Twitter and the spread of academic knowledge | Hacker News Reader

Twitter and the spread of academic knowledge

mattsclancy.substack.com

115 pointsnickwritesit13 comments

Twitter consists of micro-communities, which should be factored into any attempts at statistical analysis. Some of those communities have migrated to Mastodon, where the presence of multiple servers provides additional signal for micro-community and cluster identification. In addition, Twitter(s) circa <year> are different datasets due to both platform policy and evolving membership.

Honestly it hasn’t happened for my two micro communities that I follow related to my PhD and postdoc work. We are still all on X and mastodon, even though I have an account, it just doesn’t serve the messages properly and I’m unable to easily find new people. That network effect is super sticky..

Yeah this is happening pretty strongly in specific fields. Terence Tao is on Mathstodon. There's newsie.social for journalists, types.pl for PL researchers. This is similar to how twitter started and apparently how it's also going to die, all of the high-signal users who produce the content leaving for another space, leaving behind nonsense.

My wife is a plant pathologist with a strong interest in mycology. She uses twitter specifically for fungus-focused posts. Whether she actually finds it useful for research I don't know, but it seems to help with networking and finding out about events.

Compared with many things we believe we know, p<0.05 is still pretty weak.

For instance, I've seen quite a few medical correlations that were P<0.001.

I try now to avoid the mindset of "significant" vs "insignificant" as having a discrete black or white cutoff.

p<0.05 is a ridiculous high bar for speculative research, and a ridiculous low bar for practical research.

If I didn't know its rationale, it does look a lot of what a mixed committee would settle on trying to appease everyone. But yeah, it's not a good static value.

As people move to other platforms it feels like the signal could change and people may have more control over their feed but less serendipity?

My feeling is the more public platforms are occupied by engagement economics, bots and fake everything, we humans meet in messaging groups like Telegram, Slack, etc that are not public.

seems like a possible solution could be pubic places (on the internet) that are not governed by engagement economics

seems like this'd be a good place to offer my occasional "thanks!" to DanG for governing this public place (without his boss needing recourse to engagement economics)

If it's true Twitter doesn't matter that would mean academia is truly broken.

It's certainly broken, but I doubt to that extent.

There's a conversation to be had about the costs (time and the risk of being cancelled) of running a Twitter account as a researcher and if you don't, how do you get your work on Twitter?

Anyway checkout Altmetric if the overlap between social media and academia interests you -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altmetric

> If it's true Twitter doesn't matter that would mean academia is truly broken.

The article doesn't say "Twitter doesn't matter". It only shows that when academic Twitter users tweet, there's some correlation between [academic users] tweeting and citation, but not the causality: whether Twitter is mediating awareness of the paper or if it’s merely that good papers get cited and also talked about on Twitter.

Also, it doesn't measure any other form of engagement than citation-count (e.g. author name mentions, SEO ranking, h-factor of journals doing the citing).

As to non-scientific engagement: if a paper got MrBeast or any popular meme poster to even make one tweet about its findings, I imagine it'd get lots more layman engagement (mostly of the non-citation kind); would that translate into anything tangible on scientific engagement?

When you say "academia is broken", do you mean "there's way too much published research and most of it is inconsequential", or "citations should skew towards good, replicable research" or what?

> There's a conversation to be had about the costs (time and the risk of being cancelled) of running a Twitter account as a researcher

Has anybody quantified that? I imagine it varies hugely by field of study, and that there are some (e.g. studies of vaccines, infectious diseases, the intersection of social-media and politics, some sociology/political science, other flashpoint topics) where it's too risky. Andrew Huberman seems to be one case-in-point, although much of his posting is not hard research in his subject area. (Also, people trying to cancel someone and failing has a Streisand Effect). Also, do you factor in hte limitations on methods academics can use to monetize social-media prominence?

Academia is broken is just a meme in HN. Wouldn't take it too seriously.

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