Thesis on Morality & Autism Spectrum Disorders

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Well I'm not really sure about the protocol in these kind of surveys on Canadian Universities - but it was brought to our attention that her e-mail is invalid, so we contacted her mentor who knows nothing about it...

Off topic, well, we were, just a little.

Reading here somehow made me think of this clip, if you see the connection:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHFXG3r_0B8

Could it be that even as we speak, the OP is forming the same opinion as Arthur? Is this thread a mirror of how we come over to NTs? Ask us to answer a few questions about ethics, and we discuss advanced physics.

Anyway, who thinks hypothetical thought experiments are by nature useless, and why? Or is it just the particular thought experiments in the OP's survey?

Hmmm......the OP does seem to have gone rather quiet......have we been duped?

I find them useless, because they are hypotheticals, and superficial, one-dimensional ones at that.

You cannot even begin to assess a person's ethical values based on those questions.

You have know the person pretty intimately, IMHO.

Ethics is not something that could be "measured" really well via scientific studies.

At most, you'll obtain a very general idea--which is not enough to assess ethics.

It's possible:

One sign: the Invalid E-mail.

At least it didn't cost us anything other than a few minutes of our time!

Well thanks to the kind member of this forum who noticed that something might be fishy, we contacted her mentor and she said this:



Not sure why list a mentor who isn't aware of the study, and give a false e-mail?

And apparently the survey has been closed:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/survey-clo ... 93LQ_3D_3D

I think this is a good guide for the future if somebody wants to survey us:

Make sure the email is valid.

I should have thought of that!

And if this is so... ? Is it a bad thing? I am what I am. Am I supposed to feel that there is something wrong with that?
Also, the physics was advanced three centuries ago. It's now taught in middle school.


Thought experiments are very useful, but the ones in the OP's survey are poorly designed. That they should be well established in a certain field says more about that field than anything else, I think.

Here's a bad thought experiment:
A golden retriever named "implausible" is harnessed to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. How long will the dog have to pull to move the black hole 10 meters to the left?

Here's another thought experiment:
Suppose a student rushes through the process of creating an online survey to do some research for a class assignment and gets unexpected negative feedback from the group to be studied, suppose further that the student has made a typo in the email they provide and failed to go through expected procedures to clear the survey with their academic mentors. Suppose this is discovered when an admin of the online community invited to participate in the survey, failing to contact the student by email, contacts the student's teacher to ask about the survey.

What has the student learned about morality? Did the student learn more about autistic people or about their own nature?

Their own nature, probably.

Curious. It doesn't quite smell like troll.

I suppose it's not unknown for students to think independently from their tutors, but given the way they load students up with work, it would have to be an uncommonly keen one that wanted to do anything that the tutor hadn't asked them to do.

And why give a false email address along with a valid address for the tutor who didn't know about this matter?

Doesn't a new member have to give a valid email address to sign up on WP? Obviously that address is confidential, but knowing whether or not it was the same address might shed light on the mystery.

We can't see the e-mail she provided upon registering - only Alex and those with the admin powers can.

But isn't it a bit curious that now all of a sudden the survey has been closed?

Not sure what was the point of all this to be honest

Well the winners apparently get rewards: http://www.library.yorku.ca/web/blog/20 ... announced/

To be honest, I think it was a case of good intention, with perhaps not the best way to go about it. We have another student asking for respondents right now. The approach was a bit different. Sometimes people aren't aware that different demographics- and certainly different arenas- should be approached in different ways. That is not necessarily due to malice. It's also possible that just everything lined up wrong- miscommunication with instructor, misunderstanding about how to gather data, issues with email and server, on and on and on. If one hasn't gathered respondents in this way before, one hasn't had the learning experience to know what works or doesn't.

I truly don't think any harm was meant, and my hunch is that it is legit. I think that a lot could be gained if the student considers the feedback and reworks the approach. If they are willing to do that, maybe individuals could consider participation in a second effort? [if the assignment allows as part of procedure.]

I would be willing to but it doesn't mean anyone else has to, obviously. I chose not to answer this one, though.

That may be a different extra poster presentation activity that the students do based on work they have been doing. Unsure. This seems to be a requirement for a class?
It's hard to say really.

I think it would be really cool if Courtney came back and put all this speculation to rest with a post.

I don't think this seems like trolling either. The OP seemed sincere.
I hope she wasn't freaked out by our discussion of the survey--if so, I hope she can realize that we were discussing the survey, not her as a person.