.
That only works on the AIs that aren't a real threat anyway, and I don't think it helps with the social harm done by greedy business managers with less powerful AIs. In fact, it might worsen it.
Only some things scale like that. Google's insistence to use the same model everywhere has gained them a deserved reputation as having atrocious support.
Passive voice often adds length, impedes flow, and subtracts the useful info of who is doing something.
Examples:
* Active - concise, complete info: The manager approved the proposal.
* Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager.
* Passive - missing info: The proposal was approved. [by who?]
Most experienced writers will use active unless they have a specific reason not to, e.g., to emphasize another element of the sentence, as the third bullet's sentence emphasizes approval.
Many times this is exactly what we want: to emphasize the action instead of who is doing it. It turns out that technical writing is one of the main areas where we want this! So I have always hated this kind of blanket elimination of passive voice.
Sometimes the missing info is obvious, irrelevant, or intentionally not disclosed, so "The proposal was approved" can be better. Informally we often say, "They approved the proposal," in such cases, or "You approve the proposal" when we're talking about a future or otherwise temporally indefinite possibility, but that's not acceptable in formal registers.
Unfortunately, the resulting correlation between the passive voice and formality does sometimes lead poor writers to use the passive in order to seem more formal, even when it's not the best choice.
Yep, just like tritones in music, there is a place for passive voice in writing. But also like tritones, the best general advice is that they should be avoided.
That doesn't make sense. It's like saying that the best general advice about which way to turn when you're driving is to turn right. From your comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493308, and from the fact that you used the passive voice in your comment ("they should be avoided") apparently without noticing, it appears that the reason you have this opinion is that you don't know what the passive voice is in the first place.
I can’t find it, but I remember reading an article a year or two ago with an analysis showing some of the most vocal critics of the passive voice used the passive voice more often than most of their contemporary writers.
If you always turn right at every intersection, you will just go around and around the same block. Which way you should turn depends on where you want to go.
You didn’t originally say anything about always turning right at every intersection and neither did the GP. I had the same two thoughts as GP when I read your analogy.
E-Prime (short for English-Prime or English Prime, sometimes É or E′) denotes a restricted form of English in which authors avoid all forms of the verb to be.
E-Prime excludes forms such as be, being, been, present tense forms (am, is, are), past tense forms (was, were) along with their negative contractions (isn't, aren't, wasn't, weren't), and nonstandard contractions such as ain't and 'twas. E-Prime also excludes contractions such as I'm, we're, you're, he's, she's, it's, they're, there's, here's, where's, when's, why's, how's, who's, what's, and that's.
Some scholars claim that E-Prime can clarify thinking and strengthen writing, while others doubt its utility.
That's a cool Easter egg page, where the main article text itself is in E-Prime (in use, not in mention), except for where it lists the criticisms and counterarguments - that part has copious amounts of "to be" :)
I've had entire conversations in E-Prime. I found it an interestingly brain-twisting exercise, but still managed to smuggle in all kinds of covert presumptions of equivalence and essential (or analytic) attributes, even though E-Prime's designers intended it to force you to question such things.
Well, I had those conversations a long time ago, but we can describe some general patterns.
We can smuggle in presumptions through the use of attributive adjectives. In the above comment (which you might have noticed I wrote in E-Prime) I mentioned smuggling in "covert presumptions" of "essential attributes". If I had instead written that in assembly language as follows:
I smuggled in presumptions of attributes.
The presumptions were covert.
The attributes were essential.
it would clearly violate E-Prime. And that forces you to ask: does he intend "covert" to represent an essential attribute of those presumptions, or merely a temporary or circumstantial state relative to a particular temporal context? Did he intend "essential" to limit the subjects of discourse to only certain attributes (the essential ones rather than the accidental ones), and within what scope do those attributes have this purported essentiality? Universally, in every possible world, or only within the confines of a particular discourse?
In these particular cases, though, I smuggled in no such presumptions! Both adjectives merely delimit the topic of discourse, to clarify that it does not pertain to overt presumptions or to presumptions of accidental attributes. (As I understand it, Korzybski objects to the "is of predication" not because no predicates exist objectively, but because he doubts the essentiality of any predicates.)
