Facebook recap
The discussion over the Facebook experiment seems to involve a lot of people being honestly surprised that other people feel differently.
One interesting correlation based on my Twitter feed is that scientists involved in human subjects research were disturbed by the research and those not involved in human subjects research were not. This suggests our indoctrination in research ethics has some impact, but doesn’t answer the question of who is right.
Some links that cover most of the issues
- Michelle Meyer: How an IRB Could Have Legitimately Approved the Facebook Experiment—and Why that May Be a Good Thing
- Coding Coduct: Frame Clashes, or: Why the Facebook Emotion Experiment Stirs Such Emotion
- John Foreman: Facebook’s solution to big data’s “content problem:” dumber users
- Tal Yarkoni: In defense of Facebook
- Zeynep Tufekci: Facebook and Engineering the Public
- Adam Kramer (one of the people who did it)
- (update) Tyler Cowen: Should we care that Facebook is manipulating us
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »