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Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

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Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those posts really are a curse. And they are usually not quite that simple, there is always some PEDMAS quirk to it so ~70% of the people get it wrong, causing yet more comments pointing out how they are wrong and further inflating engagement. Those are worse than the stupid Farmville/Mafia Wars posts that used to horrendously clutter up the platform, at least those are easy to block. Those math things come from all…

For folks that are out of the loop, the post looks something like “24/4*3: 80% of people get this wrong!” and the arguments in comments are between people who do this the way most computers do (multiplication and division have the same priority and the leftmost one goes first, so you first calculate 24/4 to get 6 then multiply by 3 to get 18) versus the way that the acronym literally says to do it, (multiplication co…

> > some PEDMAS quirk

> multiplication comes before division in the acronym

Yeah, well, it seems that depends on how you write the acronym...

Re: Unmasking the most viral page on Facebook

#152
post #89
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shock is that someone at Meta looked into these studies and decided not to take actions to fix it because it might hurt their revenue.

We are told again and again that correlation is not causation, but we readily ignore this maxim when we are looking for an account that we hope is true. At a time when Facebook is regularly vilified (sometimes deservedly), wanting to believe that its practices have caused teenagers’ mental health to suffer is understandable. But wanting doesn’t make it so. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-fac…

> We are told again and again that correlation is not causation

I'm beginning to suspect that maybe we're told this too often, so we're starting to take it for granted that correlation can't be causation. But the saying actually only means that correlation is not necessarily causation. Quite often, correlation is actually there because of causation.

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