Language homogenization at Harvard
This article is almost criminally flawed. The author makes some horrible assumptions and presents shoddy data. Even if we assume that the latent space model is &quot;correct&quot; (we shouldn&#x27;t), they don&#x27;t present anything like variance or number of samples in a year. Then they sort of arbitrarily fit a line to data which pretty clearly looks non-linear.<p>Suppose, for example, that The Crimson (not Harvard btw, it&#x27;s a student newspaper) runs 10x as many articles this year as last. It&#x27;s possible you&#x27;re going to get a huge reduction in cosine distance just by virtue of a few authors producing a lot more content.<p>At a minimum, we need mean, variance, and number of samples. This doesn&#x27;t tell you anything about &quot;Harvard&quot;, it just tells you about the students who the Crimson choose to publish. There are lots of structural reasons within Harvard that the Crimson has probably stopped being a unified voice of the student body -- but again, that&#x27;s not what the article purports to show.