Hacker News Reader

Comment by braindongle | Hacker News Reader

> Facebook has acted on this and intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression, just to see if they could, and then they bragged about it.

No, they did not. They adjusted the proportion of positive emotional expressions and negative emotional expressions in users' news feeds in order to test for an association between that proportion and emotional expressions in users' posts. There are serious problems with what they did, but "intentionally made hundreds of thousands of people fall into a depression" is late-Slashdot style trolling.

http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf

View on HN

unethical science does not deserve to be wrapped in its journalistic language in an effort to detach it from the harm it caused, it deserves to be called out for what it actually is, in this case intentional psychological manipulation of people's moods without their knowledge or consent.

One does not grasp the true harm caused by unethical experiments by reading only the documented (published or non-published) scientific results. Two extreme examples which I am by no means comparing to that of Facebook, but rather as canonical examples of unethical science, include the Tuskegee experiments and Nazi experimentation. Reading only the published results of these experiments does not convey the horrific harm that actually occurred. The same principle applies to referring towards Facebook's scientific data as an argument that these experiements were not unethical. The scientific results only serve to shroud and conceal the actual activity which occurred in the production of these results.

(edited for clarity)

How do you distinguish between unethical science and A/B testing, or even just 'We changed our product, then didn't like the results, and changed it back?'

I would assume a core tenet of ethics and deciding if something is unethical is if it has the potential to harm people. Inducing depression to indiscriminate masses is pretty high on the list. It's not valid to compare the emotional impact of Facebook on millions of its addicted users to something like the color of a box of laundry detergent.

Selling cake has the potential to harm people, a moral framework needs a bit more subtlety than that to be sensible.

do folks "sell cake" to see if it worsens people's depression? this is more like selling cake that secretly has nuts in it which are known to cause allergic reactions without disclosing it.

Well, it's more like if the nuts had an unknown reaction, and the idea was to figure out what the reaction was by slipping it into some cake, and then observing.

which would be massively unethical if not illegal to do as a food manufacturer

Well, including laxative to judge how much people can tolerate before they get the shits isn't far off the mark from inducing depression.

FB - A little negative = meh

FB - More negative = major downer

FB - Totally negative = woah, look at the sorry state they are in now.

Cake - A little laxative = mmm this cake is special somehow

Cake - More laxative = nice cake, special, where is the roll of extra TP?

Cake - Dump it in = people home for days, the shits.

In both cases, not telling them is the ethics problem.

Basically the public trust boils down to people expecting others not to harm them. Depression can become chronic. The shits could damage someone requiring medical help.

Both are clear risks people would very likely avoid, if they knew.

FB - We want to run a depression test. Plz volunteer your feed and see if you get depressed.

Cake - We have a laxative that tastes great, but you might get the shits, plz have some cake.

See the problem?

Medical trials are also just A/B testing. waves hands

true, but most of them have opt in. . .. Like people know they are in the test even if they don't know if they are the control or not.

That was my point, apparently that was not obvious at all. That is what I meant by the "hand waving" part. Being apologetic about FB just because what they did was some kind of A/B testing does not redeem them at all.

The terms don't apply to the same context. A/B testing is a specific technique (well, not that specific) which can be used to do ethical science or unethical science.

I think one good discriminant is: Would you want to explain it candidly?

E.g.: "Starting next week, we'll try to affect your mood as part of an experiment". Or "the new version of our product purposefully tries to depress you a bit" followed by "we didn't like the results of it so we've changed it back".

There is at least a dense 50 years of research and writing on the topic of scientific ethics, it's a bit naive to pop into a thread and ask, "so what's the deeeeaaaal with human experimentation?"

To be clear, I think the question is where the line is between 'experimentation' and 'just doing what people do normally'.

Concrete example: I am in the process of trying to hire people right now. I'm not sure what the exact best way to do that is, so I vary how I interview over time and see how well it seems to work. I record what happens in a spreadsheet, and then later on I look at the 'data' to make some judgments.

Am I experimenting on my interviewees? Am I potentially harming them?

