“The Epoch Times is a far-right[16] international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement”
A link to his own website and his bibliography is not a peer review.
You said his work has been peer-reviewed, but when asked to provide such peer-reviews, you only cited a news article about him, and his self-published bibliography. Interestingly enough, his own bibliography doesn't even link to peer reviews of the Google/election-focused research.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=robe...
In his bibliography you can see many follow up papers. So you are just wrong saying his methodology and approach is the work of a lone warrior.
If you are asking me to summarize his research body that’s unreasonable to show my claim that it’s peer reviewed, which it as shown above demonstrably is.
Also, The EpochTimes is not a good source, it's a far-right site run by IMHO a religious movement that borders on a cult. It publishes Q-Anon theories on its front page uncritically.
And "peer-reviewed" by whom?
https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/robert-epstein-google-b...
"Epstein is a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research, but other than a technologist who doesn’t appear to help with the studies, Epstein is the organization’s only staff member, according to the AIBR website. Epstein is the co-author of a study published by his employer, only the summary of which is available, that claims that biases in Google’s search results may have tilted millions of undecided voters to vote for Clinton in the 2016 election. That was the study Epstein described in his Senate committee testimony, where he didn’t mention that his huge claim is based on monitoring the search results of just 21 undecided voters out of 95 voters for a 2017 white paper. In his submitted testimony, Epstein did provide seven pages of citations—but all of them are papers or op-eds he wrote or co-wrote himself. Only one of them—a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about how biased results produced by search engines could have the ability to sway undecided voters—was peer-reviewed. Even that study didn’t demonstrate that this has actually happened."
There you go, n=21. This guy fails high school stats. Fails 30% large counts condition, fails 10% sample condition, probably isn't a random sample either.
With regards to this specific paper, you say yourself the methods paper is peer reviewed. It’s also been cited 470 times according to Google scholar, which is an academic home run.
Will a methods paper apply the methodology at scale? Look at his follow up papers for that.
The point on scale is fair if true, but the paper Slate criticize is a methodology paper which is not where you would expect a large scale study. I haven’t read his body of work to get a full picture of that question, and it’s not clear to me that Slate did so either. No matter what Slate is an activist publication that at times misrepresent to support a predetermined conclusion.
Slate's criticisms were factual, they are of course biased, but so what?
This study's statistical parameters are really shoddy, and just straight up bad data. Garbage in, garbage out. His PNAS original study had a larger sample, but again, the conclusions don't really follow, and there are many more explanatory effects for how search behaves (including his own point about how searches can create band-wagoning and reinforcing behavior), and the claims that it shift votes are not established.
One only has to imagine that if more voters are searching for Clinton and clicking Ads or the first few SERP results, then the search engine might take that as a signal to return MORE of those results, which causes more people to do follow up searches for Clinton info, establishing a positive-feedback loop without any BS about tech companies putting their foot on the balance. We've in fact seen this behavior before, famously when Microsoft's Bing started returning search results for documents it couldn't possibly have crawled, simply due to click-tracking.
Plus, the sheer fact that a majority of world wide media were against Trump, Google's crawler is going to end up with a lot of pro-Clinton content. I'm not just talking about US mainstream media and newspapers, but UK, French, German, Canadian, Australian, you name it, a majority of the media did not like Trump. The search engines can only deal with the data they're crawling and the user behavior they're receiving.
I know it comes as a shock, but a majority of not just Americans, but the Western world did not have a high opinion of Trump in 2016. You don't need to invent elaborate tech conspiracies to end up with pro-Clinton or Trump-critical articles getting surfaced since that was the actual Zeitgeist.
It's amazing to me that even after winning in 2016, Trump and his cadre were still sore that Clinton won the popular vote. Well, newsflash, but the Democrats have been winning the popular vote pretty much every election. Add up all of the votes House & Senate members got, and you'll see far more Democratic votes, because the GOP generally represents lower population density districts. Again, not surprising.
