Slashdot Mirror
Twitter Considered Harmful To Swine-Flu Panic
judgecorp writes "Twitter is being criticized for spreading panic about swine flu. This is not just knee-jerk Luddism 2.0: it's argued that Twitter's structure encourages ill-informed repetition, with little room for context, while older Web media use their power for good — for instance Google's Flu Trends page (which we discussed last winter), and the introduction of a Google swine flu map." On a related note, reader NewtonsLaw suggests that it might be a good idea, epidemiologically speaking, to catch the flu now vs. later.
http://xkcd.com/574/
I'm not sure if that's funny, ironic, satiristic, scary or just reality, but, you've GOT to wonder...
http://www.bistolas.net
Just lick a kid with autism and you will be safe!
People using twitter, or people blaming twitter. What's the word I'm looking for?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
might be a good idea, epidemiologically speaking, to catch the flu now vs. later.
That's silly: why would the solution to eradicating a disease be catching it when it's already out there?
A better solution would be to treat the causes of the disease in the first place. In this case, H1N1 is a variant of the Spanish flu. Spain, Mexico? see a pattern? Of course, the solution is to ban Spanish and classical guitar worldwide.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Giving people a voice spreads panic. Film at 11.
People want to be heard. And they learned from the news that bad news get the most attention. So what do you do when you want the most attention? You spread bad news. You invent them where necessary, because everyone else does it too and you gotta outdo them.
We, in the free world, didn't learn the lesson that people with tightly controlled media learned a long time ago: Just because you may say the truth doesn't mean that you have to. We grew up with free press and the idea that you can tell it the way it is. The fallacy was to assume people would do just that.
Maybe this, along with other similar "problems", will teach us that, surprise, surprise, people lie to you when they think they gain an advantage out of it. Just don't believe everything you hear.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Reminds me of my local Fox News station that carried an official statement from the government about how people shouldn't panic. Then immediately followed it with a report of the number of cases around the country, then an interview with one of the victims saying how awful it was to vomit for hours on end. And then all the places and all the ways you can catch the flu, and what you should do if you do.
Fair and balanced once again.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
This isn't all that rare on Twitter. #amazonfail is a good example of the Twitter jumping to conclusions and blowing something way out of proportion.
Does anyone recall the "racial caution" given to asian people (and by asian, I mean oriental, not the rest of asia that is usually ignored when people say asia) when SARS was the big worry?
Now it will be avoiding anyone of hispanic decent and of course anyone would just couldn't keep away from "spring break fever?"
In any case, looking at the google tracking information so far, it's pretty darned slight. Given that there are plenty of people who have already recovered from it, I would have to estimate that this is still little more than an ordinary flu.
People die more often of other diseases that are more easily treatable than this. I think the usual fatalities will apply -- the extremely young and extremely old. A vaccine will be put out before too long but I think with all the quarantine activity going on, it is already pretty well contained. (There may be times when the directed focus of the people is useful... now if we can just direct the focus of the people on civil liberties and the governments gone wild problems something might be accomplished.)
News at 11
The rapid dissemination of information that twitter provides can be a good thing (or at least so I read on Bad Astronomer, I still haven't been to twitter after the first time I went there to see what it was), but seriously, the same rules apply as with anything you read on the Internet.
If you're a twitter user and you feel the need to let people know about things, at least link them to a reputable information source. No, an obvious conspiracy site saying this is a terrorist attack is not an information source.
one of the victims saying how awful it was to vomit for hours on end.
Maybe just a strange coincidence, but Twitter itself seems to me like a place where people are vomiting continuously.
Panic, unlike influenza, can be "spread" only to those who willingly accept it.
I have just finished watching the evening news here in New Zealand(its 7:00pm Tuesday night) and they have been interviewing a family through a window of their quarantined house. To add to the picture, additional cameramen out on the road, hamming it up and fearful to go any closer. The main network channel is bringing test results "live at 9pm".
It is theatre at its best. It makes "alarmist" twitter look boring.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
The Internet adds two thing on to of just giving voice to people who are uninformed:
1) Giving voice to the crazies. There are lots of crazy people in the world. Many of these crazy people like to predict doom at every turn. While there are some historical examples of the doomsday prophets that got a widespread voice, most were just ignored. Now the Internet lets them publish to a world wide audience, and to find other crazies like them to reinforce their views. It isn't just that they are uninformed, it is that they actually want the doomsday scenario to be true.
2) Anonymity. Part of the problem of calling out doom in the real world is that if you end up being completely and totally wrong, people may decide to ignore you, ridicule you, maybe even pop you in the mouth. You become the crazy guy that nobody will invite over and so on. Well not on the net, there's basically no consequences for your actions. In another forum I saw someone who has said that for sure, this is The Big One(tm). (S)he threw out a whole bunch of "This is what's gonna happen," statements, with no backing. However when (s)he's wrong, as is almost certainly the case, there'll be no repercussions. (S)he can pull the same shit during the next big thing.
So the next just creates this perfect storm for doomsday hysteria: The information is spread instantly, there's no credentials check so there's lots of uninformed people, the crazies can talk all they like, and nobody is held accountable. Thus it becomes real easy for "A man in Brazil is coughing," to be blown up in to "All of Brazil is infected and now has a zombie apocalypse," in a matter of hours.
My advice to everyone is same as always: Trust the experts, in this case the CDC and WHO. Wash your hand often (this is a good idea no matter what) and make sure you've got some soup and acetaminophen on hand since if you get sick, you aren't likely to die, but you probably won't feel like shopping and will likely want those two things.
