NSA already does this. "Stylometry" I believe is the term. Perhaps they used heuristics and algorithms so far? I would NLP was good enough for this years ago.

Back in 2015 you might have some linguists work with data scientists to do feature engineering and use those as inputs to an LR model. I suppose you can let a deep learning model feature engineer for you, but either way, you'll get to some of the same heuristics you're thinking of.

I taught this as a routine class project in 2018.

What training data did you use in that project?

Didn't they de-annonymize Satoshi through analyzing his "stylometry" too?

Two of the people who [likely] made up "Satoshi"s core team are now deceased, RIP (Hal Finney [ALS] & Len Sussman [Suicide]).

Both of these have been widely debunked as Satoshi candidates, especially the latter.

Someone unintentionally did something similar with HN comments to find users who sound most similar to you/eachother and people were finding their throwaway and alt accounts.

Yes I recall that: 'Find Your Hacker News Doppelgänger':

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568709

Interesting. There was commentary about finding anonymous/throwaway accounts, but on mine, I did not find my anonymous account (although I use that very rarely). The accounts that turned up seemed to be all real, and in a couple cases I could guess what might have made the checker match us (e.g., mentions of MFAs or Apple //e or similar politics), but not all. I didn’t notice any linguistic similarities.

Yeah back then I felt mine didn't produce good matches either.

Neat experiment, though it took me fewer than 30 seconds to rule out my nearest "doppelganger". Too many patterns there I've never used.

That's interesting. I wonder if they will periodically update the data set to reflect new posts.

I'm a big counter intelligence man, so I love deliberately inserting randomness into potential identification metrics.

In the words of martha stewart, it's a good thing

You probably don't want to associate yourself with a convicted criminal as a deflection technique.

We both have unfortunate usernames when it comes to that

I'm supportive of helping our convicts reintegrate into our society as healthy contributors and seeing they receive the support they need to find their niche in our diverse economy and social landscape.

Remember to do it with your code as well.

I doubt TrueCrypt developers decided that it was Not Secure As Microsoft’s bitlocker after considering the paper that got released the following year.[0]

[0] - https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...

I wonder if there is a way to do that automatically.

rng shuffling of style and library usages, paradigms. and naming convention. camelCase vs NOCAMELCASE based on a coinflip, etc. leverage Lint static analyzer tools to enforce prior to submission.

lot of fun ways to stick it to those bulk surveillance data lakes that may be the targets of such training sets

I use em dashes — though with space — and also ellipses… Also 2×4s (that are actually 1½×3½), where 2 ≠ 4 above −270°C, and footnotes¹ and all that.

¹ There.

Great. Even easier then

The next step after is to build an AI to convert your style of writing to another person's style.

Running all writing through AI to re-write everything in a different style while conveying the same information might work. Create a way to apply it to all online writing and you have something like a writing VPN.

Exactly. You barely need "AI" for this. Changing style enough to put some sand in a sophisticated text identifier could be as simple as introducing some spelling and grammar variations. It could easily be commoditized (isn't grammarly doing this already minus the privacy part?). Of all cat and mouse games LE and intelligence are playing, for this one I'm betting on the mouse.

Just write all your 'sensitive' texts in leetspeak, use very few words, and very short words and it should be fine. It's like the typing equivalent of cutting letters out of magazines.

I proposed this as an automated process for our provinces social services/inquiries email. The idea being that the text would be harder to use as a method of discrimination.

You can probably spot me at work because I use really simple words.

I write obviate then I re-read and replace it with “removes the need to do $foo.

Some writers at work forget that the goal of the written word is to communicate to the reader not impress them with word salad.

I regard it the same as clever code (note: not the same as complex code) - written for the author not the reader.

William Faulkner:

"Ernest Hemingway: he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used."

Ernest Hemingway:

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."

> not impress them with word salad

No. Look, I had some "fight" in these pages two days ago because somebody complained of my style.

