4 ms·
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet. If you are going to do this experiment, it needs to be _double-blind_. Meaning PG cannot know which username his
by coderrr 18y ago
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet. If you are going to do this experiment, it needs to be _double-blind_. Meaning PG cannot know which username his post is going to show up under until after he has written it. Same goes for all the comments he writes (if you're going to measure those too).
If PG knows before hand what name his content is going to show up under there is a high likelihood of a bias on his part which he would be _unable_ to ignore even if he consciously tried. This is standard psych experiment stuff.
- attack_forgotpw 18y agoThis is easy to protect against. Just obscure pg's real name from a portion of the YC userbase. This is really an extremely easy test to get right if we think for a minute.
- coderrr 18y agoThat's a great idea. I think it would probably work, but I can think of one potential case where it would introduce some complications. If user1 sees 'pg' as the submitter and user2 sees 'blah' user1 might comment something which gives away that it is actually pg to user2. Now user2 might realize this and act on their pg bias. Can you think of a way to prevent this?
- kirubakaran 18y agoWay: group1 that contains user1 should be isolated from group2 that contains user2. They can't see each other's replies. But I wouldn't want such things to happen here except on Apr 1.
- attack_forgotpw 18y agoDo it per page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=165938 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=165938 There are a number of simple vulnerabilities but I've yet to see one that cannot be trivially protected against.