231–240 of 403 posts
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Of course it doesn't make sense. I think it's just a dog whistle to the people who believe google have a guy in a room somewhere turning the "conservative search results" lever down a notch during elections.
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Also, The EpochTimes is not a good source, it's a far-right site run by IMHO a religious movement that borders on a cult. It publishes Q-Anon theories on its front page uncritically.
And "peer-reviewed" by whom?
https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/robert-epstein-google-b...
"Epstein is a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research, but other than a technologist who doesn’t appear to help with the studies, Epstein is the organization’s only staff member, according to the AIBR website. Epstein is the co-author of a study published by his employer, only the summary of which is available, that claims that biases in Google’s search results may have tilted millions of undecided voters to vote for Clinton in the 2016 election. That was the study Epstein described in his Senate committee testimony, where he didn’t mention that his huge claim is based on monitoring the search results of just 21 undecided voters out of 95 voters for a 2017 white paper. In his submitted testimony, Epstein did provide seven pages of citations—but all of them are papers or op-eds he wrote or co-wrote himself. Only one of them—a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about how biased results produced by search engines could have the ability to sway undecided voters—was peer-reviewed. Even that study didn’t demonstrate that this has actually happened."
There you go, n=21. This guy fails high school stats. Fails 30% large counts condition, fails 10% sample condition, probably isn't a random sample either.
I've worked on very large scale recommendation systems at a FAANG. If Twitter's system resembles anything like ours, the concept of publishing or open sourcing "the algorithm" doesn't make sense. Even if we were to open source all associated code and publish all related documents it would be very difficult to make sense of the entire system. That is precisely why companies such as Twitter A/B test the hell out of eve…
Whatever. He paid for it. Private company. Do what it wants.
> it would be very difficult to make sense of the entire system
No. Not buying that. Difficult isn't the same as impossible and, if only to game the system (harder,) people will figure it out. And even if it isn't 100% possible to reproduce the results based on what is released significant insights will still emerge.
Further, there is some ceiling on the complexity. Twitter operates at scale and that means they can't actually burn 52kWh of power for every tweet or store TiBs of metadata for every user to do the analysis or take 30 minutes to publish. Likely it's a pretty efficient system and, therefore, limited in complexity.
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Of course it doesn't make sense. I think it's just a dog whistle to the people who believe google have a guy in a room somewhere turning the "conservative search results" lever down a notch during elections.
"Among the elite, and within Twitter specifically, there is much more inclination to ban the right. I say this as someone whose political views, if you force them onto the left-right spectrum, probably end up about 80% toward the left. E.g. I've spent millions over the past several elections supporting the Democrats. It used to be that censorship was something the right did, and free speech was something the left wer…
They don't need to because they have cool Twitter alternatives. Like Mastodon.
I've worked on very large scale recommendation systems at a FAANG. If Twitter's system resembles anything like ours, the concept of publishing or open sourcing "the algorithm" doesn't make sense. Even if we were to open source all associated code and publish all related documents it would be very difficult to make sense of the entire system. That is precisely why companies such as Twitter A/B test the hell out of eve…
Understood and several of us have dealt with large complex systems. Open sourcing algorithm or code is not about everyone go and analyze the same, instead when controversy or issues arise it'll be readily available for independent experts to review it.
I've worked on very large scale recommendation systems at a FAANG. If Twitter's system resembles anything like ours, the concept of publishing or open sourcing "the algorithm" doesn't make sense. Even if we were to open source all associated code and publish all related documents it would be very difficult to make sense of the entire system. That is precisely why companies such as Twitter A/B test the hell out of eve…
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Is the idea somewhere in the-algorithm there's a function called `derankGOPMembers()`? Twitter's been pretty transparent in how it "deranks" certain accounts [1]. What more would come from opening the code that certainly not include the actual database of "no no terms" (if you were to believe that exists)? [1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2022/our-ongoi...
Twitter is transparent in how they do shadow bans? They still deny they are a thing but it's clear to see the network effects of them. Twitter is transparent - that's the most hilarious thing I have read today!
I follow a few people in "gamer/twitch twitter" and every now and then this meme pops up of twitter secretly deranking "go live" twitch.tv tweets, which is much more palatable to these people than the reality of just no one caring about their boring tweets.
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It's so difficult as someone who works in technology to tolerate this idea that there is "an algorithm". Maybe this will get flagged on HN but the overwhelming feeling is to just scream "don't be such a fucking idiot, this is a $43Bn company it doesn't boil down to 50 lines of code" and hell, there are plenty of examples of 50 lines of code at my company I could spend a month really understanding and even then not un…
I don't think that most people actually believe "the algorithm" is like a Python script or something.
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Was it the algorithm or was it a "guy in a room" which/who decided to block New York Post's article on Hunter Biden's laptop scandal?
To those that are probably triggered by this and likely even uninformed, the "left" view has been that the laptop story was fake, but it turns out it was real.
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Was it the algorithm or was it a "guy in a room" which/who decided to block New York Post's article on Hunter Biden's laptop scandal?
To those that are probably triggered by this and likely even uninformed, the "left" view has been that the laptop story was fake, but it turns out it was real.
Now if you truly want to address this concern of the people, the question obviously would be if it was the algorithm that blocked the article or was it "a guy in a room"? I don't see what is the difficulty in admitting that it was "a guy in a room" because our values/ideology does not align with ideology of New York Post.
When you start to say that it was the algorithm that did it, and that there was zero human interference, without any proof to back up those assertions, then it is much the same as saying that it was a "popup" that triggered when one is caught watching porn. "I did not do it, it was the machine."
Then it becomes even more important to open source the algorithm so everyone can see what is happening internally. It at least puts some doubts to rest. It is better than saying "believe me it was the algorithm not me".