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Comment by lbarrow | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that it's pretty common for CS departments to get IRB exemption even when human participants are tangentially involved in studies.

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It is also quite easy to pull the wool over an IRBs eyes. An IRB is usually staffed with a few people from the medicine, biology, psychology and maybe (for the good ethical looks) philosophy and theology departments. Usually they aren't really qualified to know what a computer scientist is talking about describing their research.

And also, given that the stakes are higher e.g. in medicine, and the bar is lower in biology, one often gets a pass: "You don't want to poke anyone with needles, no LSD and no cages? Why are you asking us then?" Or something to that effect. The IRBs are just not used to such "harmless" things not being justified by the research objective.

see my other comment to the GP. pulling the wool suggests agency and intentionality that isn't necessarily present when you have disciplinary differences like you describe. Simple miscommunication, e.g., using totally normal field terminology that does not translate well, is different.

It is your job as a researcher to make the committee fully understand all the implications of what you are doing. If you fail in that, you failed in your duties. The committee will also tell you this, as well as any ethical guideline. Given that level of responsibility, it isn't easy to ascribe this to negligence on the part of the researchers, intent is far more likely.

No, it is your job as a researcher to make sure you never even bother to submit to the IRB something that might fail review.

Sometimes you might need to make the committee understand before a full review when you are asking where a line is for some tricky part, but you ask about those parts long before you have enough of the study designed to actually put it before the review.

Ethics are a personal responsibility. You should be personally embarrassed if you ever have something fail review, and probably should have your tenure removed as well since if your ethics are so bad as to put before the board something that fails you will also do something even worse without any review.

It is absolutely my job, but I don’t necessarily have actionable information that I created a misunderstanding.

I submit unclear thing

Thing is approved

Thing must have been clear right?

'Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.' - Alfred North Whitehead

I've seen from a distance one CS department struggle with IRB to get approval for using Amazon Mechanical Turk to label pictures for computer vision datasets. I believe the resolution was creating a specialized approval process for that family of tasks.

That sounds like a disconnect from reality.

I think it is because many labs in CS departments do very little research involving human subjects (e.g. a machine learning lab or a theory lab), so within those labs there isn't really an expectation that everything goes through IRB. Many CS graduate students likely never have to interact with IRB at all, so they probably don't even know when it is necessary to involve IRB. The rules for what requires IRB involvement are also somewhat open to interpretation. For example, surveys are often exempt depending on what the survey is asking about.

Machine learning automatically being exempt is a huge red flag for me. There are immense repercussions for the world on every comp sci topic. It's just less direct, and often "digital" which seems separate but it's not.

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