To clarify: I’m in support of doing psychological tests on small scales and writing up the results on Less Wrong. I’m not in support of breaking certain ethical injunctions in the process.
If gwern had legitimately gotten a different self-experiment than Seth Roberts, and then the same process had transpired, I’d be entirely in favor of this post. It’s an important caveat to self-experimentation that you need to really watch out for confirmation bias, and trust people more if they’re willing to publicize negative results as well as positive ones.
But falsifying results to achieve that, even temporarily, was a bad choice (and it makes me less willing to invest my time in reading gwern’s self-experimentation in the future).
To clarify: I’m in support of doing psychological tests on small scales and writing up the results on Less Wrong. I’m not in support of breaking certain ethical injunctions in the process.
If gwern had legitimately gotten a different self-experiment than Seth Roberts, and then the same process had transpired, I’d be entirely in favor of this post. It’s an important caveat to self-experimentation that you need to really watch out for confirmation bias, and trust people more if they’re willing to publicize negative results as well as positive ones.
But falsifying results to achieve that, even temporarily, was a bad choice (and it makes me less willing to invest my time in reading gwern’s self-experimentation in the future).