The Opposite of Hitler

I like to ask my friends stupid questions. For example:

• “What kind of son would SpongeBob have?”
• “What would you do if some puddles went down into the earth forever?”
• “Why don’t you return my calls anymore?”

ugh, MONDAYS

One I’ve been asking a lot recently, however, is “What is the Opposite of Hitler?” I like this question because A) it’s annoying and B) it has no right answer. Many people respond with some famous goody two-shoe like MLK or Mother Teresa. An engineer friend of mine told me “reltiH” is the opposite of Hitler. A non-engineer gave me “rock.” Most people, though, don’t answer because, according to them, people don’t have opposites.

But sometimes they really, really do

If you think about it, opposites are kind of a weird concept. Most people learn the idea of an opposite around the age of 4 (e.g. hot/cold, boy/girl, taxable assets/tax-exempt assets). But really, what is an opposite?

opposite |ˈäpəzit| — adj. diametrically different; of a contrary kind

So what I’m really asking my friends is “what is the most different thing” from Hitler. If that’s the case, then my non-engineer friend who thought “rock” was the opposite of Hitler may not be so far off. I can’t think of anything that Hitler had in common with “rock.”

He’s so anti-rock that he only throws paper in rock-paper-scissors

But what if we think about the difference between two things as the distance. Distance could be the number of logical leaps we would have to make to get from “rock” to “Hitler”; the more distant things are the more different they are. Let’s say a “leap” is a click on Wikipedia, from one article to the next. If that’s the case then rock is only three leaps away from our man Hitler.

Side note: ‘Rock Pile’ is my stripper name.

Compared to Mother Teresa (two leaps away) and MLK (one leap away), “rock” is looking pretty good. One of the furthest articles from Hitler is Mafikizolo, a South African music duo. So we may have our opposite.

South Africa is known as much for it’s arm-hedges as it is for its not-Hitler music groups.

But this approach might not be totally fair. Just because we can connect Mother Taresa to Hitler through fellow Nobel-Lauriate Elie Wiesel, doesn’t mean she’s closer to Hilter than a rock. In fact, if you randomly visit one of the 5 million articles on the English Wikipedia, you’d be able to get to Hitler with 3 or fewer clicks 98% of the time. Mafikizolo (five leaps from Hitler) is one of only 80 articles that are more than four leaps from Hdog.

LINEAR SCALING IS FOR COWARDS

So from this perspective most things are starting to seem kinda Hitler-y. What we really want is some sort of conceptual opposite of Hitler.

Enter Google’s Word2Vec. Word2Vec is a freaky technology released to the public in 2013 that learns the “meaning” behind words without being taught. It just reads a whole bunch of text (like, the entire internet) and extracts meaning by itself. There’s a lot of clever things that go in to making Word2Vec work, but one result is the ability to do “math” with words: Word problems. Quick, go to the nearest 17-year old studying for the SATs and ask them these two questions:

• Paris is to France as _________ is to Japan
• King is to Man as _________ is to Woman

Now ask Word2Vec the same thing you and get

This makes sense stop asking questions

It’s very likely that this or something similar is what’s behind Google Translate, because the vector representations that Word2Vec learns are the same regardless of language. That is, the representation learned for “uno” is about the same for “one.” In any case, I highly recomend playing around with a toy implementation of Word2Vec online.

Newt Gingrich is mathematically the American Hitler

But we’re here on a mission, to find the anti-hitler. If we just look for the word closest to negative hitler (-1 × hitler), we find Plantar fascia, the connective tissue that supports the arch of your foot. According to Word2Vec, the tendon is the word least likely to be used in the same context as Hitler. Until now.

First rule of Podiatry: Do not mention Hitler.

I don’t know about you, but for me this is frustrating. Even though the Plantar fascia supports up to 20% of my body weight, it just doesn’t feel like the opposite of Hitler. Maybe those friends of mine who said Hitler had no opposite were right: Maybe he is so unique in our cultural conciousness that he has no equal and opposite. But for now if anyone asks me “What’s the Opposite of Hitler?” I’ll tell them to take off their socks and shoes.