Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

twitter/the-algorithm

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 403 posts

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#371

Post by bigfudge »

tomcam wrote: post #342
bigfudge wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s lazy shorthand for “belatedly apply their policies against hate speech to prominent politicians”.

Like PewDiePie, Azealia Banks, Babylon Bee, and Carpe Donktum? By the way, in the USA there is no legal support for the term hate speech. It is covered under the umbrella of the first amendment.

No, pewdiepie was banned for five minutes for saying he was going to join isis. He’s still on the site but doesn’t tweet.

https://mobile.twitter.com/pewdiepie

Hate speech doesn’t need legal protection as a term to be against the rules of the site. I can’t remember if that’s the actual term twitter uses, but it’s the spirit of their rules.

We could have a wider debate about whether our public square should be privately owned (I don’t think it should) but that wasn’t your point.

Edit: more details and reason why his tweets are (self)deleted

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-37244296

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#372

Post by asabjorn »

jjulius wrote: post #361
asabjorn wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article summarize his research. He had published many articles on the topic, and most have linked pdfs you can download for free in his bibliography here: https://drrobertepstein.com/pdf/vita.pdf

A news article is not a peer review. A link to his own website and his bibliography is not a peer review. You said his work has been peer-reviewed, but when asked to provide such peer-reviews, you only cited a news article about him, and his self-published bibliography. Interestingly enough, his own bibliography doesn't even link to peer reviews of the Google/election-focused research .

Just his foundational study, where he discuss methodology, is cited by 470 others. Double check for “The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections” here

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=robe...

In his bibliography you can see many follow up papers. So you are just wrong saying his methodology and approach is the work of a lone warrior.

If you are asking me to summarize his research body that’s unreasonable to show my claim that it’s peer reviewed, which it as shown above demonstrably is.

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#373

Post by asabjorn »

cromwellian wrote: post #232
asabjorn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

In other news, accurate information shifts voters to Democrats. Did Robert Epstein analyze how many Fox News viewers shifted to Trump? My own experience in watching relatives slowly radicalized by Fox News hints this may be a fertile ground for some peer-reviewed research. :) 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 t…

Starting out with smearing as qanon, far right etc demonstrate that you are an adherent of repressive tolerance. This is a labeling of viewpoint opponents as beyond the pale using appeals to emotion (pathos) without evidence, instead of or in addition to engaging in appeals to reason (logos). It’s a cheap trick when used like this.

With regards to this specific paper, you say yourself the methods paper is peer reviewed. It’s also been cited 470 times according to Google scholar, which is an academic home run.

Will a methods paper apply the methodology at scale? Look at his follow up papers for that.

The point on scale is fair if true, but the paper Slate criticize is a methodology paper which is not where you would expect a large scale study. I haven’t read his body of work to get a full picture of that question, and it’s not clear to me that Slate did so either. No matter what Slate is an activist publication that at times misrepresent to support a predetermined conclusion.

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#374

Post by newman314 »

asabjorn wrote: post #337
tomrod wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I reckon Google wasn't causal here, but rather access to unfiltered information was. A goodly portion of conservatives/conservative-leaners I know and love are fairly gullible to Fox News and other bastions of ten-truths-with-a-lie approaches. Unfiltered information and data literacy sometimes helps to overcome that problem -- 2% - 5% of the population sounds about right for that shift to my prior. Your…

Yes, and people tend to downplay the human influence on algorithms. Its fashionable to pretend that algorithms don’t carry the bias of their maintainers, while “the emperor is clearly naked”. Humans write and train algorithms, and the quality of a search engine stems from biasing the result. Human moderation is also done by people with bias. So tech workers that tilt heavily woke, not even just democrat, are likely t…

How does one “tilt heavily woke”?

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#375

Post by asabjorn »

newman314 wrote: post #374
asabjorn wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and people tend to downplay the human influence on algorithms. Its fashionable to pretend that algorithms don’t carry the bias of their maintainers, while “the emperor is clearly naked”. Humans write and train algorithms, and the quality of a search engine stems from biasing the result. Human moderation is also done by people with bias. So tech workers that tilt heavily woke, not even just democrat, are likely t…

How does one “tilt heavily woke”?

By it being common to do some activism as part of work activities, such as activism for the woke DEI doctrine. Also, by people in the valley commonly cutting off friends and acquaintances if they speak critically of woke activist measures (or fail to post the required flags-of-day on social media). 80%+ of political donations are democrat.

Wokism, like all forms of Marxism, demand praxis (“do the work”) from its adherents which is why it’s so visible and progressively take over organizations until all they do is praxis.

Side note: Activism through praxis is not optional, because Marxist theology has this idea that their adherents have a special gnostic knowledge where they like a God create reality. The idea is that once all alive are Marxist utopia will be spontaneously created by the collective.

