Robin Lakoff has died

12 comments

• alex_young 2 days ago

  In case anyone else is wondering - Robin is the ex-wife of another prominent linguist, George Lakoff.

  Somehow GPT-5 got this badly wrong when I first asked:

    Yes — George Lakoff and Robin Lakoff are related. They are siblings.
  

  Er, no. They were married once and divorced 50 years ago according to their Wikipedia pages.
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  • coke12 2 days ago

    What a fascinating semantic mistake. Is it possible being long-divorced is more similar to being siblings than we realize?

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    • bryan2 2 days ago

      I would sincerely hope not.

    • add-sub-mul-div 2 days ago

      This question may well be the rosetta stone for the cultural divide over AI.

  • diggan 2 days ago

    I don't think it means much except you need to enable "web" or searching at least for most models to deal well with facts, and that's probably for the better.

    Even a basic search tool + GPT-OSS-20b handles it correctly it seems to me (https://gist.github.com/victorb/de69a8c2169e6a7cc1989592419b...), if I guessed what prompt you used correctly, "Were George Lakoff and Robin Lakoff related?".

• js2 2 days ago

  Gift link:

  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/us/robin-lakoff-dead.html...

• drankl 2 days ago

  https://archive.today/YjwUg

• toomuchtodo 2 days ago

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Lakoff

• antibull 2 days ago

  [dead]

• Husieandr 2 days ago

  [flagged]

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  • throwawayzzzzzz 2 days ago

    [flagged]

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    • Husieandr 2 days ago

      [flagged]