- Machiavelli's Laboratory is a free ebook that I published on April 13, 2010. It is a satiric discourse on scientific ethics, from the perspective of an unethical scientist. Please don't take any of the advice and opinions in the book (or the excerpts featured in this blog) seriously.
At the tail end of yesterday's blog, I inserted an output screen from Google's ngram viewer. Google collects an index of the occurrences of words and phrases (up to 5 words in length) found in its' collection of scanned literature. The lengths of phrases are ngrams (e.g., a 1-gram is a single word, a 2-gram is a two-word phrase, and so on).
At the ngram viewer page, anyone can enter a comma-separated list of words and phrases, and Google will produce a graph plotting occurrence frequency over time. Most of their scanned books come from the period following 1800, and Google's default starting data is 1800. You can look at earlier years, or you can confine your search to shorter periods of time.
You can use the ngram layer as a gauge of cultural honesty.
Let's look at the ngram that compares the frequency of "success" and "failure".
In the nineteenth century, "success" (the blue line) was about 6 times more frequent as "failure". By the end of the twentieth century, "failure" had overtaken "success" and is currently just shy of a tie.
What does this mean? It means that in the artifactual world of literature, our ancestors were somewhat reluctant to write about failure; not so today.
Are modern writers more honest than our predecessors? Have we evolved to the point where we can openly admit our failures?
Of course not. Modern writers have simply learned that they can openly criticize their competitors without incurring the scorn of their peers.
Let's look at the occurrences of the phrases "his failure" and "my failure"
The occurrence of "my failure" remains at a consistent and low level through the centuries. The occurrence of "his failure" enjoyed a meteoric rise through the mid-twentieth century. Basically, modern writers made the important discovery that they could blame someone else when things went wrong.
- © 2011 Jules Berman