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#376

Post by Yoric »

vrfvr wrote: post #257
Yoric wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is also the Trump alternative, iirc. Just the far left seems to respect the license.

No, it's not THE trump alternative. It existed before. Open source, such that anyone can use it

I meant used by the Trump alternative.

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#377

Post by philjohn »

bogomipz wrote: post #338
philjohn wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last place I worked had an explicit clause in the RSU agreement that essentially said "if we get bought the price per share for unvested stock will be given to you as cash".

I'm curious was the complete cash out immediate or did it assume the same schedule as the vesting? I'm guessing if the cash out is immediate the company would then run the risk that those people might exit?

I believe it was immediate, but I don't have the grant document anymore to check.

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#379

Post by Traster »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #327
Traster wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person on twitter isn't a software engineer. They won't know what python is. They don't know what an algorithm is. So let's be clear about what the baseline is here. There's no point talking to them about how you distribute queries using micro-services or whaever bullshit twitter's engineering team bought into this season. This idea that "the algorithm" is something you can just "publish" is a pernicious…

This is a bad take. Just because it is a stupid unaccountable heap of shit now doesn't mean it has to remain that way in the future.

I'm not talking about whether it's accountable or not, I'm saying that to actually share the algorithm you're basically saying that you're going to open source Twitter's entire code base. Oh and when you do that the average person will be no better off because they don't read code anyway. And when engineers read through the code it's going to like "Where did you get all these different variable values from?" and the answer isn't "We came up with a method for valuing tweets from first principles", it's going to be "We showed 7 billion people tweet X and 7 billion people tweet Y and tweet X caused 5% more people to engage so we tweaked this value".

And sure, you can say "Well that's a bad way of designing the algorithm" but then what you're really saying is that you don't want to open source the algorithm at all, you want to re-write the algorithm to satisfy your sense of how the world should work with no evidence it'll actually work.

Re: twitter/the-algorithm

#380

Post by cromwellian »

asabjorn wrote: post #373
cromwellian wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other news, accurate information shifts voters to Democrats. Did Robert Epstein analyze how many Fox News viewers shifted to Trump? My own experience in watching relatives slowly radicalized by Fox News hints this may be a fertile ground for some peer-reviewed research. :) 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 t…

Starting out with smearing as qanon, far right etc demonstrate that you are an adherent of repressive tolerance. This is a labeling of viewpoint opponents as beyond the pale using appeals to emotion (pathos) without evidence, instead of or in addition to engaging in appeals to reason (logos). It’s a cheap trick when used like this. With regards to this specific paper, you say yourself the methods paper is peer review…

I'm simply stating facts, Epoch Times is not a reliable source. And as the Slate article pointed out, his 7 pages of citations were all his own articles and only one citation was Peer Reviewed in a journal with any credibility.

Slate's criticisms were factual, they are of course biased, but so what?

This study's statistical parameters are really shoddy, and just straight up bad data. Garbage in, garbage out. His PNAS original study had a larger sample, but again, the conclusions don't really follow, and there are many more explanatory effects for how search behaves (including his own point about how searches can create band-wagoning and reinforcing behavior), and the claims that it shift votes are not established.

One only has to imagine that if more voters are searching for Clinton and clicking Ads or the first few SERP results, then the search engine might take that as a signal to return MORE of those results, which causes more people to do follow up searches for Clinton info, establishing a positive-feedback loop without any BS about tech companies putting their foot on the balance. We've in fact seen this behavior before, famously when Microsoft's Bing started returning search results for documents it couldn't possibly have crawled, simply due to click-tracking.

Plus, the sheer fact that a majority of world wide media were against Trump, Google's crawler is going to end up with a lot of pro-Clinton content. I'm not just talking about US mainstream media and newspapers, but UK, French, German, Canadian, Australian, you name it, a majority of the media did not like Trump. The search engines can only deal with the data they're crawling and the user behavior they're receiving.

I know it comes as a shock, but a majority of not just Americans, but the Western world did not have a high opinion of Trump in 2016. You don't need to invent elaborate tech conspiracies to end up with pro-Clinton or Trump-critical articles getting surfaced since that was the actual Zeitgeist.

It's amazing to me that even after winning in 2016, Trump and his cadre were still sore that Clinton won the popular vote. Well, newsflash, but the Democrats have been winning the popular vote pretty much every election. Add up all of the votes House & Senate members got, and you'll see far more Democratic votes, because the GOP generally represents lower population density districts. Again, not surprising.

The GOP could use that information to decide they need to change policies to attract different demographics, and widen their audience, but it seems like in the post-Trump era, it's down to claiming vote fraud, media bias, and doubling down on populism and weird stuff about their opponents being Groomers or CRT theorists. It's honesty sad, because the GOP used to run some campaigns on issues that had cross cultural appeal, like crime reduction, but now it's all weird culture war stuff.

Post reply on HN