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Comment by lbarrow | Hacker News Reader

The response makes the researchers seem clueless, arrogant, or both - are they really surprised that kernel maintainers would get pissed off at someone deliberately wasting their time?

From the post:

  * Does this project waste certain efforts of maintainers?
  Unfortunately, yes. We would like to sincerely apologize to the maintainers involved in the corresponding patch review process; this work indeed wasted their precious time. We had carefully considered this issue, but could not figure out a better solution in this study. However, to minimize the wasted time, (1) we made the minor patches as simple as possible (all of the three patches are less than 5 lines of code changes); (2) we tried hard to find three real bugs, and the patches ultimately contributed to fixing them

"Yes, this wastes maintainers time, but we decided we didn't care."

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Fascinating that the research was judged not to involve human subjects....

As someone not part of academia, how could this research be judged to not involve people? It _seems_ obvious to me that the entire premise is based around tricking/deceiving the kernel maintainers.

Yeah, especially when the researcher begins gaslighting his subjects. He had the gall to call the maintainer's response "disgusting to hear", and then went on to ask for "the benefit of the doubt" after publishing a paper admitting that he decieved them.

For comparison, imagine that you attented a small conference and unknowingly became a test subject, and when you sit down the chair shocks you with a jolt of electricity. You jump out of your chair and exclaim, "This seat shocked me!" Then the person giving the presentation walks to your seat and sits down and it doesn't shock him (because he's the one holding the button), and he then accuses you of wasting everyone's time. That's essentially what happened here.

And given the apparent failure of UMN's IRB, banning UMN from contributing to the Linux kernel honestly seems like a correct approach to resolve the underlying issue.

Probably science journals should suspend publication of any human research done in UMN. That might get this issue the attention it deserves. These were human trials without IRB pre-approval, but IRB condoned it afterward?

That was my thinking too, surely their school's IRB would have a field day with this. The question is whether they ran this by their IRB at all. If they did it, there would be implications on the ethics of everything coming out of UMN. If they didn't, then the same for their lab. I know at my school things were quite clear - if your work requires any interaction with any human not in your lab, you need IRB approval. This is literally just a social engineering experiment, so of course IRB should have reviewed it.

https://research.umn.edu/units/irb

They ran it by the IRB after publishing the paper, and the IRB issued a post-hoc exemption.

Disgusting.

This is an indignant rebuttal, not an apology.

No one says "wasted their precious time" in a sincere apology. The word 'precious' here is exclusively used for sarcasm in the context of an apology, as it does not represent a specific technical term such as might appear in a gemology apology.

Your particular criticism is not fair in my opinion. Both researchers went to undergrad outside the U.S., so they may not speak English as a first language. Therefore, it's not fair to assume to intended that connotation.

I also think it's not fair criticism. While "precious" can indeed have sarcastic connotation, I don't detect that tone in the paragraph at all.

That single word alone is enough to alter the tone of the paragraph when read. That the rest of the paragraph is plausible does not excuse it.

I disagree. The text of their paper and their emails show a firm grasp of english.

I’m not inclined to be particularly forgiving, given the overall context of their behaviors and the ethical violations committed. I choose to consider that context when parsing their words. You must make your own decision in that regard.

That would be considering they can say virtually anything and pretend when criticized that it was just a miscommunication problem because they don't speak English well enough. Which depending on the consequences, can not necessarily absolve from responsibility even if it would give elements for excuses -- well at least for the first time, certainly not if they continue their bullshit after it!

If they have a problem in mastering English, they can take lessons, and make native speaker review their communication in the meantime.

The benefit of the doubt can not stick for ever on people caught red-handed. It can be restored of course, but they are now in a position where they drastically shifted the perception by their own actions, and thus can't really complain of the results of their own doings. Yes, they can not make mistakes anymore, and everything they did in the past will be reviewed harshly, not for further condemning them without reasons, but just to be sure they did not actually break things while practicing their malicious activities.

I am from outside the US, and it’s perfectly fair to criticise a professionals ability to use language the way its supposed to be; that’s your job, if you can’t do that then don’t take the job.

Their English is perfectly competent, but I just don't think it's fair to assume that they know the connotation of every English turn of phrase, especially when that assumption is being using to castigate them as "sarcastic".

I think this may be unintended. It is very hard to formulate a message that essentially says both "we recognize your time is valuable" and "we know we waste your time, but we decided it's not very important" at the same time, without it sounding sarcastic on some level. Inherent contradiction of the message would get through, regardless of the wording chosen.

“We determined after careful evaluation of the potential outcomes that the time wasted by kernel maintainers was, in total, sufficiently low that no significant impact would occur over a multi-day time scale.”

If I can come up with the scientific paper gibberish for that in real-time, and I don’t even write science papers, then these people who understand how to navigate an ethical review board process surely know how to massage an unpleasant truth into dry and dusty wording.

I think that they just screwed up and missed the word “precious” in editing, and thus got caught being dismissive and snide towards their experiment’s participants. Without that word, it’s a plausible enough paragraph. With it, it’s no longer plausibly innocent.

The quote is translated to English as "your puny concerns is nothing compared to our Science", so it only covers one of the two bases. To cover both, they had to include some explicit verbiage recognizing the value of time being wasted, and they went a little overboard with "precious", making it sound fake - as it actually was.

Or more charitably: "Yes, this spent some maintainers time, but only a small amount and it resulted in bugfixes, which is par for the course of contributing to linux"

Indeed! "we could not figure out a better solution in this study".

There IS a better solution: not to proceed with that "study" at all.

Exactly. Since when is "people will sometimes believe lies" a uncertain question that needs experimental review to confirm?

Maybe that cop convicted yesterday was actually just a UMN researcher investigating the burning scientific question "does cutting off someone's airway for 9 minutes cause death?".

Careful, the prosecution’s witnesses testified on cross–examination that there was no evidence of bruising on Floyd’s neck, which is inconsistent with “cutting off someone's airway for 9 minutes”.

Well, or do what an ethical research would do and seek authorization from the board of Linux foundation before doing any (who knows potentially illegal social engineering attacks) on team members.

Next study would involve creating fake grant to study researcher review process of discerning which grant is a scam or not

Your honor, I tried to find any solution for testing this new poison without poisoning a bunch of people, but I carefully considered it and I couldn't find any, so I went ahead and secretly poisoned them. Clearly, I am innocent! Though I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused.

> Unfortunately, yes

That is the perfect example of being arrogant

> We had carefully considered this issue, but could not figure out a better solution in this study.

Couldn't figure out that "not doing it" was an option apparently.

> clueless, arrogant, or both

I'm going to go with "both" here.

Had him as a TA, can confirm. Rudest and more arrogant TA I've ever worked with. Outright insulted me for asking questions as a transfer who had never used Linux systems before. Him implying he was ignorant and new is laughable when his whole demeanor was that you're an imbecile for not knowing how these things work.

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