So, an Ising model?
(reads the article)
It's an Ising model!
The physics of news, rumors, and opinions
21–30 of 37 posts
Re: The physics of news, rumors, and opinions
#22Ooh my kind of paper.
Also an older paper that I was introduced to, that exposed me to the concept of cascades sizes.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517441113
And they went into it too:
> xtending the analysis to 50,220 fact-checking posts from dedicated debunking pages, Zollo et al. [288] find that corrective information remains almost entirely confined to the scientific echo chamber: approximately two-thirds of likes on debunk-ing posts come from science-oriented users, and only a small fraction of conspiracy-oriented users engage with such content. Sentiment analysis of comments, based on a supervised clas- sification model, reveals that responses to debunking posts are predominantly negative, regardless of the commenter’s orienta-tion. Strikingly, the rare conspiracy users who do interact with debunking tend to increase their subsequent activity within the conspiracy echo chamber, suggesting that exposure to dissent-ing information can reinforce rather than attenuate prior beliefs. Otherwise stated, results indicate that the spread of misinfor-mation online is less a problem of information scarcity than of entrenched structural and cognitive segregation, where homo-geneity and polarization govern the dynamics of both the diffu-sion of false narratives and the reception of their correction.
Use this the next time someone promises that online conversations naturally tend towards insight.
Re: The physics of news, rumors, and opinions
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
"All models are wrong; but some are useful." - George Box Even particles aren't actually particles, nor spin states actually spin states. The map is not the territory. Physics models are only useful (and "correct") to the extent that they make successful predictions. If the adaptation of these principles to social communication yields useful predictions, then however inaccurate they may be in reproducing the exact na…
The word “some” in the quote from Box is doing a lot of heavy lifting. If a model is useful, I’d like to see it being used (outside academia, where there’s minimal penalty for complexity and a high emphasis on novelty). If models like these are widely adopted at social media companies or news agencies, it’s fair to say OP’s take isn’t valid. Otherwise they may have a point.
These ideas are used, and they influence what policy is crafted.
You can’t predict what an individual will do, but work like this kills many inaccurate ideological positions that we inherited.
There’s a paper from 2016 that shows how posts saturate/cascade through conspiracy communities and that it has distinct cascade dynamics. This wasn’t a model, it was a description of observed behavior.
Or take some relatively recent work from Harvard, which suggests that while our capacity to create misinformation has increased in both quantity and quality, its consumption rate seems to be stable.
Re: The physics of news, rumors, and opinions
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
The word “some” in the quote from Box is doing a lot of heavy lifting. If a model is useful, I’d like to see it being used (outside academia, where there’s minimal penalty for complexity and a high emphasis on novelty). If models like these are widely adopted at social media companies or news agencies, it’s fair to say OP’s take isn’t valid. Otherwise they may have a point.
These ideas are used, and they influence what policy is crafted. You can’t predict what an individual will do, but work like this kills many inaccurate ideological positions that we inherited. There’s a paper from 2016 that shows how posts saturate/cascade through conspiracy communities and that it has distinct cascade dynamics. This wasn’t a model, it was a description of observed behavior. Or take some relatively r…
> kills many inaccurate ideological positions that we inherited.
It doesn't, which is part of the point the OP is making. And now my point, it's ok that these pseudo-scientific "revelations" don't kill those "inaccurate ideological positions", because that's the whole point of human free will, there's no "accurate ideological position" when it comes to the day-to-day life, or to societal life in general.
Re: The physics of news, rumors, and opinions
#25as always, Douglas Adams was here first, with the idea if FTL travel powered by bad news, but as the ships were so unwelcome wherever they arrived, the idea had to be abandoned
Re: The physics of news, rumors, and opinions
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should deploy a quant trading model based on your predictive behavior theory and compound your way to be the richest person on earth. It's not that complicated apparently!
I think GP meant to say that people are not that sophisticated. Newtonian physics is not very sophisticated but fortunes have made and broke on deploying it (Roulette, dice, coinflipping etc) statistical physics, otoh, is slightly more sophisticated than the median human so some experts have indeed made money building related models
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Re: The physics of news, rumors, and opinions
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
"All models are wrong; but some are useful." - George Box Even particles aren't actually particles, nor spin states actually spin states. The map is not the territory. Physics models are only useful (and "correct") to the extent that they make successful predictions. If the adaptation of these principles to social communication yields useful predictions, then however inaccurate they may be in reproducing the exact na…
Natural scientific models use the vocabulary of pre-existing intuitions we have from interacting with the world: particles, rotation, etc. We try to simplify predictions by mapping experimental outcomes using things we already know and can directly perceive. Using these abstractions as foundation for models of social dynamics and modern media feels a little wrong: the mapping is imperfect and incomplete, and as these…
Agreed. But when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Re: The physics of news, rumors, and opinions
#28[dead]
Re: The physics of news, rumors, and opinions
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
People are not that complicated, and there's abundant evidence that physical models of social phenomena have decent predictive power, notwithstanding all the intervening complexity. The argument of statistical physics is not that people are particles, but that the equations we've found good at describing various natural phenomena work in social contexts because those processes tend toward efficiently conserving energ…
You should deploy a quant trading model based on your predictive behavior theory and compound your way to be the richest person on earth. It's not that complicated apparently!
So you are saying that if there exist quant traders making lots of money off their models, then that would be evidence that human behavior can be accurately mathematically modeled?
Re: The physics of news, rumors, and opinions
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should deploy a quant trading model based on your predictive behavior theory and compound your way to be the richest person on earth. It's not that complicated apparently!
So you are saying that if there exist quant traders making lots of money off their models, then that would be evidence that human behavior can be accurately mathematically modeled?
It's a lot more complicated than that. Eugene Fama might be a good starting point for you.
(Spoiler: most PhD level machine learning quant trading funds do not make money. Marcos Lopez de Prado can explain why that is the case: they accidentally invest in false discoveries. It's so pervasive that I often argue it's a numerical analytic proof for EMH. Most quant funds you've heard of are engaged in high-frequency market making, they provide liquidity by continuously quoting prices and earning the bid-ask spread with limited directional risk. It's not behavior forecasting. Something like order flow toxicity has predictive ability for like a few milliseconds.)
Something like this does not work: https://www.tradingview.com/v/9Ut0yL2p/
Even if it has a good p-hacked backtest with some parameters, it's not going to work in practice. It's just a novelty by/for academics.