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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 wat

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 theories on its front page uncritically. And "peer-reviewed" by whom? https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/robert-epstein-google-bias-conservative-bogus-trump.html 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.

asabjorn 4y ago
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.
- cromwellian 4y ago
  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.

asabjorn 4y ago

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.

cromwellian 4y ago
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.