Del Harvey and David Hand

Del Harvey and David Hand probably never heard of each other.  Hand’s book “The Improbability Principle” makes clear that something that has a 99.99% chance of not happening still is pretty likely to happen when it gets lots and lots of chance to occur.  Del Harvey’s TED talk makes clear that most people who write those 140-character messages on Twitter are fine people.  Harvey heads the Twitter security team and she has the data to back up her claim. However, just as Hand points out, something with a chance of 1 time in ten thousand times will happen a great deal when there are hundreds of millions of chances for it.  As she says, her job is to work out whether a given Twitter user or a given practice on Twitter is threatening or menacing or evil in some way.

In accord with Deming’s principle, most people most of the time are acting conscientiously, morally and in a friendly way.  That means that when she and her team are more or less responsible for 500 MILLION tweets each day, the great majority are not their business.  But, it still means fifty thousand bad apples in the Twitter stream EACH DAY! So, from the point of view of Harvey’s team, each day will certainly be filled with highly improbable events.

It takes both experience and knowledge to know what is going on.  She uses the example of “Yo, Bitch”  Is that a strong putdown?  An attempt to be nasty?  Possibly, but in some circles, it is ok, typical even.  There are even people writing tweets who are pretending to be dogs and they talk like that to each other.

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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety