Aarhus University’s reply to SJW letter

In the fallout of the OKCupid dataset release, some people wrote a complaint letter to Aarhus University. I haven’t read the letter, but Aarhus University has now replied to it: Reply to Oliver Keyes et al Basically, the letter affirms everything I’ve already said, namely:

  • University was not involved, so:
  • Their ethics rules do not apply.
  • I can put the university on my name because I’m a student there, and this does not imply that I’m claiming to be working there. (Indeed, this is normal practice for Master’s students.)

A bonus statement is:

  • “We are sure that EK has not learned his methods and ethical standards of research at our university, and he is clearly not representative of the about 38,000
    students at AU.”

The last one is funny because it can be interpreted two ways. While they presumably mean it in a negative sense, I see it as positive: I managed teach myself statistics, programming, data science and psychology, and put those skills to use to gather this dataset. The university cannot claim much credit for these accomplishments. ;) Indeed, their only deed was having a linguistics program so easy that I could pass classes by spending perhaps a few days on each class at the end of each semester. The Danish state then provides the funds for living.

For those wondering who Oliver Keyes is, basically he is such as annoying SJW that even Encyclopedia Dramatica has a page on him. One can also find info from more serious sites such as this one, or this one.