But you can use precisely the same structure to much more nefarious rhetorical ends. Consider, "Chávez kicked the squalid capitalists out of the country." Well, he kicked out all the capitalists! We've smuggled in a covert presumption of essentiality, implying that capitalism entails squalidity. And E-Prime's prohibition on the copula did not protect us at all. If anything, we lose much rhetorical force if we have to explicitly assert their squalidity, using an explicit statement that invites contradiction:
The capitalists are squalid.
We find another weak point at alternative linking verbs. It clearly violates E-Prime to say, "Your mother's face is uglier than a hand grenade," and rightly so, because it projects the speaker's subjective perceptions out onto the world. Korzybski (or Bourland) would prefer that we say, for example, "Your mother's face looks uglier to me than a hand grenade," or possibly, "I see your mother's face as uglier than a hand grenade," thus relativizing the attribute to a single speaker's perception. (He advocated clarity of thought, not civility.)
But we can cheat in a variety of ways that still smuggle in that judgment of essentiality!
Your mother's face turned uglier than a hand grenade.
We can argue this one. Maybe tomorrow, or after her plastic surgery, it will turn pretty again, rather than having ugliness as an essential attribute.
Your mother's face became uglier than a hand grenade.
This goes a little bit further down the line; "became" presupposes a sort of transformation of essence rather than a mere change of state. And English has a variety of verbs that we can use like that. For example, "find", as in "Alsup found Dahmer guilty." Although in that case "find" asserts a state (presumably Dahmer became guilty at some specific time in the past), we can also use it for essential attributes:
I find your mother's face uglier than a hand grenade.
Or lie, more or less, about the agent or speaker:
Your mother's face finds itself uglier than a hand grenade.
And of course we can retreat to attributive adjectives again:
Your mother has a face uglier than a hand grenade.
Your mother comes with an uglier face than a hand grenade.
Or we can simply omit the prepositional phrase from the statement of subjective perception, thus completely erasing the real agent:
Your mother's face looks uglier [...] than a hand grenade.
Korzybski didn't care about the passive voice much, though; E-Prime makes it more difficult but, mostly, not intentionally. As an exception, erasing the agent through the passive voice can misrepresent the speaker's subjective perception as objective:
Your mother's face is found uglier than a hand grenade.
But that still works if we use any of the alternative, E-Prime-permitted passive-voice auxiliary verbs:
Your mother's face gets found uglier than a hand grenade.
As Bourland said, I have "transform[ed] [my] opinions magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of things".
As another example, notice all the times I've used "as" here. Many of these times smuggle in a covert assertion of essential attributes or even of identity!
But I found it very interesting to notice these things when E-Prime forced me to rethink how I would say them with the copula. It seems like just the kind of mental exercise to heighten my attention to implicit assumptions of identity and essentiality that Korzybski intended.
I wrote the above in E-Prime, by the way. Just for fun.
#2 Is the most pleasant form. The proposal being approved is the most important. #1 Tries to make the manager approving more important then the approval.
That's funny because I read this entirely differently (somewhat dependent on context)
"A decision was made to..." is often code for "The current author didn't agree with [the decision that was made] but it was outside their ability to influence"
Often because they were overruled by a superior, or outvoted by peers.
That's funny, I always thought that meant, "my superior told me I had to do this obviously stupid thing but I'm not going to say my superior was the one who decided this obviously stupid thing." Only occasionally, that is said in a tongue-and-cheek way to refer directly to the speaker as the "superior in charge of the decision."
That reads like several comments I've left in code when I've been told to do something very obviously dumb, but did not want to get tagged with the "why was it done this way?" by the next person reading the code
Usually the passive voice is used at work to emphasize that it was a team/consensus decision, adjacent to the blameless incident management culture. It’s not important that one engineer or PM pushed it, but that ultimately the decision was aligned on and people should be aware.
Although arguably it would be clearer with the active voice and which specific teams / level of leadership aligned on it, usually in the active voice people just use the royal “we” instead for this purpose which doesn’t add any clarity.
Alternatively sometimes I don’t know exactly who made the decision, I just learned it from an old commit summary. So in that case too it’s just important that some people at some time made the decision, hopefully got the right approvals, and here we are.
