This is just awesome
Debunking Princeton
31–40 of 150 posts
Re: Debunking Princeton
#32A suitably joking response for a "study" that didn't need to be taken too seriously (and wasn't taken very seriously by most media outlets, including the one that led a story with it). As we discussed yesterday here on Hacker News[1], the study methodology was not sufficiently validated to convince most people that Facebook will massively lose users, even if all the data were correct. More likely, the study's model w…
Some people on the Wall Street did take it up a bit seriously perhaps going by the price movement today.
S&P was down a lot too. Just one of an infinite number of reasons to not assume price action on a company can be traced back to a given news story.
Re: Debunking Princeton
#33I hope this becomes a bigger story than the original. I can't tell you how many times someone has thrown a junk science article in my face, thinking that the issue in question was now settled. A survey with a small sample size, outsized extrapolations and numbers that don't match the accompanying conjecture. There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. People have a tendency to believe anythi…
while I think the original wasn't close to real science, don't be surprised if they are somewhat right
Re: Debunking Princeton
#34I hope this becomes a bigger story than the original. I can't tell you how many times someone has thrown a junk science article in my face, thinking that the issue in question was now settled. A survey with a small sample size, outsized extrapolations and numbers that don't match the accompanying conjecture. There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. People have a tendency to believe anythi…
while I think the original wasn't close to real science, don't be surprised if they are somewhat right
You're probably basing your opinion that FB may die by 2018 on better insights than they were basing the study on honestly.
Re: Debunking Princeton
#35Oh and wasn't the Facebook research based on Google trends? Meaning: people that can't type "facebook.com" on the address bar and type it into google then click? So... based on that, we can assume people are getting more familiar with the internet maybe?
The original article isn't very long. If you want to discuss it, you could, I dunno, try reading it? Yes, it is from google trends. Just like the data on yahoo and google itself that they compared it to. So no, there is no rational basis to assume that the data indicates people are getting more familiar with the internet.
Re: Debunking Princeton
#36Hey, Facebook, wanna prove Princeton wrong? How about publishing actual metrics proving that user engagement is at an all-time high?
(Oh, you don't have metrics to prove that? Is that because users are jumping ship?)
Re: Debunking Princeton
#37This is pretty funny, although they ruined it with their "HEY GUYS THIS WAS A JOKE" at the end.
agreed, but they have to put that in there to cover their asses in case some moron doesn't get it and gets offended.
Re: Debunking Princeton
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some people on the Wall Street did take it up a bit seriously perhaps going by the price movement today.
My investment account seems to disagree too. The stock was down more than $1 before the market even opened based on that sham study by Princeton.
Irony overload. What was wrong with that paper again? Correlation != causation?
Re: Debunking Princeton
#39Seems like Facebook is responding to the media interpretation of the Princeton paper rather than the paper itself. I saw no problems with the paper: it applied an epidemiologically-inspired statistical technique to Facebook using a defunct precursor as exemplar. The limitations of this technique are obvious, but it's an interesting idea.
People do "research" like this all the time - you throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. Most of the stuff that ends up on the floor never receives any attention at all, so you don't hear about it on first-tier news sites. But when it's about Facebook, it goes viral, and suddenly is the subject of intense scrutiny. They didn't bring this to the UN for a call to action. They didn't start a company around it. They just applied an idea to some data and wrote it up. And now the entire Internet is making fun of some exaggerated version of their idea, summarized by Huffington Post hit-mongers.
Personally, I applaud these guys for putting in the work to test out a theory. If it's not correct, it will go in the bin with the other ten million papers with flawed theories, premises, methods, or other aspects that have been published in the last day or two.
Re: Debunking Princeton
#40I hope this becomes a bigger story than the original. I can't tell you how many times someone has thrown a junk science article in my face, thinking that the issue in question was now settled. A survey with a small sample size, outsized extrapolations and numbers that don't match the accompanying conjecture. There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. People have a tendency to believe anythi…
" There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. " Many who are published deserve obscurity. And some who have obscurity deserve more funding. Can you give it to them? Do not be so eager to deal out censorship; for even institutional review boards cannot see all ends.
That was an impressive use of the Lord of the Rings lines in your comment I must say