Yes, that's exactly my argument, right? Three troll tweets is all there is, and that plausibly swung a close election.
Let me know if you want to argue against a stronger strawperson and I'll get back to it.
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Replying to @zeynep
Your argument is lacking in any sort of systematic evidence, at all. If you think impression counts are an imperfect measure -- and surely they are -- then come up with something better.
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Replying to @NateSilver538
The mere count and placement of DNC hack stories, alone, would be a pretty strong metric. It dominated media plus displaced other stuff. As with anything complex, it's a complex story but just that one is their operation—though obviously "the patient" had very weak immune system.
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Replying to @zeynep
You're -- deliberately? -- confusing two things. The DNC hack could well have been important. There's no evidence that Russian shitposts on Instagram mattered much, though.
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Replying to @NateSilver538
Not separable. The DNC hack was very much supported by massive operation on social media. It was almost all you'd see in some corners, mostly as screenshots with false claims that went viral. Plus, yep, mass media got played. Hence my call for looking at ecology, not percentages.
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Replying to @zeynep
I put "you have to look at the whole ecology" into my Google Academese translator and it came out as "I don't have any evidence".
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Replying to @NateSilver538
Okay! Keep looking at percent of tweets as a good metric for impact—and doctors should weigh viruses/bacteria as percent of bodymass to decide on impact and not look at how it impacts body/immune system (aka the whole ecology) . Good luck, to you and Dr. Google. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Replying to @zeynep
You haven't proposed any alternative measures. And your anecdotal evidence isn't very persuasive, either (despite being cherry-picked). I've argued with you often enough to know you can be very persuasive when the evidence supports you—it doesn't here, and we both know it.
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Replying to @NateSilver538 @zeynep
This is the same thing I was reacting to yesterday. Complex systems aren't a metaphor or academese; they're well-studied, though they pose real methodological difficulties. The wider cultural/public sphere is in many ways one of those complex systems. 1/
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It's right in those circumstances to say: then look at the pile, not the last grain of sand! But it's wrong to say, "All grains of sand are small, so they don't really mean much in a big pile of sand".
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Yep. Complex systems are quite hard to analyze, do not lend themselves to easy metrics, but where a lot of societal action is (as well as many interesting natural systems). I'm not arguing that we have easy answers or methods!
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