XKCD: Research Ethics
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XKCD: Research Ethics
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Re: XKCD: Research Ethics
#2The newsfeed doesn't show us every single thing that every friend does. So it has to make some kind of decision about which things to show and which not to show.
If the newsfeed accidentally did a poor job of this (and mine often does), we could accuse facebook of being incompetent (or less than perfectly competent).
If, however, newsfeed intentionally did a poor job of this, and purposely showed us things specifically designed to make us sad, that's gone beyond "less than competent". That's "actively malicious".
THAT is the reason people are getting upset. Or at least it would be if they understood how facebook works.
Re: XKCD: Research Ethics
#3The newsfeed doesn't show us every single thing that every friend does. So it has to make some kind of decision about which things to show and which not to show. If the newsfeed accidentally did a poor job of this (and mine often does), we could accuse facebook of being incompetent (or less than perfectly competent). If, however, newsfeed intentionally did a poor job of this, and purposely showed us things specifical…
But you're assuming the competent case is based on some criteria which is ideally unbiased and fair to all. I say, it's impossible to design such a system without knowingly affecting people emotionally on some level.
Re: XKCD: Research Ethics
#4The newsfeed doesn't show us every single thing that every friend does. So it has to make some kind of decision about which things to show and which not to show. If the newsfeed accidentally did a poor job of this (and mine often does), we could accuse facebook of being incompetent (or less than perfectly competent). If, however, newsfeed intentionally did a poor job of this, and purposely showed us things specifical…
And what standards body has defined the metrics so that we can measure what a "poor job" is in this case? The comic still stands, Facebook could very well be doing a poor job now, and is that unethical? What if FB's input had no overall effect? Is the test still unethical even though no one was sad? How will we define what is and isn't unethical? If advertisements makes me sad, and FB experiments with placing more ads on my news feed, leading me to become depressed, is that unethical? Are they still intentionally doing a poor job even though they are probably more or less unaware of my disposition to ads?
I think Randall has a fair point here. FB has essentially been doing this for years and something about their latest test got all our panties in a bunch. Its clear though now, FB never had to adhere to any sort of standards for their website.
Re: XKCD: Research Ethics
#5It annoys me a good bit that when I choose the 'recent stories' feed rather than the 'top stories'...whatever it is...that the setting gets reverted every time the app is restarted, or occasionally in the web version as well. Of course, it's par for the course, so it's not like I should be surprised. Yet it seems like the setting is stored on the Facebook servers and seems to persist across browser sessions on the web app.
I guess you could chalk some of that up to incompetence, but most of it to apathy.
Re: XKCD: Research Ethics
#6The newsfeed doesn't show us every single thing that every friend does. So it has to make some kind of decision about which things to show and which not to show. If the newsfeed accidentally did a poor job of this (and mine often does), we could accuse facebook of being incompetent (or less than perfectly competent). If, however, newsfeed intentionally did a poor job of this, and purposely showed us things specifical…
And if they had selected for your feed based on "what will make you buy stuff in the ads" and not publish the results, that would just be "business as usual".
And yet that seems a lot more dangerous than this study...
Re: XKCD: Research Ethics
#7It annoys me a good bit that when I choose the 'recent stories' feed rather than the 'top stories'...whatever it is...that the setting gets reverted every time the app is restarted, or occasionally in the web version as well. Of course, it's par for the course, so it's not like I should be surprised. Yet it seems like the setting is stored on the Facebook servers and seems to persist across browser sessions on the we…
I just read this the other day, if you have a link that you access facebook from you can change it to be http://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr [0] and that will fix it for you[1]. Be that as it may, I do agree that it seems to be developer apathy that this hasn't been fixed already.
[0] http://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/262206/make_your_facebook_new...
Re: XKCD: Research Ethics
#8The newsfeed doesn't show us every single thing that every friend does. So it has to make some kind of decision about which things to show and which not to show. If the newsfeed accidentally did a poor job of this (and mine often does), we could accuse facebook of being incompetent (or less than perfectly competent). If, however, newsfeed intentionally did a poor job of this, and purposely showed us things specifical…
And what standards body has defined the metrics so that we can measure what a "poor job" is in this case? The comic still stands, Facebook could very well be doing a poor job now, and is that unethical? What if FB's input had no overall effect? Is the test still unethical even though no one was sad? How will we define what is and isn't unethical? If advertisements makes me sad, and FB experiments with placing more ad…
Going further: what if this was broad exploratory study, not meant to test any specific hypothesis? What if they rated posts based on thousands of features, a parameter space large enough to guarantee they would find plenty of correlations (both spurious and substantial), and randomly perturbed each user's feed and monitored how the features of their contributions changed? I would expect that they already do this, and from the very small amount of detail I've seen in articles about the mood factor so far, I wouldn't be surprised if this was just one of the more interesting correlations that fell out of that sort of process.
Re: XKCD: Research Ethics
#9Companies have been purposely making people feel bad about themselves for a very long time.
Ads intentionally make people feel ugly, lazy, stupid, fat, dirty, smelly, dandruffy, lonely and ashamed so they'll buy whatever product is on offer.
Commerce is all about manipulating people for profit. I'm not a Facebook fan, but tell me how this is worse than standard operating procedure with every other consumer product?
Re: XKCD: Research Ethics
#10Companies have been purposely making people feel bad about themselves for a very long time. Ads intentionally make people feel ugly, lazy, stupid, fat, dirty, smelly, dandruffy, lonely and ashamed so they'll buy whatever product is on offer. Commerce is all about manipulating people for profit. I'm not a Facebook fan, but tell me how this is worse than standard operating procedure with every other consumer product?
Because those aren't psychological experiments. Nobody's claiming it's ethical for an ad company to make you feel bad about yourself, but that's not really the point here. The point is that there are strict ethics rules for running experiments, and one of those rules is, except for a limited exception (that does not apply), the subjects need to be knowingly taking part in the experiment.