this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Which is the exact opposite of what I was proposing. I'm saying that you can get a grant to collect your own data more easily if you know ahead of time that by collecting the data you're going to find something interesting.
This is analogous to the legal concept of "parallel construction", in which police can make use of evidence that would not be admissible in court to direct their investigation towards finding other evidence that proves the same thing the original inadmissible evidence would.
No you literally cannot. I’ve done this for a living. This is beyond the pale in scientific ethics and would be absolutely fatal for a career.
This is not the FBI or the NYPD. There is no court. There is a panel of your peers who have been through exactly all of those questions, and who consider the entirely morally offensive.
And the think is that it’s not even needed. If you’re in a position to work with this kind of data, there are legitimate sources of the data that will be made available to you which are documentable.
And you literally can’t sneak stuff in with parallel construction because you have to meticulously cite everything that you’re basing your research on. I don’t know how to be more plain than saying I would see a student expelled for this faster than I would for plagiarism. And now that I’m working more in the commercial side, working with stolen data would get you fired. There is a zero tolerance policy.
We have access to this level of data and more. If we need it, we will write a check for it and jump through the hoops to get it, and it will have gone through review for ethical research by people whose entire careers are grounded in studying scientific ethics so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.
I’m sorry if I’m being a bit enthusiastic about defending this point, but it’s something that the western scientific community has quite honestly fucked up for centuries and it involves something that makes almost all of us extremely concerned about companies like 23 and Me even existing. It’s a thing that we’re still figuring out, and that’s even under the legal and licensed access to that data. This is like talking to Richard Stallman about Palantir.