All this “physics of news” framing repeats the same mistake mainstream economics made decades ago, confusing human action with measurable physical phenomena. People aren’t particles, and opinions aren’t spin states. As Mises and Hazlitt argued, mathematical models give spurious precision when applied to purposeful behavior: they hide their "arbitrary assumptions" behind elegant equations. Treating communication, belief, and motivation as quantifiable variables may look rigorous, but it strips away meaning, choice, and context and the very essence of human decision. What results isn’t insight, but an illusion of control dressed up as science.
Physics operates on mechanical causality while human behavior does not.
Imagine thinking that a statistical model should address individuals' internal state. That's like considering thermodynamics bunk because it addresses aggregate behavior without accounting for that of individual particles.
> xtending the analysis to 50,220 fact-checking posts from dedicated debunking pages, Zollo et al. [288] find that corrective information remains almost entirely confined to the scientific echo chamber: approximately two-thirds of likes on debunk-ing posts come from science-oriented users, and only a small fraction of conspiracy-oriented users engage with such content.
Sentiment analysis of comments, based on a supervised clas-
sification model, reveals that responses to debunking posts are predominantly negative, regardless of the commenter’s orienta-tion. Strikingly, the rare conspiracy users who do interact with debunking tend to increase their subsequent activity within the conspiracy echo chamber, suggesting that exposure to dissent-ing information can reinforce rather than attenuate prior beliefs.
Otherwise stated, results indicate that the spread of misinfor-mation online is less a problem of information scarcity than of entrenched structural and cognitive segregation, where homo-geneity and polarization govern the dynamics of both the diffu-sion of false narratives and the reception of their correction.
Use this the next time someone promises that online conversations naturally tend towards insight.
as always, Douglas Adams was here first, with the idea if FTL travel powered by bad news, but as the ships were so unwelcome wherever they arrived, the idea had to be abandoned
8 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 27.9 ms ] threadPhysics operates on mechanical causality while human behavior does not.
(reads the article)
It's an Ising model!
Also an older paper that I was introduced to, that exposed me to the concept of cascades sizes.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517441113
And they went into it too:
> xtending the analysis to 50,220 fact-checking posts from dedicated debunking pages, Zollo et al. [288] find that corrective information remains almost entirely confined to the scientific echo chamber: approximately two-thirds of likes on debunk-ing posts come from science-oriented users, and only a small fraction of conspiracy-oriented users engage with such content. Sentiment analysis of comments, based on a supervised clas- sification model, reveals that responses to debunking posts are predominantly negative, regardless of the commenter’s orienta-tion. Strikingly, the rare conspiracy users who do interact with debunking tend to increase their subsequent activity within the conspiracy echo chamber, suggesting that exposure to dissent-ing information can reinforce rather than attenuate prior beliefs. Otherwise stated, results indicate that the spread of misinfor-mation online is less a problem of information scarcity than of entrenched structural and cognitive segregation, where homo-geneity and polarization govern the dynamics of both the diffu-sion of false narratives and the reception of their correction.
Use this the next time someone promises that online conversations naturally tend towards insight.