gwern comments on Results of a One-Year Longitudinal Study of CFAR Alumni - LessWrong

33 Post author: Unnamed 12 December 2015 04:39AM

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Comment author: Unnamed 16 December 2015 03:15:36PM 6 points [-]

why do you hate science and the future of humanity

Because we promised to respect the participants' privacy. That includes (e.g.) not posting their income on the internet alongside other information that might be used to identify them.

Our current plan is to share the data with a few stats folks who also agree to protect their privacy. I've exchanged emails with Ilya about this, and we're looking for others.

Comment author: gwern 27 December 2015 09:29:32PM 0 points [-]

If salary is your main worry, why not transform it into a rank ordering? That erases specific salary numbers while still preserving enough information to run a lot of tests (for example, a lot of nonparametrics uses rank-ordering).

Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 11 January 2016 11:03:38AM 0 points [-]

(As I know you're well-aware,) there have been plenty of demonstrations of researchers managing to de-anonymize even supposedly anonymous datasets. Enough demonstrations that if I turn over personal information to any organization and they imply that they'll treat it as confidential (and CFAR certainly did), then I would consider even anonymized releases of that information as a mild breach of confidence unless they specifically warned me about the possibility of this when I was giving them the data.