I understand not being interested in hearing negative outsider takes, but may I ask why it makes you sad to see negative quotes from Twitter here? For some context as to why I included those tweets, the worldview I’m coming from is one where outside perception can strongly affect our ability to carry out future plans (in governance, getting people to agree to shared safety standards, etc.), and as such it seems worth paying attention to the state of adversarial discourse in influential circles (especially when we can practically effect that discourse). If there’s good reason not to specifically quote from twitter, however, I’d be happy to remove it/relegate to footnotes/use different sources.
Random samples are valuable, even if small, the first data point carries the highest amount of information. Public opinion matters to some degree, I believe it matters a lot, and Twitter is a widely used platform, so it is decently representative of the public opinion on something (at least more representative than Lesswrong).
If you want to give a good survey of public opinion on Twitter, you likely should choose tweets that are highly upvoted. All of the tweets the OP cited have less than 1000 upvotes. Is that an amount of likes that suggest that it’s decently representative of the public opinion?
For each tweet the post found arguing their point, I can find two arguing the opposite. Yes, in theory tweets are data points, but in practice the author just uses them to confirm his already held beliefs.
Random samples, among a representative population, are valuable. It seems unlikely that Twitter is representative of the general population, more likely it is only representative of a subset.
I understand not being interested in hearing negative outsider takes, but may I ask why it makes you sad to see negative quotes from Twitter here? For some context as to why I included those tweets, the worldview I’m coming from is one where outside perception can strongly affect our ability to carry out future plans (in governance, getting people to agree to shared safety standards, etc.), and as such it seems worth paying attention to the state of adversarial discourse in influential circles (especially when we can practically effect that discourse). If there’s good reason not to specifically quote from twitter, however, I’d be happy to remove it/relegate to footnotes/use different sources.
Sad and uninteresting seem related to me? It seems solely a distraction, so to read LWers focusing serious attention on a distraction is sad.
See my reply to niplav for my perspective.
It sounds like your trying to convince readers that random potshots on Twitter are serious opinions?
If so, this seems a bit absurd, as if readers can’t tell by themselves when someone’s opinion is worth their attention.
Random samples are valuable, even if small, the first data point carries the highest amount of information. Public opinion matters to some degree, I believe it matters a lot, and Twitter is a widely used platform, so it is decently representative of the public opinion on something (at least more representative than Lesswrong).
If you want to give a good survey of public opinion on Twitter, you likely should choose tweets that are highly upvoted. All of the tweets the OP cited have less than 1000 upvotes. Is that an amount of likes that suggest that it’s decently representative of the public opinion?
For each tweet the post found arguing their point, I can find two arguing the opposite. Yes, in theory tweets are data points, but in practice the author just uses them to confirm his already held beliefs.
Random samples, among a representative population, are valuable. It seems unlikely that Twitter is representative of the general population, more likely it is only representative of a subset.