Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by breck | Hacker News Reader

This seems to jive with my experience, but I'm trying to formulate a back-of-the-envelope mathematical explanation. Here's my thinking: nouns are in 3D space and verbs are in the 4th dimension (you need the concept of time to have a verb).

By going "noun-verb", you are fixing the first 3 dimensions and leaving one remaining (hence the ~1000x reduction in search space for autocomplete). By going "verb-noun" you are only fixing 1-dimension, leaving the other 3 unknown, and autocomplete would have a larger search space.

Putting it another way. If I started a story "the year was 2015", I've only narrow the one time axis, but the "noun/place" hasn't been narrowed at all, so you still have a sphere of possibilities. However, if I started a story "we were on the Golden Gate bridge", I've pinpointed the 3-dimensions of place/noun, and now the reader only has to pinpoint where on the "time-line" we are. And even that timeline has been shortened to a segment of ~100 years.

Interesting analogy. Only after reading this comment did I realize that my mental model has been somewhat similar. Although if I had to write it down, I'd phrase it in terms of data structures.

If you have a sparse matrix of nouns and verbs where cells show whether a given verb(noun) pairing is valid, indexing by noun is clearly more efficient, because most of the time you know exactly what you're operating on, but not necessarily what the operation you want is named. The variables are likely right there before your eyes, a couple lines above the cursor, but the functions are spread out all over the code base.

This correlates well with human language access times for nouns vs verbs.

"Here, we study naturalistic speech from linguistically and culturally diverse populations from around the world. We show a robust tendency for slower speech before nouns as compared with verbs. Even though verbs may be more complex than nouns, nouns thus appear to require more planning, probably due to the new information they usually represent."

https://www.pnas.org/content/115/22/5720

However, if I started a story "we were on the Golden Gate bridge", I've pinpointed the 3-dimensions of place/noun, and now the reader only has to pinpoint where on the "time-line" we are.

How does the reader trying to guess the date narrow the choice of verbs?

You might be on TGGBridge jogging, and the date is irrelevant. It seems like fixing the location to TGGBridge narrows the possible verbs, but it’s still a huge list - “we were on” means you could be doing anything people can do - photographing, touring, jogging, sketching, working as a bridge repair crew or structural engineer or a vehicle breakdown van or an Uber driver or protesting or meeting up in a well known location.

In English, “I was driving..” implies a vehicle, but “a car..” doesn’t imply you were driving it, or necessarily doing anything to/with it at all.

> How does the reader trying to guess the date narrow the choice of verbs?

My thinking is when someone visualizes something they need to visualize the place/noun first and the verb (what happened over time). The first requires 3 dimensions and the latter just one more.

Both nouns and verbs are semantically one dimensional - they are each lists of words.

In a computer yes. But I don’t think that’s how the mind stores things.

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