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.
@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.
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.
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:
@kravietz I am sure you will find 'scientific references' with counter view.