Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by AreShoesFeet000 140 days ago
Loved the paper. Would like to try to reproduce it with intelectual political leadership soon.
3 comments

Politics is a bit biased, not only because many of these people don't write their own speeches, but also because the complexity of what they say is not neutral. Simpler speech conveys the idea of being no-nonsense and close to the people, while more complexity gives the impression of being intelligent and well thought out.

Depending on who you want to target, you may go one side or the other. For example, republicans tend to use simpler words than democrats to match what their electorate value.

Even just doing presidents would give a good dataset, Reagan, Bush Jr, Biden, Trump.
Re-watching Bush Jr now, in Trump era, makes Bush sound like a veritable genius. And we thought then that he was stupid (and in comparison to himself from a decade or two earlier he was)
Politicians have speechwriters, though, so you wouldn't be analyzing who you think you're analyzing.
Speakers go off script, and some do it a lot.

I think it would work ok.

As Donald Trump comes to rely on the teleprompter more and more, his apparent intelligence will only increase.
That's what he comes out with while using the teleprompter??
He seems to stop following it often. Boredom? Changing his mind?
In his first term people were suggesting that he's functionally illiterate and is incapable of following even the teleprompter. Whether that or he always thinks he's smarter than anyone so wouldn't follow the teleprompter written by someone else.
Yeah, but some actually do write most their own words for the most part. It would require some critical analysis for each individual for sure.