I recently caused a bit of drama in my professional sphere by sharing statistics I had been keeping on how good my co-workers are at their jobs. The work we do is in public, and it's known and expected that I'll be watching them and sharing feedback with them on their performance, and/or talking about their performance with others. The only thing I did differently was write down my observations on a notepad, and once I had a few hundred data points, I shared anonymous statistics about the whole group's average performance. A few of them asked to not be included in this, and I refused.
This made several people upset, and they seemed to think I had violated some important norm around privacy or consent. I disagreed, since it was information I already would have had access to normally, it's not private information; it's expected that I'll talk about it with others, and it was all anonymous so it couldn't impact the reputation of any particular person.
Right now, I don't see a good reason why this was unethical. If when this market closes I have changed my mind and I believe that any part of what I did was unethical, I'll resolve to NO. Otherwise I'll resolve to YES.
I don't need to be convinced that everything was unethical; even if I'm only convinced that I should have let people opt-out, or that I shouldn't have shared it publicly, that'll be enough to resolve to NO.
I'm bidding this market up to near 100% as an incentive for people to provide me with arguments I find compelling.
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I'm not taking a stance on the other issues here, but if you're going to do this at all then I don't think opt-out makes sense. Because maybe I'm just projecting here, but *I'd* be much more likely to opt out if I were on the low performing end - it'd be embarrassing to be the bad-at-your-job data point, even anonymously (and I also might not sufficiently trust the anonymity to hold). If this correlation holds strongly enough for other people too, then allowing opt-out would significantly skew your data, rendering it much less useful.
Big fan of spreadsheets and statistics. However, given that you had a lot of data points, it seems low-cost for you to just respect other people’s preferences not to be included. I don’t know that it’s strictly unethical per se, but if you do the cost-benefit calculation, it doesn’t impact your data much but it makes people upset, so it seems at least a kind thing to do to remove them.
@Conflux I agree that's true in the short term. Long term though, I think it's dangerous to have norms that too strongly allow people to control other people's behavior. If I want to walk around my neighborhood and count how many houses are red, I shouldn't need consent for that, and a request from a neighbor to be omitted should be seen as ridiculous.
@JoyVoid No, I think such norms are harmful. We need scientists and journalists to be able to investigate people who don't want to be investigated.
@IsaacKing Ah I expressed myself poorly, sorry. In what cases would you see a request about not being able to be investigated as reasonable then, if any? Are there privacy or consent concerns you see that would be okay to take into account in general?
@JoyVoid If it's a context in which the vast majority of people agree it's inappropriate to observe someone (e.g. in the bathroom), then that should be respected.
If the information is identifiable, like a list of individual people and how many mistakes each of them made, I think that starts to approach harassment.