It is the farthest from legitimate to suppose that one's intention is to impress - that is accusing people of childishness, and you need to have solid grounds to suppose that. There are higher chances that one wants to be _precise_.

That would be precision in the expression of some content, to have such expression match as perfectly as possible a defined structure of thoughts you elaborated. You may want to describe the facts precisely, and/or the mental processes that those facts provoke.

Also some image subtly (and not so subtly) emerged, days ago, of "language as a cage": but if you want to express exactly some "/that/", it is the language that will have to provide the means - as opposed to a horrifying idea of "expressing what language allows".

There are contexts in which it is of paramount importance that the reader understands the message (e.g. instructions) - pay attention towards using the most digestible expression then. But when you want your content to be expressed as the defined sculpture of structures of ideas, while many different expressions are possible they are pretty much "what they are, because they are what they should be".

"Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do."

I would have sworn that was from Elements of Style but apparently it's a Mark Twain quote.

“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” Mark Twain

Arguably it's that kind of thinking that's destroyed society. Dumbing things down to the lowest common denominator.

I agree with the sentiment, but in some cases it is not dumbing down but making it clearer.

For me, the gold standard of this is Carl Sagan writings. Beautiful ideas, explained in the clearest language possible.

Don't agree. Like the commenter upthread, I have for some years had the feeling that my language is bloated with subordinate clauses, and that I use too many ten-dollar words. It's easy to use flowery language to conceal from yourself the shallowness of your understanding. So I get out my Xacto knife, and cut out the crap. Sometimes.

To quote the late philosopher Dr. Rick Roderick, "Deeply rooted in our culture is anti-intellectualism; our fear of eggheads. The work of intellectuals has always been separated off from the work of ordinary people - you have to be freed from the constraints of manual labor. When I was a dishwasher, I didn't have time to do this. Any time I was involved in manual labor, I didn't really have the time to do this intellectual work."

Most people do not have time, nor desire to do additional intellectual work after slaving away doing whatever it is they do for income.

> destroy[ing] society

More precisely: not just having people less intellectually exercised¹, but also and especially creating some sort of "demand" that "things have to be simple". Non-recognition of complexity is also one of the cracks allowing populism. Your duty is to "spend one further thought", while some instances seem to defend an idea of an "as-if-constitutional right to reduced consideration".

(¹ I wrote the other day, «I also believe that "Now drop and give me twenty" will return us fitter personnel than "Please, be fed from a straw"»)

When I compare modern thinkers to those of say 150 years ago, I find that modern thinkers not only use a simpler style, the ideas are better too.

As a sesquipedalian, my writing is sesquipedalian.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sesquipedalian

Your example doesn't match the principles you highlighted. Obviate->remove is replacing a perfect-fit with a generic alternative. "Obviate" was neither a word salad nor complex, it was straight up (marginally) better. This was a tradeoff to appeal to people whose vocabulary is narrow, not improve comprehension.

People reading what I write are frequently users of English as a second language.

Expecting most of the English people to know obviate is pushing it, for someone using English as a second language it’s just adding complexity.

It’s about aiming where you expect the average reader to be.

Because you know the word don’t fall into the trap of assuming everyone else does.

Many times it's the other way around.

Obviate has several cognates in romance languages, so it is straightforward.

Now, the phrasal verbs that are so obvious to a native speaker, these are the real head-scratchers.

Or street slang. It may sound like dumbing it down to you, but it actually adds complexity for a non-native.

Indeed.

"Register": I immediately know what it means and it takes tenths of a second for me to make the decision to click (or not to).

"Sign up": despite having a CEFR C2 level of English and using it at work every day, I still need to think for a few seconds if this is a registration or a login (cf. "sign in").

For a native speaker I suppose the latter is (marginally?) easier, but for a non-native, it's much harder, not even close.

