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You spammed a million people for this? Enough that over a hundred thousand people spent the time and energy to write an email reply? Please do justice to the

You spammed a million people for this? Enough that over a hundred thousand people spent the time and energy to write an email reply? Please do justice to the collective time you took up with the survey. Could you break down the data by name and/or gender of both the sender and the respondent? Test multiple hypotheses simultaneously? For example, in page 1002 of the referenced research article (http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/marianne.bertrand/research/papers/emily_lakisha_aer.pdf http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/marianne.bertrand/research/p...), they break down a whole slew of other qualities that may have affected response rate. It's entirely possible that the name choice for your study has more of an effect than the perceived race association of those names. The "99.9% confidence" cited is really not that, and is subject to various biases which are hard to discern.

ohashi 14y ago
The spamming part really bugged me too. It seemed like he harvested these emails rather than any form of opt-in. This seems like bad science in general.
- jcr 14y ago
  I agree with you about the harmful spamming aspects being troublesome. If it was a medical trial that harmed the test participants, it would be deemed unethical. On the other hand, using opt-in would have resulted in a bias in the results. The experiment might be ethically dubious in regards to harming participants, but the design of the experiment is still logically sound. Calling it "bad science" is fair if your position is based purely on the ethical implications, but typically, the phrase "bad science" is used to describe improper experiment design and erroneous conclusions. Eric left out a lot of wanted/needed details and data about his experiment. Due to the ethics questions involved, it would be best if his data was release and his experiment was evaluated, rather than lots of other people repeating the same or similar experiments. The harm is already done, so let's try to learn from it. Maybe I'm just being too forgiving?
jules 14y ago
Assuming on average 10 minutes was spent by the receiving end, the OP has just killed 0.24 human lives to conduct this study. Or if we value a human life at $7 million [1], the damage is about $1.7 million. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

ohashi 14y ago

The spamming part really bugged me too. It seemed like he harvested these emails rather than any form of opt-in. This seems like bad science in general.

jcr 14y ago
I agree with you about the harmful spamming aspects being troublesome. If it was a medical trial that harmed the test participants, it would be deemed unethical. On the other hand, using opt-in would have resulted in a bias in the results. The experiment might be ethically dubious in regards to harming participants, but the design of the experiment is still logically sound. Calling it "bad science" is fair if your position is based purely on the ethical implications, but typically, the phrase "bad science" is used to describe improper experiment design and erroneous conclusions. Eric left out a lot of wanted/needed details and data about his experiment. Due to the ethics questions involved, it would be best if his data was release and his experiment was evaluated, rather than lots of other people repeating the same or similar experiments. The harm is already done, so let's try to learn from it. Maybe I'm just being too forgiving?

jules 14y ago

Assuming on average 10 minutes was spent by the receiving end, the OP has just killed 0.24 human lives to conduct this study. Or if we value a human life at $7 million [1], the damage is about $1.7 million. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life