51–60 of 162 posts
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> This company deliberately made people sad Which would be correct, surely?
It's technically correct but implies malicious intent. It's like saying "Pfizer deliberately injected a substance in people that kills them" to describe a failed drug trial.
"News media deliberately make people outraged. This ought to be the final straw". I don't have issues with the study in general. You do want to know whether and how you can influence people in a positive or negative way, especially if you want to avoid it. There's really no other way to find out than to study it. They should've gotten clear consent for participation in that study, but that's about it from my point of…
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Let's imagine hypothetically that sad, negative posts get more engagement by whatever metric Facebook uses, and Facebook was paying no attention to sentiments at all and ending up putting more sad posts on feeds. Would that have been unethical? I can't really see what would be so different.
Is it unethical to create an automated system that maximizes global unhappiness for profit?
Product Person #1: Hey, here’s a writeup that says if we show too many positive posts to people that it creates bad feelings. Should we show less positive posts? Product Person #2: Not sure, wouldn’t negative posts make people feel worse? Product Person #1: Wow, I donno, maybe we should try adjusting additional posts people see one way a bit and see what happens? Product Person #2: Not a bad idea, how about we try bo…
That's the definition of an unethical experiment design and would be considered academic misconduct if that were academic work. Regardless of intent, fb probably shouldn't be allowing front end devs to design psychological experiments at mass scale. https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Experimental_ethics
Product Person #1: Hey, here’s a writeup that says if we show too many positive posts to people that it creates bad feelings. Should we show less positive posts? Product Person #2: Not sure, wouldn’t negative posts make people feel worse? Product Person #1: Wow, I donno, maybe we should try adjusting additional posts people see one way a bit and see what happens? Product Person #2: Not a bad idea, how about we try bo…
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...
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It's technically correct but implies malicious intent. It's like saying "Pfizer deliberately injected a substance in people that kills them" to describe a failed drug trial.
"it creates bad feelings" If this is the hypothesis they are testing for, the problem is they subjected people to a psychological experiment without consenting to it, for the ultimate purpose of their own financial gain. How is that not malicious intent?
I don't think facebook engineers or data scientists care what people feel when they're adjusting their models, they only care about time spent on their platform or some other overly reductionist metric. One could argue that chasing super-efficiency will always result in abominations, but I think its hard to say that someone is doing something imoral by just doing the human equivalent of gradient descent in the optimization problem of driving engagement. That's not to say that we shouldn't have a conversation about this and not figure out ways to make these super efficient and powerful companies find ways to be satisfied with organic engagement.
Product Person #1: Hey, here’s a writeup that says if we show too many positive posts to people that it creates bad feelings. Should we show less positive posts? Product Person #2: Not sure, wouldn’t negative posts make people feel worse? Product Person #1: Wow, I donno, maybe we should try adjusting additional posts people see one way a bit and see what happens? Product Person #2: Not a bad idea, how about we try bo…
I don’t know anyone that uses Facebook anymore that likes it. Everyone I know who uses it says, “I’m thinking I should delete it soon”. Universally, the number one criticism is, “All I ever wanted to see are my friends’ posts and every update shows me less and less of those”. Does anyone actually know people who avidly use and love Facebook? It seems like Facebook is like the Christian church where the church and eve…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's technically correct but implies malicious intent. It's like saying "Pfizer deliberately injected a substance in people that kills them" to describe a failed drug trial.
"it creates bad feelings" If this is the hypothesis they are testing for, the problem is they subjected people to a psychological experiment without consenting to it, for the ultimate purpose of their own financial gain. How is that not malicious intent?