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Comment by anp | Hacker News Reader

Based on my time in a university department you might want to cc whoever chairs the IRB or at least oversees its decisions for the CS department. Seems like multiple incentives and controls failed here, good on you for applying the leverage available to you.

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I'm genuinely curious how this was positioned to the IRB and if they were clear that what they were actually trying to accomplish was social engineering/manipulation.

Being a public university, I hope at some point they address this publicly as well as list the steps they are (hopefully) taking to ensure something like this doesn't happen again. I'm also not sure how they can continue to employ the prof in question and expect the open source community to ever trust them to act in good faith going forward.

first statement + commentary from their associate department head: https://twitter.com/lorenterveen/status/1384954220705722369

Wow. Total sleazeball. This appears to not be his first time with using unintentional research subjects.

Source:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=Lor...

This is quite literally the first point of the Nuremberg code research ethics are based on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code#The_ten_points_...

This isn't an individual failing. This is an institutional failing. This is the sort of thing which someone ought to raise with OMB.

He literally points to how Wikipedia needed to respond when he broke the rules:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...

I didn't see any unethical work in a quick scan of the Google Scholar listing. I saw various works on collaboration in Wikipedia.

What did you see that offended you?

You realise that the GP went through the trouble to point out that research on people should involve consent, and that they [wikipedia] needed to release a statement saying this. What does that tell you about the situation that gave rise to that statement?

Got it, and @Tobu's comment describes the issue perfectly. Thanks!

As far as I can tell, the papers he co-authored on Wikipedia were unlike the abuse of the kernel contribution process that started last year in that they did not involve active experiment, but passive analysis of contribution history.

Doesn't mean there aren't ethical issues related to editors being human subjects, but you may want to be more specific.

They claim they got the IRB to say it's IRB-exempt.

A lot of IRBs are a joke.

The way I've seen Harvard, Stanford, and a few other university researchers dodge IRB review is by doing research in "private" time in collaboration with a private entity.

There is no effective oversight over IRBs, so they really range quite a bit. Some are really stringent and some allow anything.

Which would suggest the IRB’s oversight is broken in that institution somehow, right?

Well, the university of Minnesota managed to escape responsibility after multiple suicides and coercion of subjects of psychiatric research. From one regent: “[this] has not risen to the level of our concern”.

https://www.startribune.com/markingson-case-university-of-mi...

Wow, very interesting read (not finished yet though), thank you. To me, this seems like it should be considered as part of UNM's trustworthiness as a whole and completely validates GKH's decision (not that any was needed).

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