Well certainly if I ask question A in one interview, and question A' in another, and question A' is harder and I don't pass that person, then one might be tempted to argue that maybe that person would've done better on question A; therefore, I've harmed someone by 'experimenting' and making it harder for them to get a job. Rejecting someone can certainly make them depressed.

In principle this is no different from A/B testing an interview process, using real live humans no less.

So do I personally have an ethical obligation to disclose to everyone I interview that I am conducting human experimentation on them? Or is the only difference in power and scale—I am just one person, but Facebook can A/B test on millions of people at once?

> Well certainly if I ask question A in one interview, and question A' in another, and question A' is harder and I don't pass that person, then one might be tempted to argue that maybe that person would've done better on question A; therefore, I've harmed someone by 'experimenting' and making it harder for them to get a job. Rejecting someone can certainly make them depressed.

> In principle this is no different from A/B testing an interview process, using real live humans no less.

> So do I personally have an ethical obligation to disclose to everyone I interview that I am conducting human experimentation on them? Or is the only difference in power and scale—I am just one person, but Facebook can A/B test on millions of people at once?

Generally, when interviewing, we ask the same questions of each applicant. We adjust the questions from A to A' as positions are hired, and pools are assembled, but for a specific job, each candidate gets the same questions.

It would have to be different for open recruitment not tied to a specific job, but I haven't had to do that.

There is plenty of gray area in human protections law. Source: I'm a researcher who spent most of last week dealing with lawyers in multiple time zones on exactly how to write a bit of protocol in order to preserve the grey area (so as to avoid setting unnecessary precedent), while honoring the more stringent interpretation (to avoid even the appearance of skating onto thin ice).

Four years ago, having talked to some of the same lawyers about the same topic, none of us had any thought that it was a grey area. An a priori interpretation of the law was pretty clear: a more liberal position was (and is) perfectly legal. But the most anxious minds tend to prevail in these matters.

I enthusiastically support requiring Facebook to have an IRB greenlight any user impacting changes they want to make.

That's a terrific idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board

There is plenty of gray area in human protections law.

Of course, which is why the conversation continues. If it was settled at the beginning without nuance, it would be defined in black and white.

I'm not sure how your reply relates, though, since I was merely imploring GP to demonstrate any awareness of the state of research rather than jumping in with a lazy question-comment.

Elsewhere this is expressed by the slogan, "I'm 12 years old and what is this?"

Well if your study involves depressed people unknowingly being manipulated with negative newsfeed items that they didn't know they consented to being subjected to in a secret study, then that's unethical. The scientists aren't stupid, they knew beforehand that in a sufficiently sized population, there will be a segment of depressed people that they are influencing to commit suicide by being subjected to increased negative newsfeed material. That is unethical to me any way you cut it.

I disagree. If you Google for primary literature related to Tuskegee, you will find, front-and-center, publications describing the ethical disaster that it was. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2609060/ https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3372911/brandt_r... One does indeed grasp the horror.

And, where did the Nazis publish, again?

We certainly need people to responsibly interpret peer-reviewed literature for lay audiences. Responsibly.

>If you Google for primary literature related to Tuskegee, you will find, front-and-center, publications describing the ethical disaster that it was.

Your citations were published ~50 years after the Tuskegee exeripments. A proper analogy would be to compare your citations to the ethical condemntations of Facebook made 50 years from now.

>And, where did the Nazis publish, again?

The Nazis published in all of the front-and-center, mainstream publications after they were brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip (among other operations).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

> A proper analogy would be to compare your citations to the ethical condemntations of Facebook made 50 years from now.

When the findings are published has no bearing on the ethics of the experiments. Ironically, the half century lead time does not impinge on the impact, as much as the chronology strengthens the impact.

> And, where did the Nazis publish, again?

I can't answer that as it is generally agreed that this data should not be readily available, however Nazi experimentation was cited for decades, and much has been written over the ethics of this: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-ethics-of-using-medi...

> late-Slashdot style trolling

Off topic but that ^^^ is exactly why, after 20 years, I finally gave up on Slashdot and then stumbled across HN and couldn't be happier. I have, in recent times, gone back for a visit just to see what it's like and... realised my decision to leave Slashdot was made probably 10 years later than it should have been.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com