Your examples are very illustrative, but I would argue that both phrases suffer from being too generic. I wish that there wasn’t such a push for “one word” CTAs. Examples of alternatives I’d advocate for depending on context:

“Create an account”

“Subscribe to mailing list”

“Submit contest entry”

Treating everyone like an idiot is just doing you and them a disservice. The word exists for a reason, use it.

As a native speaker, it's very unpleasant to write like that. I will if necessary for effective communication, but it's like wearing a straitjacket. It can be awful to read, too. Rarer synonyms and the phrasal verbs (both commonly avoided in a simple style) are sometimes necessary to avoid excessive repetition.

It is one of the downsides of being a native speaker. I write pretty much like how I speak. It's hard to use it like a foreign language, but that's what technical international English feels like to me, in a way. In my experience, fluent second language learners master that style more easily than native speakers do.

> This was a tradeoff to appeal to people whose vocabulary is narrow, not improve comprehension.

”Comprehension” is not some audience-independent property of a text. Comprehension is what happens when a text is well-calibrated for an audience. If your audience is unlikely to know the word ”obviate” (which seems true of many engineering settings, where the audience is international), you absolutely improve comprehension by replacing it with words the audience is more likely to know.

I agree with you that ”obviate” sounds better, and in a setting like a blog post, monograph, or even an hn comment, that’s probably what I’d use. But in e.g. a work email for colleagues in another country, you reduce the risk of miscommunication by following OP’s suggestion.

Isn't that how communication works? Understanding your audience and "appealing" to them does improve comprehension for them.

> your audience

There lies the spring coil. The less it is established what your audience is, the more you shift from "calibrated expression" to a form of expression which is as absolute and universal as possible. (See my previous post here, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33045225 .) If you have a message for an audience, you will try and condition its expression according the audience; the more the audience is abstract, the more the expression will be unconditioned, as if intended for an ideal audience.

Yeah, using words you're sure your audience knows just is communication, to me.

That said, there is of course a gray zone here.

Nit pick. Fair point in some ways but it depends on your audience. If the latter consists primarily of folk with an extensive vocabulary that enables them to detect the nuance that might be intended by the use of a supposedly unusual word (like obviate) then they won't know what you mean by 'word salad' unless you're using some word inappropriately. Seven letters versus twenty three characters. No competition. If obviate is what you mean then use it. For a general audience however, you're absolutely right.

Occurs to me there's another point in your favor as expressed in Orwell's version of a well-known passage from the Old Testament 'Ecclesiastes' into modern English. He makes the point brilliantly. Aesthetics does come into it!

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter"

If I had had more time, you mean.

About 15 years ago, at JHU, I heard about an algorithm that detected a writer's gender with more than 90% of accuracy, and the NLP professor considered that problem solved.

Is this algorithm published?

I briefly considered making one. My idea was simple — build a Markov chain for each person plus the text with the unknown author, do a dot product of the intersection of the all the chains, pick the author with the best match. Never got around to it. Perhaps this weekend?

You can pick me out because I use double hyphens -- the poor man's em dash.

Triple hyphens --- the LaTeX man's em-dash.

On my phone the failure is manifest — it linebreaks between the hyphens.

How robust is it though? If you scale to thousands or tens of thousands of people. If it depends on trigrams and uncommon characters it can be countered by incredibly simple measures.

> most users can be identified

For some value of "identified". However good it is, it can't definitively nail someone as the author of a piece of text.

The basic version would be university code detectors that try to match similarities between users code.

That isn't detecting who wrote it, but certainly is the first step.

I forget that they're called em dashes -- but I also love to use them to offset what I say from other people.

They've broken more than one Python script of mine. That'll make you declare everything UTF-8.

If you have a compose key, (–) is compose + (-) (-) (.)

Or compose + (-) (-) (-) for (—) which is wider depending on the font.

yeah. I've read about this many years ago, and it had scared me enough to develop an alternative writing style for my squeaky clean real life persona

I wouldn't doubt for a second that NSA is already using shit like this for their global passive adversary thing