The GOP could use that information to decide they need to change policies to attract different demographics, and widen their audience, but it seems like in the post-Trump era, it's down to claiming vote fraud, media bias, and doubling down on populism and weird stuff about their opponents being Groomers or CRT theorists. It's honesty sad, because the GOP used to run some campaigns on issues that had cross cultural appeal, like crime reduction, but now it's all weird culture war stuff.
I agree the GOP fails at providing a policy alternative. That is undoubtedly true, but it’s not clear it will remain so.
That said look at how Hispanics in polls are moving heavily towards GOP. But gaining votes by just not being democrat and putting on a pretense of not supporting the woke policies is not a stable way to shift coalitions.
> weird stuff about their opponents being Groomers or CRT theorists.
More than 50% of the second biggest teacher union voted to teach CRT even in states where it’s illegal. I’ll summarize why a few popular activist teaching tools accurately fit the term grooming.
Queer theory as praxised in schools seek to teach the student to deconstruct their sexual identity and interpret it in an oppressor/oppresssed dynamic. Goal isn’t to acknowledge and stabilize a sexual identity, but to destabilize the kid sexually into constantly engaging in a critical introspection of their sexuality as a Marxist activist. Queer theory seek to destabilize in the vulnerable stage when the kid is learning that they are a sexual being. This was piloted by Lukacs in the Hungarian communist revolution.
CRT does the same as queer theory, but for race.
Critical pedagogy (SEL, the other CRT etc) that is applied across almost all schools instead of teaching skill, teach the student to interpret the words and math through their personal emotion applying the Marxist process to find the oppressor/oppressed dynamic instead of skill.
Paulo Freire that invented critical pedagogy, like all Marxists, view skills teaching as evil because it at best train people to take on roles in the meritocratic system they deem evil. In Marxist theology skilled people manifest the status quo reality through false consciousness. They believe a skilled person act like a robot based upon instructions of dead people.
Critical pedagogy results in a huge expected drop in functional literacy in high school graduates, that means they can not read words on a page and understand what the sentences mean, and the math skills are dropping in the same way. That’s not surprising when you spend school talking about how you feel about a subject instead of how to establish a shared interpretation and practicing skill.
SEL is a super evil corruption of group psychology techniques by teachers unlicensed in psychology to break kids resistance to the teachers activism.
Why should we allow Marxist teachers to indoctrinate in Marxist process instead of teaching skill?
What's really happening is the "CRT" in high schools being taught was already being taught before it got labeled CRT. Here's examples of what it boils down to: 3/5ths clause, red lining, crack vs cocaine sentencing, etc. What's controversial about this? Even conservatives admit for example, that the criminal justice system is inherently racist due to sentencing differentials.
>"Queer"..."Marxist"..."Communist"...
Do you realize how crazy this sounds? Maybe in college if you take a course in Queer Theory, you might get this, but K-12 are not teaching kids to "deconstruct sexual identity and interpret it in an oppressor/oppresssed dynamic". Do you even have kids in school? My kids are in hyper-liberal California school system and they teach ZERO of anything you're said. It's nonsense.
> teach the student to interpret the words and math through their personal emotion applying the Marxist process to find the oppressor/oppressed dynamic instead of skill.
Reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikehX9o1JbI Actual SEL in classroom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaCVfeWKTp0
Here is the most famous teacher on TikTok that uses SEL techniques, are you really going to claim this woman is teaching a super evil marixst corruption of psych? Good lord: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc_RnQvaqoY
Where dafuq is the Marxism? They're teaching the kids self control, to regulate their emotions. I have a daughter, whenever she gets something wrong, or doesn't understand something, she gets frustrating and emotionally upset, and while she is upset, nothing else the teacher says is heard. At home I have to reassure her that failure is the process of learning, that its ok to get something wrong, or not understand it, that's a step along the way to understanding. Only after I manage to calm her, can she return to doing her work. She's too much of a self-critic/perfectionist.
