Edward Gibson: uncertainty

Transcript context

…That breaks people’s brain. Yeah, yeah. But say it’s written in front of you and you can just have as much time as you want. Even though that one’s not too hard, right? So if I say, “It’s like the book, it’s like, oh, the book, which the author who I met wrote was good.” That’s a very simple completion for that. If I give that to completion online somewhere, to a crowdsourcing platform and ask people to complete that, they will miss off a verb very regularly. Like half the time, maybe two-thirds of the time, they’ll just leave off one of those verb phrases. Even with that simple… So say, “The book, which the author who…” And they’ll say, “Was…” You need three verbs, I need three verbs. “Who I met, wrote, was good.” And they’ll give me two. They’ll say, “Who was famous was good.” Or something like that. They’ll just give me two. And that’ll happen about 60% of the time. So 40%, maybe 30%, they’ll do it correctly. Correctly, meaning they’ll do a three-verb phrase. I don’t know what’s correct or not. This is hard. It’s a hard task. Yeah, actually I’m struggling with it in my head.…

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