Beth Barnes notices: Rationalists seem to use the word “actually” a lot more than the typical English speaker; it seems like the word “really” means basically the same thing.
We wrote a quick script, and the words “actually” and “really” occur about equally often on LessWrong, while Google Trends suggests that “really” is ~3x more common in search volume. SSC has ~2/3 as many “actually”s as “really”s.
Huh, weird. I do notice that I don’t like the word “really” because it is super ambiguous between being a general emphasis “this is really difficult” or being a synonym to “actually”, i.e. in “do you really mean this?”. The first usage feels much more common to me, i.e. in more than 80% of the sentences I could come up with the word “really” in it while I was writing the comment, I used it as general emphasis, and not as a synonym to “actually”.
I think all of those words would be better used less. Really, actually, fundamentally, basically, essentially, ultimately, underneath it all, at bottom, when you get down to it, when all’s said and done, these are all lullaby words, written in one’s sleep, to put other people to sleep. When you find yourself writing one, try leaving it out. If the sentence then seems to be not quite right, work out what specifically is wrong with it and put that right instead of papering over the still, small voice of reason.
There is also the stereotypical “Well, actually,” that so often introduces a trifling nitpick. I believe there was an LW post on that subject, but I can’t find it. The search box does not appear to support multi-word strings.
That’s what I mean. It appears to return pages that contain either “well” or “actually” (the “Summoning Sapience” hit does not contain “well”). I would expect searching for the two words to return the pages that contain both words, and searching for “well actually”, including the quotes, should return the pages in which the words appear consecutively.
Oops, you are right that for some reason we had the verbatim search feature deactivated on some of the indexes. Thank you for helping me notice this! This should now be fixed! (Because of caching it might take a while for it to work for the exact “well, actually” query, but you can try using quotes for some other queries, and it should now work as expected).
Beth Barnes notices: Rationalists seem to use the word “actually” a lot more than the typical English speaker; it seems like the word “really” means basically the same thing.
We wrote a quick script, and the words “actually” and “really” occur about equally often on LessWrong, while Google Trends suggests that “really” is ~3x more common in search volume. SSC has ~2/3 as many “actually”s as “really”s.
What’s up with this? Should we stop?
Huh, weird. I do notice that I don’t like the word “really” because it is super ambiguous between being a general emphasis “this is really difficult” or being a synonym to “actually”, i.e. in “do you really mean this?”. The first usage feels much more common to me, i.e. in more than 80% of the sentences I could come up with the word “really” in it while I was writing the comment, I used it as general emphasis, and not as a synonym to “actually”.
I think all of those words would be better used less. Really, actually, fundamentally, basically, essentially, ultimately, underneath it all, at bottom, when you get down to it, when all’s said and done, these are all lullaby words, written in one’s sleep, to put other people to sleep. When you find yourself writing one, try leaving it out. If the sentence then seems to be not quite right, work out what specifically is wrong with it and put that right instead of papering over the still, small voice of reason.
There is also the stereotypical “Well, actually,” that so often introduces a trifling nitpick. I believe there was an LW post on that subject, but I can’t find it. The search box does not appear to support multi-word strings.
ETA: This is probably what I was recalling.
The search box definitely supports multi-word strings. See this screenshot.
That’s what I mean. It appears to return pages that contain either “well” or “actually” (the “Summoning Sapience” hit does not contain “well”). I would expect searching for the two words to return the pages that contain both words, and searching for “well actually”, including the quotes, should return the pages in which the words appear consecutively.
Oops, you are right that for some reason we had the verbatim search feature deactivated on some of the indexes. Thank you for helping me notice this! This should now be fixed! (Because of caching it might take a while for it to work for the exact “well, actually” query, but you can try using quotes for some other queries, and it should now work as expected).