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Comment by alanwong | Hacker News Reader

OP and an editor of the news site (Inkstone) that published the article.

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments. It's getting late over here but we can answer your questions tomorrow.

For those of you interested, here's a link to the published research: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20171765 (full text requires a subscription.)

And here's a draft of the research (PDF): http://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/econ/documents/2018-fal...

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How did they get permission give the students uncensored access?

Hi, reporter of the story here. From their paper, it looks like they didn't. "We intentionally keep the language introducing the tool [VPNs] vague to avoid political pressure from the school administration."

The acknowledge a grant by the National Science Foundation of China, so I assume they convinced someone there that knowing more about the effects of censorship would be useful for the government as well.

The researchers made clear that they are "independent of the government." They also assured participants that "we will erase all survey data if we are faced with political pressure to share the data with government or school officials." They used email and WeChat (similar to WhatsApp) messages to communicate with the students and even hand out free one-year account of Youku (similar to Youtube) to obscure the study's explicit focus on censorship.

That doesn't mean they didn't get approval to do so. Obscuring the focus on censorship is just good study design, since they wanted to find out whether explicitly pointing out that foreign media report differently has an effect.

I'm not sure what their choice of communication method has to do with anything.

I just spent way too long figuring out the NSFC grant system, but I did eventually find the grant acknowledged in the paper. [1]

Turns out he got 2.8 million yuan from 2015-01 to 2019-12 for research on behavioral economics, which I guess is broad enough that he could have done the research without telling anyone at the NSFC about it. I guess we'll be able to tell based on whether he gets a new grant approved from 2020 onwards.

[1] can't link, but you can find it with 批准号 71425006 and 批准年度 2014 at https://isisn.nsfc.gov.cn/egrantindex/funcindex/prjsearch-li...

I've been seeing a great lot of military movement across the Guangdong province in last few days. Any info on that?

Just today, saw a column of 20 bridge layers and an escort of comparable size on the rail near Changping

(With JS disabled the site is useless. T_T )

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