> You don't know the long term effects of random social media posts either.
Right, hence the whole rest of my message concerning intent, consent, and their importance with regards to morality and ethics.
> Was that also unethical?
Maybe? I wasn't there, I can't tell you. There are plenty of ways to act VERY unethically when it comes to sales and advertising, even while being truthful (e.g. you could omit some very important information). Deceptive advertising is a whole class of illegal actions in many developed nations, and not all of those actions involve the strictest definition of lying.
Not sure what hypothesis testing has to do with anything, experimentation certainly doesn't need to go hand-in-hand with statistical analysis.
I almost added a bit about taking the whole thing to its logical conclusion that the entire field of advertising and sales is arguably unethical. I haven't really thought that entirely through so I omitted it, but it's food for thought nonetheless.
Still, there's no oversight for either type of experiment (Facebook's or the color change). Where the border gets drawn between ethical and unethical is murky even WITH oversight, let alone without it.
Because you don't really know what the longterm effect on the subjects is going to be, especially w.r.t behavioral studies. The human psyche is still in many ways very much a black box, and there are plenty of questionable behavioral studies where the consequences of the study greatly outweighed the benefits.
As far as deliberate vs. random goes, it's an important distinction because intent and consent are arguably paramount when dealing with questions of morality and ethics - as reflected by our legal system, where intent and consent are often a source of debate. In this case, experimentation is clearly done with intent and often without explicit consent (as opposed to the implied consent given by the Terms of Use).
It's why giving someone HIV (or Syphillis) unknowingly isn't illegal or really all that immoral (because the infector is unaware), but it is illegal to infect people intentionally.
> For most engineers, including a number of very good and ethical people at Facebook, it’s surprising that this is even an issue.
Wow. That really hit home. I work for a large enough company that's constantly running experimentation, usually as A/B testing (not Facebook). It honestly never even dawned on me to consider how borderline ethical that is.
White hat security has got to be one of the most important but thankless fields in computer science today.
At best, there are bug bounties that may or may not be worth it depending on the severity of what you find and how many hours you poured into it.
Frequently, you get shit like this where the threat of imprisonment is very real (not that I think anything will come of this because it would be a PR nightmare, but the threat still looms).
And of course, at worst, we all can read about what happened to weev (admittedly exacerbated by him being a complete tool).
In retrospect though, I think it's more surprising that it wasn't thought of as a children's game to begin with, and I say that as someone who played it off and on in alpha.
It's not hard to draw the analogy that Minecraft is essentially "advanced Legos", and the prevailing view certainly is that Legos are primarily for children.
Why that's the case is a separate question, but I don't think it's contentious to say that most people assume Legos primary audience is children.
Eh. I dunno. When you get in that deep it kinda feels like it's an inevitability, one way or the other. I hate doing it because it's almost cliche at this point, but Avon Barksdale has a pretty good point:
"Comin up the way we did, you know, you kind of expect that. Waitin on it. See, the thing is, you only got to fuck up once. Be a little slow, be a little late, just once. And how you ain't gonna never be slow? Never be late? You can't plan through no shit like this, man. It's life."
> As far as I'm concerned, Adria Richards did pretty much zero wrong.
That's silly. The article posted by Amanda Blum above lists at least a couple different ways that Adria Richards could have handled the situation more constructively. It seems pretty obvious to most of us that nearly everyone involved acted wrong to some degree. The men shouldn't have been making the joke, Adria Richards shouldn't have posted the photo on Twitter, Play Haven and Sendgrid should've had more fortitude, etc.
> No way in hell would I ever comment on whether Adria Richards was ever a less-than-pleasant snowflake, because that'd make me part of the problem.
That's also silly. You're not allowed to have an opinion on someone because of their gender/ethnicity? Seems like a pretty sexist thing to say that a woman needs to be treated with kid gloves because of her gender.
> A plain HTML site is accessible, and will be accessible in a 1000 years. A site depending on (external) JavaScript sources will force John Titor to travel back in time to find version 1.x of jQuery.
Not to sound completely apathetic, but so what? Most of us aren't building sites that we expect to be around in 10 years, much less 1000 years. The ephemeral nature of what we're building isn't lost on us - we're trading that guaranteed longevity for an improved development process (though some obviously disagree).
Frequently, writing a traditional website with any sort of meaningful UI interactions was/is kind of a mess. Most of us don't write these applications (and you're right, they are applications) because we have any particular affinity for JavaScript, but because it makes the whole process much nicer. It still sucks, it's just nicer.
Sure, progressive enhancement is a thing. And it's a great idea. In practice, top-down directives will probably be something akin to "Sure, do that, but do it on your own time and not at the expense of anything else." The realized benefits are very low (the % of users with JavaScript disabled is incredibly small), and saying something like "our site won't be accessible in 1000 years otherwise" is likely to get you mostly blank stares. It's a pretty big investment with very little benefit to most companies.
Sure, 50 years down the road if these sites still exist they'll probably be nigh-unusable without some sort of "ES6 emulator mode", but so what? I don't think we'll go wanting for any historical artifacts from this time period. If we do, it'll be because future generations have no interest in our generation - not because we didn't produce enough relics.
Right, hence the whole rest of my message concerning intent, consent, and their importance with regards to morality and ethics.
> Was that also unethical?
Maybe? I wasn't there, I can't tell you. There are plenty of ways to act VERY unethically when it comes to sales and advertising, even while being truthful (e.g. you could omit some very important information). Deceptive advertising is a whole class of illegal actions in many developed nations, and not all of those actions involve the strictest definition of lying.
Not sure what hypothesis testing has to do with anything, experimentation certainly doesn't need to go hand-in-hand with statistical analysis.
I almost added a bit about taking the whole thing to its logical conclusion that the entire field of advertising and sales is arguably unethical. I haven't really thought that entirely through so I omitted it, but it's food for thought nonetheless.