[HN Gopher] Paper linking frequency of search terms to violence ...
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Paper linking frequency of search terms to violence against women
retracted
Author : samizdis
Score : 44 points
Date : 2021-05-22 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (retractionwatch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (retractionwatch.com)
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| _Men are bad, even though we need them for homo sapiens sapiens
| to continue existing without cloning. Let 's have a study and
| write a paper to find that conclusion! We don't need no men!_
|
| _Yeah!_
|
| _Oh wait, we used thin correlation not even matched in time
| instead measuring causes, effects, and search terms. We 're going
| to have to retract that one. ): But we published! :)_
|
| _Damnit! Find real evidence, or create your own, like honey
| traps at tech conferences!_
|
| _Okay, let 's try those!_
| incrudible wrote:
| The "we need males to continue the species"-argument isn't a
| very good one to keep men around. Very few men can impregnate
| an enormous amount of women. You might want keep around a good
| selection in your breeding zoo, for genetic variance. However,
| you won't need >50% as nature dictates.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Genetic diversity is critical for the long-term health of a
| species.
| tryonenow wrote:
| >How did this article get through peer review? Like the author,
| the journal's reviewers and editors seemed to have been glamoured
| by the shine, tech fetishism, and naive empiricism of even the
| most poorly executed digital methods -- without the
| methodological humility to work together with colleagues from
| information science, or at least check in with someone familiar
| with the basic workings of tools like Google
|
| Well, that's what happens when your institution is brimming with
| ideologues who practice one sided research and immediately praise
| any results that confirms their political, dogmatic biases.
| Doubly so when criticizing certain results or topics will get you
| implicitly or ex-communicated, particularly if you are not part
| of an approved protected class.
|
| The retraction doesn't matter very much, the damage has already
| been done, and far more eyes will have been exposed to the
| results than to the retraction.
| ezequiel-garzon wrote:
| Regardless of the subject matter, I think it's good policy to do
| what arXiv does with retractions: they become a new, empty
| version, alongside a corresponding explanation, but all previous
| versions remain on the record.
| croes wrote:
| QED https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27241715
| ec109685 wrote:
| I watched this happen recently in real time. This article
| interpreted a Flurry study wrong and was featured on Tech Meme
| (its headline has since been softened):
| https://www.macrumors.com/2021/05/07/most-iphone-users-app-t... -
| "Analytics Suggest 96% of Users Leave App Tracking Disabled in
| iOS 14.5"
|
| Then the game of telephone began as bloggers simply rewrote the
| article and added their own spin:
| https://www.techmeme.com/210507/p14#a210507p14
|
| - Ars: 96% of US users opt out of app tracking in iOS 14.5,
| analytics find
|
| - iMore: 96% of iPhone users have opted out of app tracking since
| iOS 14.5 launched
|
| - Wccftech: Analytics Reveal 96 Percent of Users Have Disabled
| iOS 14.5's App Tracking on Their iPhone
|
| - Ubergizmo: 96% Of iOS Users Have Opted Out Of App Tracking
|
| - ...
|
| Flurry since updated their study to make it clear what it was
| measuring and found opt out in rate to be about 24% for prompted
| users (not the 4% cited):
| https://www.flurry.com/blog/ios-14-5-opt-in-rate-att-restric...
|
| But none of those articles are interested in correction and the
| initial visceral reaction and herumphing tweets have all since
| occurred. Hundreds of thousands of people got the wrong idea.
|
| What it shows it that there is very little original reporting,
| people don't ask study authors for clarification, and
| misinterpreting of data happens all too often.
| Cenk wrote:
| > Using date range commands, the author claimed to compare
| searches for five months in 2019 to the same five months in 2020
| -- pre-pandemic to mid-pandemic. They did so not by turning to
| Google Trends data -- the method promoted by the scholars they
| cited -- but by inputting their search phrases with date
| delimiters using Google search.
|
| > They reported the number of hits Google displays at the top of
| the page as the number of searches made for that search string.
|
| >These numbers were exceptionally high because, well, the search
| phrases were not enclosed in quotation marks. All this in an
| article arguing for the value of tech-enabled "rapid response"
| research. A culture of "move fast and break things" is common in
| Silicon Valley, but academics typically work a bit more slowly
| and carefully to avoid these kinds of errors.
| wumpus wrote:
| The number of hits reported by web-scale engines like Google
| and Bing are fabrications. When I was the CTO of a full-web
| search engine startup, I'd get an API access request every
| couple of months by someone wanting to use hit counts for an
| academic purpose. I would always them no and why; often they
| wanted to argue with me.
|
| http://searchengineland.com/why-google-cant-count-results-pr...
| http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/goo...
| azinman2 wrote:
| This was the case when I was at Google in 2008; I'm sure it's
| even further fabricated now.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on what you saw?
| azinman2 wrote:
| That it's not based on reality at all. That would likely
| be far to expensive computationally for any arbitrary
| query to give an accurate number that isn't particularly
| valuable outside of degrees of orders of magnitude, and
| even that is almost never looked at.
| Shish2k wrote:
| I'm curious, what _are_ they based on, and is there any
| reason to have a number there beyond "people expect a
| number"?
| azinman2 wrote:
| It's basically a random number. Don't extract any meaning
| from it.
| tgv wrote:
| Even then, if it had been executed flawlessly, you can only
| expect that search term frequency and violence remain
| correlated ceteris paribus, i.e., when all else is the same.
| The two time periods are clearly different, so how the hell did
| it even get published?
| croes wrote:
| By that logic, every site citing the paper makes the situation
| worse.
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(page generated 2021-05-22 23:02 UTC)