This research shows that design of modern social networks creates feedback for outrage expressions.
Emotional tweets receive more “likes” and retweets. It makes people with moderate views become more radical.
@kravietz yup. Some people wouldn't go thru source material completely before calling it useless and false.
@EdwardTorvalds Sorry, YouTube video of a few people chatting about Korean War and Holocaust is not "a source material" on vaccines. Want to discuss with me, provide at least basic scientific references.
@kravietz what sort of speciality do you possess to understand scientific references?
Chemical engineering. But it's not required - anyone can understand them with a little effort. If you can read Java API reference, you can learn to read PubMed too.
Not really. An example - you want to find out about ivermectin in COVID-19 treatment. You go to PubMed, enter the keywords and choose Meta-analysis as Article type filter.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=ivermectin+covid-19&filter=pubt.meta-analysis
The Conclusions section usually contains all you want to know and for the first two results it explicitly warns about little evidence.
My own conclusion: tread with caution. The results are unconfirmed and anyone who says "IVERMECTIN CURES" with confidence is talking BS.
@kravietz I am sure you will find 'scientific references' with counter view.
That's precisely what I wrote above - you do have studies that found, for example, that among 50 patients treated with ivermectin they noticed some beneficial effects.
But since the sample is small and the beneficial effects can be attributed to other factors, including simple luck, they usually annotate them with "evidence is weak, more study needed" disclaimer.
So "more study" they indeed do, reaching sample sizes of thousands, millions and that's then meta-analyses are produced with "strong evidence" notes. Either positive or negative.
What snake oil peddlers do, they take the early, small sample, low confidence studies and misrepresent them for marketing purposes, earning tons of money on people who can't read but happily watch convincing YouTube videos:
@EdwardTorvalds The reason to pick meta-analyses is that it's easy to hunt just a single research done on 50 patients that came out with just any outcome you can imagine. Meta-analyses aggregate large numbers of such single studies and weight them by quality of evidence, so their conclusions are most reliable.
@kravietz did you study Chemistry with meta-analysis? Will I be called Chemical engineer with meta-analysis or with proper study?
You do *not* need to graduate in chemistry to understand basic chemical concepts.
The utter stupidity of the "VACCINES HAVE MERCURY AND MERCURY KILLS" scare comes straight from not understanding chemical concepts such as mass, amount, dose, biological metabolism.
All that is taught in primary and secondary school.
The same ignorance contributes to popularity of #homeopathy by the way.
@kravietz I was not asking about basics of something-something. I was talking about expertise in Chemistry. There is big difference in both.
@EdwardTorvalds In such case any school-level chemistry textbook is your friend.
@kravietz I know what you mean. I am software developer myself, I am surrounded by people who can read and write JavaScript. But none of them understand JavaScript beyond it's surface.