> the reason the magnitude doesn't matter is that those counts will be much higher in longer documents ...
To be a bit more explicit (of my intuition). The vector is encoding a ratio, isn't it? You want to treat 3:2, 6:4, 12:8, ... as equivalent in this case; normalization does exactly that.
Probably not a good approach to take here because there are plenty of examples of everything he said. However there are simultaneously plenty of counterexamples. For example certain west coast cities where shop lifting has been de facto legalized due to non-enforcement rooted in the name of the social cause of the day.
Actually what he wrote appears to match a certain political stereotype in the US while being the opposite of the other one. So I guess it says more about his view of the US than anything else.
> > at least when they want any at all. It's not consistent.
This is because you are treating Americans as a monolithic group, failing to differentiate between various major clusters.
However I will say that at least
> > A lot of Americans are way too into punishment. It's seriously like a fetish for them.
It actively harmed the environment. Once the thing has been manufactured doing anything less than driving it into the ground is wasting the upfront environmental cost.
Not always. The average car in Wyoming gets driven 24,000 miles a year something getting 12 MPG is burning 2,000 gallons a year directly and another 30% indirectly from manufacture transportation and extraction of oil. That’s a lot for a 5 year old car you could easily be saving 30,000+ gallons of oil.
Obviously, that’s average many cars are significantly worse. Run the numbers and swapping a high mileage but poor fuel economy car for a hybrid/EV and the payback can be a net positive.
I think it depends on the nature of the task for which the skill is used. But I agree. There are certain things that are just not realistic to master without rote drilling of some sort of supporting material.
At the same time I think rote drilling gets a bad reputation because poor teachers will tend to fall back on it in instances where it isn't particularly useful.
I personally had a low opinion of it until university, where I encountered two independent topics where it was clearly necessary.
You might have something unusual going on there. At the beginning I, and to the best of my knowledge everyone I grew up around, was also taught to sound words out. At some point I stopped needing to do that. That happened quickly for the common words and more slowly for the uncommon ones. At the extreme end, for example extremely specific medical or chemical terminology, I still have to do that on account of never having encountered the word before.
At no point did I intentionally memorize word shapes. At no point in my life have I ever been conscious of recognizing words by shape. That might well be what's happening under the hood, but if so it's not something I have any awareness of. I just see a word and (in most cases) instantly know what it is without thinking about it.
Presumably your job is to get results. If catering to someone in some way is able to achieve that then it's a perfectly legitimate approach to consider.
Formatted like a formal academic publication. No way (that I can tell) to grab a pdf. Comes across as a blog masquerading as academic literature to me. Am I wrong? Did I miss something and there's an offline version available?
Pages served up over http are ephemeral. An absolutely essential part of formal academic literature is the archival aspect - self contained, immutable, and referenceable in an unambiguous manner.
There's also an immediate practical aspect for me. I will likely never get around to reading this because I will forget it exists because my "reading list" consists of a pile of pdf files.
To be a bit more explicit (of my intuition). The vector is encoding a ratio, isn't it? You want to treat 3:2, 6:4, 12:8, ... as equivalent in this case; normalization does exactly that.