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Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

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Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#21

Post by terminalshort »

shimman wrote: post #15
terminalshort wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What counts as research? If I make UI changes, I guess it's ok to roll it out to everyone, because that's not an experiment, but if I roll it out to 1%, then that's research? If I own two stores and decide to redecorate one and see if sales increase vs the other store, do I need government approval? Also I would like an example of something a social media company does that you wouldn't be able to get approval to do o…

Are you being serious right now or just engaging in "asking questions" to suppress others thoughts? Why are these types of comments so common on this site? No obviously we aren't in fact talking about making basic code changes, but maybe if those changes are being consistently done that clearly show users getting more depressed or alienated it should be questioned more and finally regulated. Fun fact, the last data p…

> Are you being serious right now or just engaging in "asking questions" to suppress others thoughts?

I must be really good at asking questions if they have that kind of power. So here's another. How would we ever even know those changes were making users more depressed if the company didn't do research on them? Which they would never do if you make it a bureaucratic pain in the ass to do it.

And, no, I would much rather the companies that I explicitly create an account and interact with to be the ones holding my data rather than some shady 3rd parties.

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#22

Post by terminalshort »

CodingJeebus wrote: post #18
terminalshort wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What counts as research? If I make UI changes, I guess it's ok to roll it out to everyone, because that's not an experiment, but if I roll it out to 1%, then that's research? If I own two stores and decide to redecorate one and see if sales increase vs the other store, do I need government approval? Also I would like an example of something a social media company does that you wouldn't be able to get approval to do o…

> Also I would like an example of something a social media company does that you wouldn't be able to get approval to do on animals. One possible example is the emotion manipulation study Facebook did over a decade ago[0]. I don't know how you would perform an experiment like this on animals, but Facebook has demonstrated a desire to understand all the different ways its platform can be used to alter user behavior and…

Isn't this just what every media company has done since the beginning of time? You think the news companies don't select their stories based on the same concept? And I'm pretty sure you would get approval to do something similar to animals given that you can get approval to actually feed them drugs and see how that affects their behavior.

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#23

Post by asdff »

terminalshort wrote: post #16
imiric wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people in these industries are collectively responsible for millions of preventable deaths, and they, their families, and generations of their offspring are and will be living the best lives money can buy. And yet one person kills a CEO, and they're a terrorist.

Large and complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable and have tradeoffs and consequences that can't be foreseen by anybody. Error rates are never zero. So basically anything large enough is going to kill people in one way or another. There are intelligent ways to deal with this, and then there is shooting the CEO, which will change nothing because the next CEO faces the exact same set of choices and incentives a…

Pretty predictable what happens when you deny coverage for a treatment someone needs

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#26

Post by asdff »

windowpains wrote: post #12
imiric wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people in these industries are collectively responsible for millions of preventable deaths, and they, their families, and generations of their offspring are and will be living the best lives money can buy. And yet one person kills a CEO, and they're a terrorist.

You say “a CEO” like it’s just a fungible human unit. In reality, a CEO is much much more valuable than a median human. Think of how many shareholders are impacted, many little old grey haired grannies, dependent on their investments for food, shelter and medical expenses. When you think of the fuller context, surely you see how sociopathic it is to shrug at the killing of a CEO, let alone a CEO of a major corporatio…

The CEO literally is a fungible human unit. Any job can be learned.

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#27

Post by vovavili »

Grimblewald wrote: post #7

From history we know that research left unchecked and unrestricted can start leading to some really dark and horrible things. Right now I think it's a problem that social media companies can do research without answering to the same regulatory bodies that regular academics / researchers would. For example, they don't have to answer to independant ethics committees / reviews. They're free to experiement as they like o…

>Right now I think it's a problem that social media companies can do research without answering to the same regulatory bodies that regular academics / researchers would. For example, they don't have to answer to independent ethics committees / reviews.

These bodies are exactly what makes academia so insufferable. They're just too filled with overly neurotic people who investigate research way past the point of diminishing returns because they are incentivized to do so. If I were to go down the research route, there is no way I wouldn't want to do in a private sector.

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#28

Post by h4kunamata »

Since when is this news??

Whole industries are paid for decades, the hope are the independent journalists with no ties to anybody but the public they wanna reach.

Find one independent journalist on YT with lots of information and sources for them, and you will noticed how we have been living in a lie.

Re: Nearly a third of social media research has undisclosed ties to industry

#29

Post by terminalshort »

BrenBarn wrote: post #19
terminalshort wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large and complex systems are fundamentally unpredictable and have tradeoffs and consequences that can't be foreseen by anybody. Error rates are never zero. So basically anything large enough is going to kill people in one way or another. There are intelligent ways to deal with this, and then there is shooting the CEO, which will change nothing because the next CEO faces the exact same set of choices and incentives a…

Well, given what you said, one obvious mechanism is to cap the sizes of these organizations so that any errors are less impactful. Break up every single company into little pieces.

That doesn't really help because the complexity isn't just internal to the companies, but also exists in the network between entities that make up the industry. I may well even make it worse because it is much harder to coordinate. e.g. If I run into a bug cause by another team at work, it's massively easier to get that fixed than if the bug is in vendor software.

In terms of health insurance, which is the industry where the CEO got shot, we can pretty definitively say that it's worse. More centralized systems in Europe tend to perform better. If you double the number of insurance companies, then you double the number of different systems every hospital has to integrate with.

We see this on the internet too. It's massively more centralized than 20 years ago, and when Cloudflare goes down it's major news. But from a user's perspective the internet is more reliable than ever. It's just that when 1% of users face an outage once a day it gets no attention, but when 100% of users face an outage once a year everyone hears about it even though it is more reliable than the former scenario.

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