The "no context" is not an inescapable consequence of the infamous 140-character medium -- the web has a useful, low-character, way to sprea
Sorry, I had to stop reading after 140 characters, so I will assume the web is spreading this disease with a low-character method: Twitter!
Why all the xkcd related posts lately?
Where do you think slashdot editors get their news?
Well, it's not a hard prediction. I mean, whole threads of uninformed and stupid people spewing stupidities... on the internet? Who would have guessed? ;) In related news, bears do poop in the woods, the pope is indeed a catholic, and the ocean is indeed wet.
On the other hand, to be fair, the internet only made it easy to run into such conversations which otherwise would have happened at the pub or at a street corner, with equally uninformed people nodding through and offering their own stupid advice. Just think of all the cabbies who can't manage their own finances, but are ready to discourse at length about how the government should fix the economy. Or of all the people who can't be diplomatic enough to their neighbour, but apparently know exactly what the president should tell France or Russia. Etc.
And occasionally whole "theories" have been formed out of such stupid-preaching-to-the-stupid situations.
E.g., historically "animal magnetism" was born out of weaker correlations than the "lick an autistic kid" in the comic. And some people still buy magnets and crystals as cures... although they were known to be scams at least as early as 1841 when Charles Mackay published his "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds."
E.g., homeopathy was born out of the observation that, basically, small doses of quinine cure malaria, but high doses of quinine cause the same kind of shivers as malaria. In the meantime we know why both happen, and it has nothing to do with "like cures like". But some people _still_ insist on believing in a cure that's intellectually on par with "lick an autistic kid" and born out of a correlation that was every bit as stupid and superficial. (In fact, just watch, I'm going to rub my crystal ball and predict that someone will promptly post a reply as to how wrong I am, and how homeopathy works and is proven and cures everything from hypochondria to cancer;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
However, you can get revenge that way.
Ok I got it, appearantly now clicking a tag in slashdot opens all articles with that tag. The last months it wasn't like that, and the months before that it gave an overview (which was the best behaviour). Anyway that confused me into thinking all articles of today were XKCD related. MAKE UP YOUR MIND SLASHDOT. If I click a tag, do something SIMPLE, not weird too advanced javascript loading things that open confusing pages.
At least I won't have to bother with all this washing your hands, avoiding public places, looking out for symptoms malarkey. Serves you meat eaters right!
The difference is that we get a new sort of belief chain.
In the pub your degrees of freedom is 1 maybe 2, but on the Internet it truly becomes 6...
So while in a pub you will have people spewing theories, it will stay in the pub. Whereas on the Internet, a friend copies a friend, copies a friend and at the end we have the entire world believing things will come to an end.
In this stock market the reason why it was such a harsh drop was not because times were crap. But there was one thing new...
BLOGS... We have this huge echo chamber of how bad things are FROM third hand people.
If you were to say, "ok so how bad are times for you?" Most would say, "oh not so bad, but its really bad for some other folks."
Well do that enough you start wondering who these "other" folks are...
BTW I did buy heavily in this stock market drop! And I am actually positive for my ENTIRE portfolio for the year!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Far from being harmful to the panic, I would say that twitter is helping the panic considerably.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Link:
http://canonical.org/~kragen/costs-lives.html
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
How about the Randi 1 million dollar challenge?
Most preliminary tests are filmed (and everyone so far flunked the preliminaries badly) and looking at some of them, the requests weren't unreasonable, the test setup wasn't stacked against the claimant in any way, etc. I haven't seen any where it would even matter whether he's set to disprove those claims or not. Either you see auras through walls, or you don't. Either you can tell the history of an object by touch, or you don't. Either you can dowse or you don't. Those people just plain old didn't have the powers they claimed to have.
I mean, seriously, when you see a group of Australia's best dowsers manage to average 1 in 10 guesses right for 10 pipes out of which only 1 has water, it's hard to take it as anything else than dumb guesswork. I don't see how Randi's agenda can affect the fact than when asked to guess the right 1 in 10, those people averaged 1 right guess in 10.
Some are really just smart people. You don't have to be a psychic to do _some_ predictions. E.g., since we're in a sub-thread about an XKCD comic, as I was saying, you don't have to be a psychic to predict that in any scare there'll be surrealistically dumb posts on twitter. (Or generally on the Internet.)
Some are just lucky guesses. Due to the nature of random numbers and events, if you have enough people rolling a die, someone out there _will_ get 10 sixes in a row.
Some are just vague enough that they can be interpreted to apply to a few billion different people, and to a thousand fundamentally different events. See, horoscopes, for example. Take some horoscopes and randomly change the star signs, e.g., take the personality description or daily prediction for a pisces and give it to a libra, and see if they notice. Invariably it's just as good.
Actually, both the USA and the Russians _tried_ using all sorts of paranormal stuff. None of them actually delivered any useful results.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Swine flu fears spread via Twitter! http://example.com/ ZOMG
RT: @obojbaljsb @ljsndljsd @ksahbksjbdv Swine flu spread via Twitter! http://example.com/
RT: @hbs9yho3u @9jbkjsrg @jkbs8h3g @kbhjs89 @kjbiugs3e Swine flu spreads via Twitter!
Swine flu killed my friend via Twitter!
Fail Whale.
Have you seen the first of Sprint's current snarky commercials about its 3G network, in which it visually depicts the Twitter network as a mob of little blue birds all chirping "me!"...?
I'd say that pretty much nails the whole narcissistic utility of Twitter.