Rationality and the English Language

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word. Excellent advice.

Yay! And I am honored that my mentioning of Orwell's essay lead you to discus it!

I am not quite sure I agree with this, however,:"Whatever the audience thinks you said is what you said, whether you meant to say it or not; you can't argue with the audience no matter how clever your justifications."

Doesn't this make misunderstanding or misinterpretation -just by definition- impossible? I do think misinterpretation is a genuine possibility.

Also, you left out the good bit in your Orwell quote (probably to shorten the length):

one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. (Emphasis mine)

I do think misinterpretation is a genuine possibility.

Of course, but it's always the author's fault, at least if you happen to be an author. It's not the audience who misinterprets your words, it's you.

Also, you left out the good bit in your Orwell quote

Vivid imagery, yes; rational argument, no. Orwell wrote some classic stuff on Traditional Rationality but I never said he was a True Bayesian Master.

Excellent post.

I really liked the article; but if you're going to talk about Orwell and writers, and be so self-conscious about it, shouldn't it be "subected by whom"?

"Authors, on the other hand, are trained not to give themselves the benefit of the doubt."

Trained by whom?

Yes, well, I never said I was a True Writing Master either.

Another great post.

Amen! Wonderful post! I couldn't agree more.

I would also note that—larger philosophical issues aside—from a pure efficiency standpoint, the passive voice uses more words than the active voice to convey the same meaning, again confusing meaning.

Bravo on this post!

Wonderful.

I am a writer and Orwell is my hero. I love to see him discussed, and I find there is never a time at which I couldn't use a refresher. "Politics and the English Language" is an all-time gem.

When you say "If you analyze words deliberatively, rephrasing propositions, trying out different meanings, searching for nuggets of truthiness, then you're losing track of the first impression", it's a bit confusing. It sounds like you are saying "Don't use stock phrases as interchangeable tokens in an attempt to construct something truthy-sounding," which I gather is your meaning, which Orwell would endorse, and which would be of a piece with the rest of this blog.

But it also sounds very close to saying, "A writer should write from the gut and not worry about rephrasing and editing because editing is phony," which is of course the opposite of what Orwell teaches. What the most romantic-minded writers call "from the gut" is very often nothing more than received wisdom that "feels" true because they have never really questioned it. A good writer, like you say, is always reevaluating his words and the ways they might be construed. He rephrases his prepostions not his propositons, if I may be so cheeky.

Daniel, I was thinking of the reader over-analyzing, not the author. Specifically, I'm thinking of all the times I've said, "Don't say X, it's misleading" and then a commenter says, "Well, if you interpret X to mean Y, it's sorta true." I edited the passage a bit, hopefully making it a bit clearer what I'm worried about.

I have to point out, you've made a mistake of terminology here, one frequently pointed out at Language Log. You seem to have used "passive voice" to mean "construction that is vague as to agency". It's important to note weaseling, as you point out, but the use of passive voice isn't a good heuristic for that. Consider your own example of "Unreliable elements were subjected to an alternative justice process"; little of the weaseliness comes from the use of the passive. It wouldn't be much less weaselly if written as "When dealing with such unreliable elements, those responsible apply an alternative justice process." Who's responsible? I dunno.

Agreed with your main thrust. Additionally, you touch glancingly on some points I want to highlight.

1. Some scientists write their journal articles in passive voice. It's not as if the articles are being written by no one, with no one to blame

Right. And your sentence suggests the scientists are to blame.

Contrast 1b: "Some journal editors publish only articles in passive voice*."

Those sentences might describe the same present world, but they make different predictions. #1 implicitly predicts that a scientist can write a journal article "in the active voice", while #1b explicitly predicts that they often can't (because the relevant journals' editors might not publish an article "in the active voice").

So which sentence is correct? Well, maybe you haven't a clue, and it's beside your point. Maybe your point really is that "Journal articles are often written in passive voice."

That is, sometimes one obscures agency because one genuinely isn't sure who the agent is, and believes it's better to be vague than to be misleading. There's a legitimate difference between obscuring something known and obscuring something obscure.

Arguably, the real fallacy underlying all of this is the improperly excluded middle. If there were only two ways to write -- identifying agency, or using the passive voice -- then "avoid the passive voice!" would be equivalent to "identify the agent!", albeit longer. But there aren't, and it isn't.

1. What does an "alternative justice process" do?

The problem here is entirely different.

"I subjected the unreliable elements to an alternate justice process" doesn't obscure the subject, but it still points away, rather than pointing at. The sentence asserts that whatever I used is a justice process, and isn't a standard one, but it doesn't actually say what I did. And it asserts that whoever I used it on was an element, and wasn't reliable, but doesn't actually say what it was.

This is a common way of pretending to say something without actually saying anything. It raises the question: do I not know what I'm talking about, or am I just refusing to say?

Incidentally, Avoid the passive voice! has the same problem. There are LOTS of ways to avoid the passive voice, most of which don't accomplish your goal. Presumably you mean "Identify the agent!"... so why not say that?

• I perhaps should write "with obscured agency" here, as per sniffjoy's entirely accurate comment. But making two corrections at the same time seems the greater sin, so I rely on scarequotes instead.

When writing essays for English class in high school, I was explicitly forbidden from using the word "I"...

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Yesterday, someone said that my writing reminded them of George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. I was honored.

To continue with the thread necromancy, it's a dubious honor. I've seen several well argued scathing critiques of that essay by linguists. See for example the Language Log posts by David Beaver and Geoffrey Pullum discussing Orwell's nonsensical claims about the passive voice, the use of metaphors, etc.

Orwell was the outraged opponent of totalitarianism and the muddy thinking in which evil cloaks itself

There's plenty of "thinking" in Orwell's books that it would be charitable to call muddy. Orwell was one hell of a good writer, but intellectually he's way overrated. Even when it comes to his best work, 1984, every now and then I'm struck when I read some older book and realize that significant parts of the plot and philosophy of 1984 were borrowed from it. (If you think I'm exaggerating, just read Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and James Burnham's wartime books.)

This is perhaps a bit after the event, but the word that kept screaming through my mind as I read this was 'context'. I was surprised, upon searching for the word, that nowhere in your article or anywhere in the comments below did anyone mention the word 'context'. Context is what the passive voice strips from a statement, and the lack of context is what obscures the meaning. It's a minor complaint, but it struck me as odd, the literal lack of 'context'.

French = Language of Love English = Language of Rationality

Elizier, and what about Huxley? Counterpoint is a stream of author's extremely rational counciousness, but you two might not get along, because Auldus wasn't too impressed of highly developed AI

Link to Orwell's paper is broken. New one: http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/

I wonder if some or most of the above can be rolled up into a formula for critiquing the utterances of things like GPT4, or even detecting it is GPT4 and not a person.