People are so dramatic these days. Everything has to be the “end of the world”. It’s destroying society, humanity, and life on Earth as we know it. ^/s
Ophelia_Hardin on
What’s the length of the moving average?
mooncadet1995 on
To be fair, the spikes over 4 were all immediately following actual crises (70s Oil shortages, 2008 housing crisis, COVID). Point taken though.
jack_monterey on
Normalized misery. Clowns will say it can get better
Win32error on
That’s one word. You’d need to know much more to actually get a good look at how the state of the union changed over time, what language was used in the past. Did they use words like calamity or catastrophe more in the past?
This tells us very little by itself.
InternationalPen2072 on
Now do “catastrophe,” “disaster,” etc. How much of this can be explained by linguistic change?
onan on
This paints a picture of there being more crises in recent decades, but I think that’s rather misleading. This mostly represents natural linguistic drift, rather than a change in the things being described by that language.
Just from some unsystematic spot checking:
– The 1931 Message to Congress includes the word “crisis” only 3 times, but the word “emergency/emergencies” 16 times.
– The 1919 Message includes “crisis” 0 times, but “problem” 7 times, “failure” 4 times, and “evils” once.
– The 1897 Message includes “problem” 7 times, and “evil” 5 times.
There _might_ be some truth to the idea that the Annual Message/State of the Union might focus more on negatives than positives in recent years. But it would require some more sophisticated sentiment analysis to determine that, not just a simple wordcount for a specific term that has become more generally popular.
HomicidalJungleCat on
But how can we make every election the most important of our lives if we don’t say everything is a crisis? /s
quasar_1618 on
The trend line on the first graph seems to be overfitting to a very small dataset with a lot of noise. It’s tough to claim exponential growth in the use of the word “crisis” when it’s only been used a handful of more times in the last 3 addresses. The second graph is interesting though
11 Comments
[The everything “crisis” 🚨](https://4lights.substack.com/p/the-everything-crisis)(Substack pos)
Viz created in Excel
Sources:
* State of the Unions: [https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/app-categories/spoken-addresses-and-remarks/presidential/state-the-union-addresses?items_per_page=60](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/app-categories/spoken-addresses-and-remarks/presidential/state-the-union-addresses?items_per_page=60)
* Google ngram Viewer: [https://books.google.com/ngrams/](https://books.google.com/ngrams/)
People are so dramatic these days. Everything has to be the “end of the world”. It’s destroying society, humanity, and life on Earth as we know it. ^/s
What’s the length of the moving average?
To be fair, the spikes over 4 were all immediately following actual crises (70s Oil shortages, 2008 housing crisis, COVID). Point taken though.
Normalized misery. Clowns will say it can get better
That’s one word. You’d need to know much more to actually get a good look at how the state of the union changed over time, what language was used in the past. Did they use words like calamity or catastrophe more in the past?
This tells us very little by itself.
Now do “catastrophe,” “disaster,” etc. How much of this can be explained by linguistic change?
This paints a picture of there being more crises in recent decades, but I think that’s rather misleading. This mostly represents natural linguistic drift, rather than a change in the things being described by that language.
Just from some unsystematic spot checking:
– The 1931 Message to Congress includes the word “crisis” only 3 times, but the word “emergency/emergencies” 16 times.
– The 1919 Message includes “crisis” 0 times, but “problem” 7 times, “failure” 4 times, and “evils” once.
– The 1897 Message includes “problem” 7 times, and “evil” 5 times.
There _might_ be some truth to the idea that the Annual Message/State of the Union might focus more on negatives than positives in recent years. But it would require some more sophisticated sentiment analysis to determine that, not just a simple wordcount for a specific term that has become more generally popular.
But how can we make every election the most important of our lives if we don’t say everything is a crisis? /s
The trend line on the first graph seems to be overfitting to a very small dataset with a lot of noise. It’s tough to claim exponential growth in the use of the word “crisis” when it’s only been used a handful of more times in the last 3 addresses. The second graph is interesting though
Oh no!! A crisis of crises!!