I'm not sure what you mean by this. Many quality studies are A/B tests. A/B just refers to the two IV states you're testing, which you're then observing a DV - sales, engagement, errors, etc.

A/B tests can be double blinded (don't tell the error monitoring people which results are from a trial), and have high number of samples, far beyond even most pharmaceutical trials.

They can also be really crappy, changing too many variables at once, etc. But they are certainly "real science".

EDIT: an example, Drug vs placebo - is an A/B test.

Where A/B studies may go wrong in my view is a few other elements:

- A/B studies have difficulty in determining differences based on multiple interacting characteristics. In fairness, so does empirical science, and the principle of "holding all else constant" is a frequent assumption of scientific processes.

- A/B studies face an inherent self-selection / exclusion bias: the participants in this round of A/B testing are those who've not been driven off the project/product from past experiments and design changes. Given that many Web 2.0 companies eventually dance with pushing people right up to the border of tolerance, it's quite possible that A/B testing has a long-term effect of pushing those participants whose tolerance has been exceeded out of the study population entirely. I don't know how large a factor this is, though loud / rage quitters are certainly a prominent (if not necessarily large) cohort. Whether or not they're also influential, or perhaps more importantly when they become influential is another question. Again, this is a fairly common problem with any social experiment, including natural social experiments, see various forms of brain-drain and social flight.

- A/B testing tends to focus on short term changes and behaviours, which may mask longer-term outcomes. This has some overlap with the above, but also with subjects' general response to change. See the classic case of this in the Hawthorne Effect (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect>).

The upshot is that A/B testing can be valid and useful, but that experimental design, particularly in the case of social and psychological experiments, where subject feed back into the study and its methodology itself, is exceptionally thorny.

Sociologists will frequently not have as good access to such a large participant pool under near ideal experimental conditions with such good ways to observe behavior. And the stuff you have to keep in mind when running experiments is not terribly complex. A bit of statistics, a few things you absolutely have to get right, that’s it.

Obviously there are reasons why AB tests are often not run rigorously (statistical illiteracy and pressure to get things done quick as well as to produce tangible results as often as possible – all three of which might lead you to run underpowered experiments with too few participants and to stop testing early which will lead to too many false positives). However, stopping to do experiments (and instead just releasing new stuff and observing the reaction) isn’t really an improvement that leads to better outcomes compared to that.

A case could be made that A/B testing is insufficiently rigorous given specific goals, resources, limitations, context, etc. But that case isn't being made here.

I wonder what would have happened, had he fired 75% of the engineers when he took control of Tesla /s.

It's perfect, in a way, that the full quote is "Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit." which translates to "And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness."

Refs: https://twitter.com/cagrimmett/status/1595967787339743232

Will certainly be interesting to see if there are enough of y'all willing to shell out $8/mo to have your speech boosted above the free variety to make up for the lost ad spend of the Pinochet-helicopter-meme-adverse.

I don’t think users are going to participate in these sorts of experiments long term. People are signing up now out of fear and anger and hope but Mastodon still lacks the user base — people for you to follow and people to amplify your posts. (Partly because it’s still a fraction as popular as Twitter and partly because the hosts all seem to be blocking a different half of the other hosts so even if two people are both on Mastodon they may not be able to connect.)

If, on top of all that, people are expected to tolerate “a lot of iterations” before things work right I see them leaving. Let’s not forget that the Twitter/Mastodon mode of interaction can be pretty toxic so there needs to be a big carrot for people. Mastodon doesn’t have it. Twitter barely did tbh.

They do it to interact with the globe, and the more people on that network the better it is.

There are a million ways to create a niche site (like hacker news) that allows a Small Focused Community to interact, that is not a replacement for Twitter

(are those still a thing? Practically every store of any size had one in the 90s, at least, but I haven't paid attention and can't for-sure recall seeing one in years)

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/aug/04/pops-privatel...

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/privately-owned-public-sp...

But Andy NGO has an especially concerning history of misrepresenting facts, using misleading cuts, and closely associating with far right insurrectionary groups such as the Proud Boys.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Ngo#Credibility

In the 14 years that CrimethInc has been on Twitter, the account has never violated Twitter policies and has never been suspended. This changed last week after a Twitter exchange between Musk and Ngo.

Ngo asked Musk to suspend the CrimethInc account, calling it an “Antifa collective” and falsely claiming the group had “claimed a number of attacks.” Within hours of Ngo’s request to Musk, and without citing any specific violations of policies, Twitter suspended the @crimethinc account.

You can call this piece "a tissue of insinuations", but the evidence, taken together, is quite damning. A pattern emerges. At least for anyone who does not have tissues in their ears.

The Gun Club arms itself to defend against far-right violence and often appears as a security force at protests to protect against expected far-right violence.

To date, Gun Club members have reportedly not engaged anyone with their weapons during one of these protests.

https://www.counterextremism.com/supremacy/john-brown-gun-cl...

Being invited by Republicans to speak before Congress is just more evidence that Andy Ngo is far right, from my perspective.

If so, check out that article. It should clear things up.

If not, and you have read the article, you probably skimmed it and mixed up antifascist and antifa. Generally the later is a subset of the former.

What views?

I saw some of the tweets people got banned for. Are you okay with me associating those views with right wing views?

