> If the objective of the traffic experiment had been to deliberately get a certain group of cars stuck in a traffic jam, this would absolutely be unethical.
A closer analogue would be a traffic experiment designed to gauge the emotional effects of a particular route. That's an important difference.
The article itself says the experiment was designed to look for evidence of emotional contagion, which is quite different from "it was designed to make people sad".
Also, in another thread it's pointed out that the effect sizes from this study were extremely small - something like 0.3% more negative words were used by ~150k people. The effect is said to be on the same scale as any minor UI change, like a size/color change of the "like" button. So it's hard to see this as anything other than folks looking for a reason to get outraged.
> The article itself says the experiment was designed to look for evidence of emotional contagion, which is quite different from "it was designed to make people sad".
That was their research goal, yes. Their methodology was this:
> For some, that meant 90% of all "positive" posts were removed from their newsfeed for a week, rendering the social network a pit of despair.
Research can be unethical even if the intention of the research is not.
For the traffic analogy, if part of that traffic experiment would involve a routing change that researchers know will likely cause a traffic jam, then the experiment will be unethical, no matter how warranted the research may be.
That's the reason you cannot use placebos to test life-saving medication (without prior informed consent), even though it would certainly be beneficial for science if you could.
And in Facebook's case, their research goal wasn't even that ethical in the first place. Maye we can have this talk if they try to find a cure for depression through emotional manipulation, but this was literally just about preventing people from leaving Facebook:
> "At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends' negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook."
"The conventional wisdom is that about 30% of patients suffer fractures or breaks during CPR. However, a 2015 study published in Resuscitation suggested that this percentage is quite a bit higher. The study analyzed autopsy data from 2,148 patients who received CPR for non-trauma-related cardiac arrest, and the statistics were as follows:
* Skeletal chest injuries were found in 86% of men and 91% of women.
* 59% of the men and 79% of the women had sternum fractures.
* 77% of the men and 85% of the women had rib fractures."
"The conventional wisdom is that about 30% of patients suffer fractures or breaks during CPR. However, a 2015 study published in Resuscitation suggested that this percentage is quite a bit higher. The study analyzed autopsy data from 2,148 patients who received CPR for non-trauma-related cardiac arrest, and the statistics were as follows:
* Skeletal chest injuries were found in 86% of men and 91% of women.
* 59% of the men and 79% of the women had sternum fractures.
* 77% of the men and 85% of the women had rib fractures."
There's a similar, though not quite as good, Chrome extension called Sidewise. Unfortunately Chrome itself is not as extensible as Firefox so there are issues in Sidewise, the most glaring being that the list of tabs appears in a separate window and Sidewise snaps its position and layout to match your Chrome window using some heuristics.
All that said, just use Firefox. It's a much better experience and after Quantum it's on par with Chrome in terms of UI performance.
The decisions taken by the Mozilla Corporation for the past years make them look like they've completely lost control of themselves. I don't feel like I can trust them at all. I don't want to know what they are going to pull off next week, so I've decided they won't execute any more code on my machine.
Well you gotta pick your poison. It's either them or Google. To be honest, "poison" is too harsh. Mozilla has done a few stupid things, but they're far more trustworthy than other Internet players.
- Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39088590-gene-machine) - by the Nobel Prize-winning discoverer of the ribosome, Venki Ramakrishnan, in the same vein as The Double Helix. Highly recommended.
I'm not so sure it'll be fun for everyone... that is only a couple of steps away from a Black Mirror episode (specifically S03E01, Nosedive). The risk of 'poor driver' ostracism/stigma is significant.
The road is a public space where privacy is not expected, and your behavior directly affects the safety of others. I'm not sure that we ought to protect "safe space to be a bad driver" the way other personality differences ought to be protected.
You assume that bad driving is a fixed trait. In addition, driver 'ratings' are given by other humans in the proposed system; humans are biased and sometimes even spiteful on the roads. A rating system sounds great in theory but wouldn't actually work.
Quiet has been the one life-changing book for me. I read it at a time when I thought of myself as unsocial (because I didn't like parties) and was uncomfortable expressing myself even among a large group of friends. After reading that book and realizing how widespread introversion is, I became more and more comfortable in my own skin. Ironically I also started enjoying more at parties because I wasn't judging myself constantly, which helped me become more of a pseudo-extrovert when I needed to be.
A closer analogue would be a traffic experiment designed to gauge the emotional effects of a particular route. That's an important difference.
The article itself says the experiment was designed to look for evidence of emotional contagion, which is quite different from "it was designed to make people sad".
Also, in another thread it's pointed out that the effect sizes from this study were extremely small - something like 0.3% more negative words were used by ~150k people. The effect is said to be on the same scale as any minor UI change, like a size/color change of the "like" button. So it's hard to see this as anything other than folks looking for a reason to get outraged.