If those extreme studies were to happen at a non suppressed rate we would be asking for IRBs and talking how science can't regulate itself.
So IRBs might be effective but they suffer from the prevention paradox.
The basic argument here is that rules are ineffective because bad actors ignore them.
- Before IRBs, unethical experiments were done by professors and grad students with disposal to all of the resources they normally have.
- People don’t always know what the ethical implications of their study is, or how it could negatively impact participants.
- The IRBs are not there to stop research. They are there to help people figure out how to conduct research ethically.
IRBs don't need to be ran by anyone more competent than a 5 year old to catch the cases you're talking about. What they have metastasis to today is just another part of the administrative industrial complex which has strangled academia.
Could you give some examples of what cases I’m talking about? I’m just dying to see what kind of straw man argument you’ve been building.
Turns out 5 year olds might catch all the bad experiment but due to lack of understanding in the field they will also reject a lot of valid experiments. Domain experts and people who have thought a lot about ethics might have better false positive and false negative rates.
Regulating constraints which impose a prevention paradox is though and is vulnerable to over bureaucratisation. I am unaware how this is handled but you told me nothing convincing which indicates that there is no back pressure limiting how much bureaucracy can be created by IRB.
Yes. For example, every time we see someone here talking about A/B testing, they're talking about human experimentation. Do these humans buy more often when shown A or B?
I consider it unethical as they don't even inform test subjects nor do they seek consent. Unfortunately, I seem to be a minority.
I don't think this argument invalidates the concept of review boards though. If anything it supports their expansion into national or international law.
Apparently there was some concern about inducing epileptic seizures. Not that there was any evidence that optical illusions, on their own, separate from the flickering of the computer screen, could cause seizures. But someone had the idea and then it couldn't be un-un-boxed.
The IRB submission process would have been too long to finish the study by the end of the semester (by the time I found out about it). So I just... didn't tell anyone I had already posted the demo online, before I ever even learned that IRB existed, and had a bunch of people on a game development forum on which I was a regular go through the study.
In my case, it was super low stakes. I mean, people into game development are subjecting themselves to the dodgy apps all the time. But when I tell this story today, there are two types of responses: those who have done academic research and laugh at my story, and those who haven't and start crying about "HuMaN eXpErImEnTaTiOn!!!"
I should start putting that on my business card: "formerly engaged in unlicensed human experimentation."
Who am I joking? I don't have business cards anymore. It's going on my Twitter profile.
The only sane solution I've seen to that is to make everything go through security review, even if the review is a simple "we don't need to review this." If everyone knows everything needs review, it makes it very hard to forget about it and incentivizes people to involve security folks with their projects ASAP in the hopes of getting review done early on / avoiding being blocked by it.
You'll always need exceptions to the rule, so you can have some sufficiently high up VP or similar sign off on releasing things without review (and with the caveat that it's still going to get reviewed, it just won't block release), but that's a lot easier to manage than dealing with random developers deciding it for themselves.
It also helps a lot to have a culture where developers learn about security too, but just like researchers and ethics, they'll have perverse incentives to downplay/ignore risks so you still need other, differently incentivized people, to enforce "checks and balances."
It sounds like IRBs are not designed to review all or even most (animal?) experiments and I think that's unfortunate. It seems like a win for everyone if we get better ethics coverage.