> that is accounts held by people taking part in month long riots and looting and political real-world violence

So, you are saying that your alleged criminal activities off Twitter should feature into whether you are banned? (Note, you never claimed they violated ANY of Twitters rules in your comment)

Is this satire? Is this an honestly held opinion? Or am I missing something?

And what happened here is that those left-wing accounts were banned without any such violation i.e. it was purely arbitrary and the very thing you claim you don't want.

The right-wingers that got banned presumably broke one of Twitter's rules - maybe they said "I wish someone would shoot (insert politician they don't like here)". Even if you take "pre-Musk Twitter had a left wing bias" as granted, that doesn't mean the right-wingers were wrongfully banned.

>But banning antifa-accounts, that is accounts held by people taking part in month long riots and looting and political real-world violence… that is bad?

The only way to boil this down to a politically neutral rule is if we banned every right-winger who was at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 alongside everyone who went to a BLM rally that turned violent in 2020. And as far as I can tell neither behavior alone was a violation of Twitter rules as they stood at the time. The rule was no inciting violence on-platform, not no being involved in violence whatsoever.

As far as I can tell, pre-Musk Twitter had two biases:

- Their moderation team was understaffed and overworked because Twitter was too big of a target to effectively moderate. Twitter moderation would overprosecute easy-to-detect cases (i.e. LMG staff getting banned for months because of them sarcastically saying "I'll kill you") and underprosecute difficult ones (i.e. everyone harassing Twitter's villain-of-the-day).

- As a direct consequence of this, right-wingers were more likely to be banned. This is because their rhetoric is inherently more violent[0] in ways that were easier to detect.

Musk has basically decided to cut the moderation team in half and unban all the right-wingers in the name of "balance". All this does is say "we are now letting right-wingers break all the rules, but left-wingers must be on their best behavior, if we let them stay on the platform at all".

[0] Specifically, left-wingers were saying to smash windows, right-wingers were saying to smash people.

Maybe! Being part of a group that also holds certain opinions isn't really relevant to whether expressing those opinions violates a policy. But which opinions did you have in mind?

Here have an extremely relevant tweet.

https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...

And note how Musk through simply engaging with these people gives endorsement to this ridiculous and baseless link between pedophiles and left-wing accounts.

And yeah if you weren't a Twitter user before, you're probably not signing up at this moment in time :)

Claims that were classified as COVID misinformation include:

- surgical masks don't work against aerosol viruses

- lockdowns and curfews will not stop covid

- natural immunity due to prior infection is more effective

- mRNA shots don't stop transmission

- mRNA shots don't stop infection

- mRNA shots cause myocarditis

One by one these have been revealed as true, with naysayers looking like ass-covering idiots, or worse, paid shills for big pharma.

If at this point you still have any faith left in the biomedical establishment, the one who doesn't belong on Twitter is you, because you will hysterically fall for the next big thing just the same.

my own twitter experience has not changed at all -- i'm seeing the same tweets i was seeing before and seeing none of the hate people are seeing. but, ofc, the plural of anecdote is not data.

For all the jokes about excessive sourcing that hacker news gets it's probably one of the things that keeps it from turning into yet another hearsay platform.

This is genuinely the only place in the internet right now I can actually read and have a decent discussion about musk without it either turning into a hate circlejerk or a flamewar, would be nice to keep it that way.

yes, and I see zero hate or other issues with content on my feed

> What is _actually_ motivating you to comment like this?

I hate when people attribute opening the Overton window to more than just Extreme left authoritarian political opinions, which is what Political Twitter was isolated to before elon, is some how a bad thing

A claim was made that is not supported. It isn't unreasonable to request such a claim to be validated by demonstration.

Personally, I have not seen an increase in "hate" or violence or bigotry or any other -ism or -ist. I've seen people disagree in a much more whole-hearted way, while at the same time, seeing prompts for reducing the strength of language. For example, you get a pop up if you write "I think you are stupid" but not "I think you are silly."

Quid pro quo: what is _actually_ motivating you to comment like this?

I personally, don't believe in eternal bans. I always hate the horror stories where someone has made a mistake and thus Google bans them from all non-related activities for life, then bans the account of anyone who gave that person privileges too.

With respect to Twitter, I'd say sure Trump is an insurrectionist and a shameful individual, but it's been 2 years... while we can't all rightly forgive him, we can at least him speak his thoughts in 280 characters or less.

For Musk to not lose gobs and gobs of money, it only matters whether advertisers, in their sole estimation, consider those people hateful. The guys with the nine figure ad budgets will almost certainly fall on the "cautious" side of that line.

The only thing that will help here is finding small, less PR minded brands or businesses to replace the players in the nine figure club. This won't be easy, but I think it is the only reasonable way forward to create the kind of Twitter that Musk seems to want to create. Having worked at "DDB Need'em" long ago, I'd set his chances of pulling that off relatively low, but I don't think it's impossible.

Which is basically what you described and therefore is already how it works.

This was never really enforced.

Social networks are valuable because of users. They gain value by attracting large numbers of users.

They have limited inherent value, and the majority have features which are easy enough for rivals to replicate.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/miguel-almaguer-remains...

Technically, he was never CEO “at Paypal”. He was forced out as CEO of X.com the second time just before it took the name of the main product (which it had acquired with the company that developed it, with Elon returning as CEO with the acquisition) and became PayPal.