knzhou

66 ms·

601.
by knzhou 7y ago
> I thought building personality profiles and launching targeted ads was pretty mundane at the end of the day. The next level of discussion that interests me is why social media manipulation is so powerful in the first place. Well, if yo
602.
by knzhou 7y ago
And yet now there is a link at the bottom telling us to follow the author on Twitter. That's like swearing off pot for heroin.
603.
by knzhou 7y ago
In physics, we call the spatial analogue of temporal frequency the "wavenumber", or if you're thinking quantum mechanically the "momentum". Neither seems to have caught on elsewhere though.
604.
by knzhou 7y ago
You have to keep in mind that you're not listening to a journalistic expose of the Trinidad election -- you are listening to a sales pitch from Cambridge Analytica, which has all the motivation to vastly exaggerate their influence. I&#
605.
by knzhou 7y ago
Because in practice a negligible fraction of people is willing to pay even a nominal fee for something they think they can get for free. Just a few days ago we had an article full of outrage that Google asked people to pay a small fee once
606.
by knzhou 7y ago
> HK protestors are for democracy, which is good. The PRC is opposed to democracy, which is bad. Come on, you should know that the ability to distill complicated issues into slogans is orthogonal to truth. "Abortion clinic bombers a
607.
by knzhou 7y ago
If you apply this consistently, you should also be sure that Brexiteers, the yellow vest protestors, and the Catalonian independent movement show that European government is fucked. (If you do, I respect that, but if you don't, conside
608.
by knzhou 7y ago
This is not a new or rare phenomenon. I noticed it many times when growing up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial
609.
by knzhou 7y ago
Over time I've gotten completely disenchanted with "empathy" as a slogan. Growing up, I thought it meant striving to see things from multiple sides. In practice it is a demand that you see things from only one side -- offerin
610.
by knzhou 7y ago
Honest question: have you personally seen the "propaganda" of the other side? If you've only seen one side, how are you so completely sure you know which one is right?
611.
by knzhou 7y ago
Honest question: have you personally seen the "propaganda" of the other side? If you've only seen one side, how are you so completely sure you know which one is right?
612.
by knzhou 7y ago
No it doesn't. In both Facebook and in newspapers there are a few words at the top. Sure, this can be misunderstood or go unnoticed, but it does in both cases.
613.
by knzhou 7y ago
> To me, the primary issue is that Facebook does not adequately differentiate organic content from sponsored content. This is a classic isolated demand for rigor. “Sponsored” is exactly as prominent on Facebook as “op-ed” is on newspaper
614.
by knzhou 7y ago
> And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. [...] This issue is NOT about freedom of expression...it’s about freedom to pay fo
615.
by knzhou 7y ago
> Her factual statements, that every high-energy physics experiment since the 1970s has only confirmed an existing theory (the Standard Model) and that every prediction made by physicists about possible extensions to that existing theory
616.
by knzhou 7y ago
No, that's very different. Yesterday I proclaimed that our experimental colleagues do an excellent job of avoiding false positives, because they use great scientific practices. Sabine would agree with me on that. This article is not ab
617.
by knzhou 7y ago
Yeah, do call me out if I'm still this arrogant in 10 years. ;-)
618.
by knzhou 7y ago
I'm not taking shots at qualifications. I only say that people should be defined by what they spend the majority of their time doing, not their job title. Sabine has more qualifications than me, but like Michio Kaku and NDT, she now sp
619.
by knzhou 7y ago
As usual with Sabine, this article blatantly misrepresents how science is done and how actual scientists think, and serves mainly to portray herself as the only person in the field capable of rational thought. People in the comments here ar
620.
by knzhou 7y ago
> Arguably a lot of particle phenomenology in the last 20+ years was bad science in that way, because no new phenomena had actually been observed/measured That is an interesting observation. Would you be willing to guess specificall
621.
by knzhou 7y ago
Sorry, do you think that fundamental physics gets more than other fields? Have you ever seen a breakdown of research budgets?
622.
by knzhou 7y ago
Our statistical standards may be unrealistic for social science, but there was a petition a while ago to lower the cutoff from 0.05 to 0.001. I think that really would help.
623.
by knzhou 7y ago
As does hiring when a Googler goes to some other company. Nobody is going to see their commits. They have to go on their word, their technical skills, and their references.
624.
by knzhou 7y ago
Well, it's all a little ambiguous. You can choose to pre-publish or not, and you can choose to announce whenever you want: before pre-publishing, after but before publishing, and at the moment of publication itself. It's certainly
625.
by knzhou 7y ago
If you leave CERN to apply for a postdoc or professorship somewhere else, they ask for lots of recommendation letters. That's how they learn what you actually did.
626.
by knzhou 7y ago
Actually, the error was caught before publication. They sent it to ArXiv, the standard pre-publication space, so that other physicists could read and comment on it. It was there that the error was quickly caught.
627.
by knzhou 7y ago
I know what the rules are. In fact the community seems to be extremely transparent about it -- there are sites that keep track of all job offers out there for you, along with historical statistics. The struggle for jobs is the result of the
628.
by knzhou 7y ago
I mean, can't you say that for any large group of people? You can't easily evaluate who's pulling the most weight at Google either. But that's not a problem, because the people at Google deciding promotions do know, and
629.
by knzhou 7y ago
Indeed, flight and space have applications, which is why they (completely justifiably) get more funding. People seem to forget this, but the space shuttle alone was funded over 15x more than the LHC was, and by a single country rather than
630.
by knzhou 7y ago
Nobody forces academics to work for low pay. I mean, that's what I'm doing right now and I certainly don't feel exploited. > Then there is literally decades of over promising on ground breaking discoveries right around the

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