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by lucideer 1819 days ago
I know you mean well but I think you completely missed the above commenters point.

You've replied here with answers to address their (our?) potential concerns, but the commenter never said they had concerns about the project itself, rather that this particular blog post doesn't "sell" or explain the value add well. That's feedback on the project's communication strategy, not on what it's actually doing.

> > Why? What's in it for them? Since when was giving our data to third parties a good idea? There is literally no motivation presented here.

> The motivation is enabling crowdsourced scientific research that benefits society.

You seem to be confusing "theys". The question is what motivates participants, not what motivates researchers.

1 comments

> You seem to be confusing "theys". The question is what motivates participants, not what motivates researchers.

Contrarily, you seem to be confusing “theys”, yourself.

There exist participants that are motivated by participating in research that benefits society.

Just like there exist individuals motivated by lending their computing resources to the various @Home research efforts.

But if the participants are limited to people who are motivated solely by participating in research, wouldn't that add significant bias to that research?
Indeed, sampling bias is a large concern.

Nonetheless, much of psychology research conducted in the US has made do with ridiculous sampling bias - the US college student is anecdotally considered to be the most-studied population in the world.

Doesn't the field of psychology have pretty serious issues with the replicability of their experimental results?
Indeed, anecdotally, if not empirically, that is the case. Nonetheless, psychology is a highly operationalized field.

In other words, every thorough study begins with an assessment and revision of the consensus language being used to describe reality.

On that front alone, psychology is one of the most hard sciences around.

Deep learning is directly attributable to psychology research, for what it is worth.