> Passive - wordy, awkward: The proposal was approved by the manager.
Oh the horror. There are 2 additional words "was" and "by". The weight of those two tiny little words is so so cumbersome I can't believe anyone would ever use those words. WTF??? wordy? awkward?
It's wordy to a high school teacher. Like using "nor" incorrectly it will cause some people's brows to furrow. Always best to be aware of the rules you choose to break.
The problem is that many people have only a poor ability to recognize the passive voice in the first place. This results in the examples being clunky, wordy messes that are bad because they're, well, clunky and wordy, and not because they're passive--indeed, you've often got only a fifty-fifty chance of the example passive voice actually being passive in the first place.
I'll point out that the commenter you're replying to used the passive voice, as did the one they responded to, and I suspect that such uses went unnoticed. Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice, and I wonder how many people think recognized that in the first place let alone think it worse for being so written.
> Hell, I just rewrote the previous sentence to use the passive voice
Well, sort of. You used the passive voice, but you didn't use it on any finite verbs, placing your example well outside the scope of the normal "don't use the passive voice" advice.
It would mean that somewhere in your sentence there's a clause headed by a passive verb. A finite verb is one that heads a clause.
This terminology is where we get the name of the "infinitive" form from, by the way.
As a rule of thumb, the nonfinite forms of a verb are its infinitives and participles. jcranmer used a passive participle, but all of his clauses are active. Unnoticed doesn't have a clause around it.
(He might have thought that go unnoticed is a passive form, perhaps of the verb notice (?), in which case that would just be an error.)
Passive can be disastrous when used in contractual situations if the agent who should be responsible for an action isn’t identified. E.g. “X will be done”. I was once burnt by a contract that in some places left it unclear whether the customer or the contractor was responsible for particular tasks. Active voice that identifies the agent is less ambiguous
There was a time when Microsoft Word would treat the passive voice in your writing with the same level of severity as spelling errors or major grammatical mistakes. Drove me absolutely nuts in high school.
Eventually, a feature was added (see what I did there?) that allowed the type of document to be specified, and setting that to ‘scientific paper’ allowed passive voice to be written without being flagged as an error.
Sometimes it's used without thinking, and often the writing is made shorter and clearer when the passive voice is removed. But not always; rewriting my previous sentence to name the agents in each case, as the active voice requires in English, would not improve it. (You could remove "made", though.)
In addition to the points already made, passive voice is painfully boring to read. And it's literally everywhere in technical documentation, unfortunately.
I don't think it's boring. It's easy to come up with examples of the passive voice that aren't boring at all. It's everywhere in the best writing up to the 19th century. You just don't notice it when it's used well unless you're looking for it.
Consider:
> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:
> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation whose founders conceived and dedicated it thus, can long endure.
This is not just longer but also weaker, because what if someone else is so conceiving and so dedicating the nation? The people who are still alive, for example, or the soldiers who just fought and died? The passive voice cleanly covers all these possibilities, rather than just committing the writer to a particular choice of who it is whose conception and dedication matters.
Moreover, and unexpectedly, the passive voice "we are engaged" takes responsibility for the struggle, while the active-voice rephrasing "the Confederacy has engaged us" seeks to evade responsibility, blaming the Rebs. While this might be factually more correct, it is unbefitting of a commander-in-chief attempting to rally popular support for victory.
(Plausibly the active-voice version is easier to understand, though, especially if your English is not very good, so the audience does matter.)
Or, consider this quote from Ecclesiastes:
> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for
ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten.
You could rewrite it to eliminate the passive voice, but it's much worse:
> For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for
ever; seeing that everyone shall forget all which now is in the days to come.
This forces you to present the ideas in the wrong order, instead of leaving "forgotten" for the resounding final as in the KJV version. And the explicit agent "everyone" adds nothing to the sentence; it was already obvious.
I think those are important considerations, but it depends even more on what you are attempting to express in the sentence in question. There's plenty of active-voice phrasing in the Gettysburg Address and Ecclesiastes that would not be improved by rewriting it in the passive voice.
>> Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
> This would not be improved by rewriting it as something like:
>> Now the Confederacy has engaged us in a great civil war [...]
