Teenager on TikTok Disrupted Thousands of Scientific Studies with a Single Video | Hacker News Reader

Teenager on TikTok Disrupted Thousands of Scientific Studies with a Single Video

theverge.com

From the article "Prolific, a tool for scientists conducting behavioral research, had no screening tools in place to make sure that it delivered representative population samples to each study.". I would argue that studies from this tool were already disrupted if you are not screening your users in some way.

Yes, that just means that any studies based on this platform were already wrong, it's just that no one knew.

The TikToker sent too many female-identifying people aged around 21

To fix it they've released a press release to tech blogs which will bring older and more male-identifying people in

Very meta

Off-topic, but do you always use the “sex identifying” construction in place of “men / women”? - it seems a bit inelegant, and if you hold “TWAW” as true also unnecessary.

Not intended as snarky, but I was slightly jarred by the ACLU’s removal of the word “woman” from a Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote yesterday, and wondered whether this was now ‘a thing’ (at least in the US).

Just trying to be inclusive tbh

I try to remove gender references in all of my comments, but in this instance it was relevant so I went with the most inclusive option I could think of

No idea if that's a thing for you folks, I'm in the UK. I'd have to look up ACLU to see what it stands for

Your mindfulness is appreciated!

Should probably just use "men" and "women", boys and girls, unless otherwise necessary, for clarity and simplicity. Someone offended by a lack of preemptive qualifying verbiage is not worth placating. If they ask for different words, you can add them in later conversation.

Preemptively tacking on qualifiers can bury the actual meaning of the idea you're trying to communicate.

Can or did? I'd rather placate the people that want to be involved than placate those that would exclude them, even if that is what is happening.

If I'm doing that wrong, I'll change my ways. e.g the person saying that it hints towards folks not being men or women if they have transitioned and we use different words which is a fair point, I'll have to look into that.

As for losing the meaning of my comment - A lot of my comments get downvoted because I'm crap at getting an idea down without editing it (we're on the 5th edit as I write). That is nothing new.

If my comment is meaningless give it a downvote

Wouldn't it be detrimental if the topic was sex? you'd have to specify "female-identifying people born with a vagina".

I'm not kidding, recently I read advice for lube for "people born with a vagina".

Sex is not gender, it's detrimental for communication to mix the two.

Two people have said it is detrimental to communication so far yet nobody has requested any form of clarification on what I said

If anything my frequent lack of punctuation needs correcting first, that has caused infinitely more confusion. Weirdly in 20 years of forum use I've never had anyone start a discussion about it.. :)

Just as with punctuation, the intended meaning is clear within context. I knew the article was about women, but reading "female-identifying people" made me do a double take.

I don't question trans women were included too, but your phrasing made me doubt if this Tiktoker's audience was mainly trans women.

Related, from recent news: It’s now possible to read articles of several hundred words length on abortion without finding a single instance of the words “woman” or “women”.

“… before many people know that they are pregnant.”

“… pregnant patients …”

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/09/texas-abortion-ban-f...

Your comment is easily understood and needs no further editing. I have been working on being more inclusive and appreciate seeing examples on how its done.

There's a silver lining: a few decades ago, we mostly knew about the psychology of college students. After this, we knew about the psychology of Mechanical Turk workers. Now we also know the psychology of 21 years old female TikTok users. That's what I call progress! In a few centuries we might know about actual human psychology.

This is odd considering Prolific makes users input a bunch of demographic info (age, sex, location, education, ethnicity/race, etc) so that researchers can target specific demographics for their surveys. Did the researchers just assume that Prolific would deliver something balanced on it's own?

I just signed up to prolific. Their onboarding tutorial/example survey references prescreening and eligibility. I'm guessing it was on researchers to filter the demographics to what was relevant to their study.

I think this is actually the right approach. Some 'balancing' algorithm would have to make assumptions about what's normal, then then the excluded participants wouldn't even show up in the research data.

I think yes, since that’s what it roughly did normally if you didn’t balance. This was a change in the normal behaviour, so if you ran a study from one week the next you wouldn’t have known that your data would change dramatically without additional screening.

If linking to a public study can "break" it, it was already broken.

The tool was bad but the data could still be good if they were getting representative samples.

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