site banner
ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4382 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

26
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This (1) post makes me think there should be research into a Dunbar's number for internet communities. Anyone know of interesting writing on the topic?

1 - https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/l8id4/did_digg_make_us_the_dumb_how_have_reddit/

Dunbar himself is still kicking, btw. Moreover, he's producing papers at an insane rate (number of Dunbar's articles about Dunbar's number). Here's the paper from 2016 on Facebook and Twitter, but they used rather old datasets -- 2009 and 2012 resp -- which reflected social media interface at that time.

Social brain hypothesis, which he's been studying, is about existence of several layers of contacts within any social communities. 150 is a size of one of the layers. After clustering social media data he found similar layered structure:

Quite remarkably, the mean rates of contact in each layer are extremely close, especially for the Facebook datasets, to those found in (and, indeed, used to define: Dunbar and Spoors, 1995) the different layers in egocentric offline personal social networks (Sutcliffe et al., 2012). This suggests that the online environments may be mapping quite closely onto everyday offline networks, or that individuals who inhabit online environments on a regular basis begin to include individuals that they have met online into their general personal social network, treating the different modes of communication as essentially the same.

I read about this experiment from another author, who said similar results were obtained in online game communities. But he was rather skeptical, saying that the data is limited and there are many built-in artificial structures, forcing certain clusters. Those clusters might be stretched to fit the hypothesis.

he's producing papers at an insane rate

Are big name researchers like him actually doing any of the grunt work or just get handed authorship for having answered one question asked by a PhD student?

Yeah yeah not all researchers, but in the ML space I usually see some very big names appear as 5th or 6th authors in inconsequential papers and am left wondering, why are they even there?

The biggest contribution might even be "asked one question answered by a PhD student" rather than the other way around. My first original math discovery as a grad student turned out to be an idea that was published before I was born, but was just esoteric enough that I hadn't heard of it. My third was something that I got beaten to, because I didn't realize the problem was that interesting (I thought it was just another test case for my second) and I blabbed about it at a conference to someone who turned out to be 10% closer to it than I was but who just hadn't considered using his research on my question before.

I eventually learned to run more by my advisor. Having someone who's been in a field a few decades to tell you what's more or less worth working on is invaluable. Even just having someone who knows what to look for and where to look can be useful. I taught a student once who invented a numerical method I'd never seen before, one with just the right mix of "tricky enough that it might have been missed" and "valuable enough that it ought to be published", but by this point I knew which book to pull off the shelf and which chapter to hunt through to find the prior discovery without having to spend days on the literature search.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats