Information Cascades: Cooperators or Cheaters?
When newcomers join a community, they are likely to copy the social networks of a role model they picked. In the study about the collapse of cooperation, researchers divided the participants in the networks into two types: cooperators who contribute to the community, and cheaters who exploit the cooperators. It is like group work that […]
Information Cascades | Social Proof, False Information & Performative Activism
When considering the ideas of social influence (social proof) and its intersection with information cascades, my mind automatically thinks of viral videos/posts. From a social sciences perspective, I see myself influenced by social proof on social media. More specifically, I find myself interacting or liking a video if it already has thousands of likes compared […]
Power laws in worker strikes
We’ve seen how many phenomena related to popularity follow power laws. Music downloads, book purchases, scientific citations, and city population size are a few areas where power laws are a good fit. Many of the common examples of phenomena fitting a power law strike us as seeming “good”. It’s good for a musician or author […]
Bayes Theorem Explaining COVID-19 Testing
Bayes Theorem is a critical component of understanding the COVID-19 testing effort that the United States has undertaken and that all individuals at Cornell participate in. Michael Lewis elaborates about exactly how the variability in testing results impacts the tests’ takeaways in a Significance Magazine article. There are two important concepts to understand: sensitivity and […]
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