What I see is a bunch of stodgy conservatives who often have no clue about what is actually going on in their schools, because they don't really spend hours a day with their kids (I spend 2hrs a day helping my kids with school every night), and freaking out because things aren't done the way they learned them, and therefore, since it is different, it is bad. I know exactly what is being taught in my kid's middle school and high school history class. No marxism, no "CRT", but yes, guess what, they do teach the factual horrors of colonialism, of slavery, Jim Crow, and the REAL causes of the civil war, not the "Lost Cause" BS.
Our high school has on campus counselors, psychologists (you can get therapy), and they specifically teach conflict resolution and empathy. So unlike my high school experience which was full of bullies and fights and cliques, the kids are remarkably decent towards one another.
And ironically, none of this is really any different than what my Catholic middle school taught me growing up. the "SEL" techniques were all over my Catholic middle school. If two people were in conflict, the nuns would talk to you about empathy for the other person and how you made them feel. They literally preached recognition of other kids feelings, with a religious overtone (because that's how Jesus would act towards others), and this was 40 years ago. They just didn't call it "SEL".
What I see is the conservative movement demonizing pretty milquetoast things, and most people just mindlessly repeating CRT CRT CRT or SEL SEL, and never having actually visited a classroom or read their kid's textbooks.
Prove me wrong: Cite a K-12 textbook that "deconstructs sexual identity", or teaches "Marxism"
Let me give you an example of NOT CRT. One of the Math textbooks banned in Florida had a statistics question about racism in a Implicit Association Test (https://www.fldoe.org/academics/standards/instructional-mate...). Are you telling me that using an actual test questionnaire as a data to construct a model on is CRT just because it's subject matter is race? it's not even a systems view (which is what CRT is), but an individual bias dataset. Explicitly NOT CRT, but LABELED CRT and banned.
What we're seeing is CRT being used as a swearword to ban any discussion of America's racist history in Southern/Conservative school districts because they don't like it. Just as "Voter ID" under the guide of securing elections (which have statistically insignificant fraudulent votes) is being used to roll back decades of progress in civil rights after the Voting Rights Act provisions expired and failed to get renewed.
It's fooling no one.
Your mileage may vary.
Also, The Epoch Times is a far right source -- not trustworthy generally.
Humans write and train algorithms, and the quality of a search engine stems from biasing the result. Human moderation is also done by people with bias.
So tech workers that tilt heavily woke, not even just democrat, are likely to both intentionally and unintentionally bias results.
Tech oligarchs of cause will pursue their own politics, but their use of repressive tolerance to censor true unfavorable stories to their politics (eg Hunter Biden laptop showing curruption) and pushing dubious stories favorable to their politics (eg russia collusion) should give them editorial liability as a publication not a section 230 company.
[1] Russia interfered with the 2016 election (though "collusion" seems a few steps too far into "they changed people's votes", which to my understanding did not happen with any high frequency, they just advertised and propagandized illegally) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
People at tech companies have political persuasions across the board. It's naive to think the companies are any sort of concerted bloc of voting power, or that the company leadership is the new room of smoking men around a conference table deciding elections.
Political party leadership, on the otherhand....
The laptop is real as verified by the FBI that has opened a grand jury on Hunter Biden due to this and other evidence.
Likewise, FBI verified that the Hailey Biden diary was real in its illegal raid of Project Veritas.
Despite the hoax Mueller found nothing despite spending immense resources. With regards to the Russia collusion hoax, follow the Durham indictments around it that show it was a Hillary political ploy all along. Example indictments is Fusion GPS fabricating the Steele report for Hillary, a tech executive thar tried to plant evidence on Trump computers, a Hillary lawyer that lied to the FBI about not acting on behalf of Hillary etc
Wokism, like all forms of Marxism, demand praxis (“do the work”) from its adherents which is why it’s so visible and progressively take over organizations until all they do is praxis.
Side note: Activism through praxis is not optional, because Marxist theology has this idea that their adherents have a special gnostic knowledge where they like a God create reality. The idea is that once all alive are Marxist utopia will be spontaneously created by the collective.