Stephen Downes

The idea is simple: pay 1500 individuals $15 to have an online conversation for half an hour with a stranger (total cost for the 1700 conversations would be $51000, by my calculations - must be nice to have that kind of money). Also, collect some demographic information about them, track how they say their moods change, document it all in something called the 'CANDOR Corpus'. Alvin Change puts a really interesting gloss on the study in this blog post, though he is not one of the study authors. What to make of this? I wonder what the conversations would look like if the participants were not American, not paid, not in the middle of a pandemic, and not aware they are being watched. I wonder how honest they are about reporting their feelings (especially given the implicit 'conversations make you feel good' finding from the study). I wonder if this was used to train AI. I wonder how many of these participants are in favour of the war. Via Alan Levine.