This is a special post for quick takes by David Udell. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I've noticed that people are really innately good at sentiment classification, and, by comparison, crap at natural language inference. In a typical conversation with ordinary educated people, people will do a lot of the former relative to the latter.
My theory of this is that, with sentiment classification and generation, we're usually talking in order to credibly signal and countersignal our competence, virtuous features, and/or group membership, and that humanity has been fine tuned to succeed at this social maneuvering task. At this point, it comes natur... (read more)