It's technically possible to parse "we are engaged" as a verb in the passive voice.
But it's an error to think that's how you should parse it. That clause is using the active verb be, not the passive verb engage; it's fully parallel to "Now we are happy".
Thats not passive voice. Passive voice is painfully boring to read is active. The preamble can be read like “however”, and is unnecessary; what a former editor of mine called “throat-clearing words”.
"the points already made" is what is known as the "bare passive", and yes, it is the passive voice. You can see e.g. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922 for a more thorough description of the passive voice.
As I said elsewhere, one of the problems with the passive voice is that people are so bad at spotting it that they can at best only recognize it in its worst form, and assume that the forms that are less horrible somehow can't be the passive voice.
I'm not sure this is a "bare passive" like the beginning of "The day's work [being] done, they made their way back to the farmhouse," one of the bare-passive examples at your link. An analogous construction would be, "The points already [being] made, I ceased harassing the ignorant". But in "In addition to the points already made" this case "the point already made" is not a clause; it's a noun phrase, the object of the preposition "to". Its head is "points", and I believe that "made" is modifying that head.
Can you insert an elided copula into it without changing the meaning and grammatical structure? I'm not sure. I don't think so. I think "In addition to the points already being made" means something different: the object of the preposition "to" is now "being", and we are going to discuss things in addition to that state of affairs, perhaps other things that have happened to the points (being sharpened, perhaps, or being discarded), not things in addition to the points.
I agree that that has the same meaning, but I think it may have a different grammatical structure, with an entire subordinate clause that was missing from the original. Since the voice of a verb is a grammatical rather than semantic question, this seems relevant; "in addition to the points people have already made" is also (probably) semantically equivalent but unquestionably uses the active voice.
Yes, the verb "is" in "Passive voice is painfully boring to read" is in the active voice, not the passive voice. But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make".
I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with.
Why am I not sure it's correct? If I say, "In addition to the blood so red," I am quite sure that "red" is not in the passive voice, because it's not even a verb. It's an adjective. Past participles are commonly used as adjectives in English in contexts that are unambiguously not passive-voice verbs; for example, in "Vito is a made man now," the past participle "made" is being used as an attributive adjective. And this is structurally different from the attributive-verb examples of "truly verbal adjectives" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attributive_verb#English, such as "The cat sitting on the fence is mine," and "The actor given the prize is not my favorite;" we could grammatically say "Vito is a man made whole now". That page calls the "made man" use of participles "deverbal adjectives", a term I don't think I've ever heard before:
> Deverbal adjectives often have the same form as (and similar meaning to) the participles, but behave grammatically purely as adjectives — they do not take objects, for example, as a verb might. For example: (...) Interested parties should apply to the office.
So, is "made" in "the points already made" really in passive voice as it would be in "the points that are already made", is it deverbal as it would be in "the already-made points" despite its positioning after the noun (occasionally valid for adjectives, as in "the blood so red"), or is it something else? I don't know. The smoothness of the transition to "the points already made by those numbskulls" (clearly passive voice) suggests that it is a passive-voice verb, but I'm not sure.
> But umanwizard was not saying that "is" was in the passive voice. Rather, they were saying that the past participle "made", in the phrase "the points already made", is a passive-voice use of the verb "make".
> I don't know enough about English grammar to know whether this is correct, but it's not the assertion you took issue with.
The most natural interpretation is indeed that the participle made is being used as a full participle and not as a zero-derived adjective. For example, you could give it a really strong verbal sense by saying "the points already made at length [...]" or "the points made so many times [...]".
> So, is "made" in "the points already made" really in passive voice as it would be in "the points that are already made"
Though I wouldn't say the same thing there; if you say "the points that are already made", that pretty much has to be an adjective. If you want it to be a passive verb, go with "the points that have already been made".
Anyway, I would be really surprised if die-hard thoughtless style prescriptivists thought that the advice "don't use the passive voice" was meant to apply to participles. It's a quibble that you don't care about and they don't care about or understand. You're never going to get anywhere with someone by telling them they mean something they know perfectly well they don't mean.
> Anyway, I would be really surprised if die-hard thoughtless style prescriptivists thought that the advice "don't use the passive voice" was meant to apply to participles.
> The relevance of participles is that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form.
So, what are you saying they do think it was meant to apply to, if every passive clause always includes a participle? I'm confused.
With respect to:
> Though I wouldn't say the same thing there; if you say "the points that are already made", that pretty much has to be an adjective. If you want it to be a passive verb, go with "the points that have already been made".
the passive-clause examples given in Pullum's blog post I linked above include "Each graduate student is given a laptop," which sounds structurally identical to your example (except that an indirect object is present, showing that it cannot be an adjective) and clarifies:
> The verb was doesn't really add any meaning, but it enables the whole thing to be put into the preterite tense so that the event can be asserted to have occurred in the past. Changing was to is would put the clause into the present tense, and replacing it by will be or is going to be would permit reference to future time; but the passive VP damaged by storms would stay the same in each case. (Notice, the participle damaged does not itself make any past time reference, despite the name "past participle".)
So it sounds like your grammatical analysis is explicitly contradicting Pullum's, which probably means you're wrong, but I'm not sure I understand it.
>> The relevance of participles is that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form.
> So, what are you saying they do think it was meant to apply to, if every passive clause always includes a participle? I'm confused.
OK, you're confused.
In the general case, an English verb has five forms†: "plain form" [go], "preterite form" [went], "present third-person singular form" [goes], "-ing form" [going], and "-en form" [gone].
The last two of those are participial forms.
It is true that a passive clause always has its verb in a participial form. We can be even more specific than that: the verb is always in -en form. This is true without exception because passive markers occur last in the sequence of auxiliary verbs that might modify a primary verb, and therefore always directly control the form of the primary verb.
It is not true that a passive clause always includes a participle, except in the sense of the name we give to the form of the verb. -ing and -en are "participial forms" because the verb takes one of those forms when it is a participle. But it can also take them for other reasons.
> the passive-clause examples given in Pullum's blog post I linked above include "Each graduate student is given a laptop," which sounds structurally identical to your example
Sure. If you wanted to put the present passive third-person plural form of make in that sentence, that form† would be are made. The sentence would have all the same words in the same order.
But that would make no semantic sense. For a point to be "already made", as opposed to having "already" been "made", you need to interpret made as an adjective, describing the state in which the point currently exists. The temporal structure of "each graduate student is given a laptop" differs from that of "in addition to the points that are already made" in a way that allows the present noncontinuous form of the verb. I don't think that works for "the points that are already made"; if I try to interpret that as a passive verb in the present tense, I get a strong sense that the sentence is malformed.
† You might notice that these two uses of the word form conflict with each other. The fact that form is used in both of these ways is why I'm annoyed at your comment conflating "participle" with "participial form". "Participle" is appropriate when you're talking about inflecting a verb according to how you want to use it in a sentence; it is a concern with the language's grammar. "Participial form" is appropriate when you're talking about the actual tokens that can appear in a sentence, with no regard to what they might mean or how they might be used; it is a concern with what you might think of as the language's "anatomy".
To be fair, current scientific papers are full of utterly terrible writing. If you read scientific papers from a century and a half ago, a century ago, half a century ago, and today, you'll see a continuous and disastrous decline in readability, and I think some of that is driven by pressure to strictly follow genre writing conventions. One of those conventions is using the passive voice even when the active voice would be better.
I suspect that the disastrous results being envisioned are somewhat more severe than not being able to tell who wrote which memo. I understood the author to be suggesting things more like bankruptcy, global warfare, and extermination camps. But it's admittedly ambiguous.
Criticisms are almost always read by the reader as criticisms of the OP's actions. If you're agreeing with somebody as you appear to be here, you should probably make that more explicit.
IMO this has always been the killer use case for AI—from Google Maps to Grammarly.
I discovered Grammarly at the very last phase of writing my book. I accepted maybe 1/3 of its suggestions, which is pretty damn good considering my book had already been edited by me dozens of times AND professionally copy-edited.
But if I'd have accepted all of Grammarly's changes, the book would have been much worse. Grammarly is great for sniffing out extra words and passive voice. But it doesn't get writing for humorous effect, context, deliberate repetition, etc.
The problem is executives want to completely remove humans from the loop, which almost universally leads to disastrous results.