Who exactly needs to get approval from an institutional review board (IRB)?
dynomight.net
dynomight.net
I do accounting research. My human-subjects research involves surveying practitioners about their jobs, interviewing them about their experiences, and conducting very simple experiments online that ask them to make decisions. There is virtually 0 real risk to any participants of my studies. IRB does always give my studies "exempt" status, but it still has to be reviewed. And they will pester me about different things like where will store our data (Onedrive is fine, but dropbox is not for some reason). This process will typically take a couple weeks of back and forth.
Yet I have a friend who participated in a Kinesiology dissertation study where they were asked to do extremely strenuous physical activity. He fainted(!) at one point from the activity. And it seemed to them that there were relatively few safeguards from that happening. Now, I'm sure that study did have IRB approval, but it really got me thinking... are we really scrutinizing studies optimally?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/174701611100700...
The author also has a blog about IRBs: http://www.institutionalreviewblog.com/?m=1
As far as I know, it's possible to get OneDrive even HIIPA compliant, but I don't think so for Dropbox.
https://help.dropbox.com/security/hipaa-hitech-overview
In keeping with the theme of the OP, I don't know if that's been tested in court, soooo... Take that all for what you will.
How could they do it more efficiently?:
How could they know it's exempt without reviewing it? Should they take researchers' at face value? That seems to undermine the reason we have IRBs, which was unscrupulous researchers. Should we assume they are willing to torture people but not to mislead the IRB?
Why shouldn't data be private? How hard is it?
> a Kinesiology dissertation study where they were asked to do extremely strenuous physical activity. He fainted(!) at one point from the activity. And it seemed to them that there were relatively few safeguards from that happening.
Informed consent is essential to an IRB; your friend would have read and signed something detailing the activities and risks. Strenuous excercise to the point of exhaustion is a part of sports performance research, at least. As long as you inform people, they have the power to opt-out (not prisoners, 6 year olds, etc.), and no undue risk.
Think about how taxes work. The IRS doesn't check every person. You make rules, you perform random audits.
IRBs could easily do the same thing. Set some rules like (simplified) "No IRB necessary if your research doesn't physically touch a person". Researchers will read the rules and skip an IRB if they're in an exempt category. Then just audit at a high enough rate they won't lie.
Here in the Netherlands (we call it HREC, human research ethics committee) the process takes months and months to get permission to talk to people.
Like, “hey I’ve designed some cool new interaction design, I want to get permission to interview people and do human-centered design iterations.” Yes, you will need to spend dozens of hours on forms and wait months.
It cannot be ethical to put these many barriers on talking to humans. And, if you want to do something like an educational game for kids? Or support for the elderly? Or for your students? Well, those are vulnerable populations, so add a few more months.
Education research is extremely difficult here (in the USA it is exempt). How to conduct research on the use of AI in a class you are teaching? You can’t get retroactive consent.
The system is not reasonable.
You have never submitted an IRB.
Cool, I guess. I wouldn't want to participate if my answers were visible to my employer because honest answers could put my employment at risk.
> As an academic researcher, it's most frustrating in that it feels like IRB scrutiny doesn't seem to align with risk.
As a worker^H^H^H^H^H^Hhuman I find it most frustrating when academics don't understand what things I consider to be risks.
If my answers to your research are leaked, can they be tracked back to me? Onedrive is terrible, just look at Microsoft's repeated flagrant disregard for security. Dropbox is awful too, just look at how easy it is to accidentally a whole folder. Why would you store your data in such places instead of on a research computer with locked down access? That screams to me of a researcher who doesn't understand the value (and risk) of the data they hold. Or perhaps of a researcher who doesn't value that risk appropriately. Perhaps also researcher who doesn't coordinate with their IT department, or an IT department who's equally or worse as competent.
IRBs are simply a way to say "I had an independent group of ethical and legal authority review my research and they thought it was ok".
1) It doesn't even reference the relevant law
2) The relevant law is so simple and clear
"The Secretary shall by regulation require that each entity which applies for a grant, contract, or cooperative agreement under this chapter for any project or program which involves the conduct of biomedical or behavioral research involving human subjects submit in or with its application for such grant, contract, or cooperative agreement assurances satisfactory to the Secretary that it has established (in accordance with regulations which the Secretary shall prescribe) a board (to be known as an “Institutional Review Board”) to review biomedical and behavioral research involving human subjects conducted at or supported by such entity in order to protect the rights of the human subjects of such research."[1]
To put it succinctly this only relates to any entity which applies for a grant, contract, coop. agreement under chapter 6A of 42 USC.
This in no way relates to private research. It's easy to get hung up on regulation spaghetti code, but regulations cannot exceed the scope of the statutes, which in turn cannot exceed the authority of Congress.
Edit: add source [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/289
But the whole point of the article is that there are other cases when you need IRB approval besides this one. That's one of the myths he's busting.
> The government can’t possibly claim to regulate what me and my roommates eat at home! That would be stupid!” Yes, it would be stupid. But who says the world makes sense? Now, would you actually be prosecuted for violating those rules?
Author says "those rules" without actually citing anything.
There is no scenario in which the Secretary of HHS can create rules which would do what the author was suggesting. It is not even something Congress could do, which is why they haven't created a statute which goes beyond their authority in requiring these boards for anything other than research receiving federal funding. If the Secretary were to create such a rule, it would obviously exceed his authority.
The author actually go into how universities make their own rule that potentially affects teachers and students doing research with their own time and resources.
So they take it pretty seriously. More so in countries where it's easy to sue, though.
It's easy for people (especially the kinds of people who gravitate towards engineering) to get all worked up about the necessary implications of the regulations as-written. But it's also important to remember that being facings consequences would require
A) The intentional action of either a state prosecutor or an injured private party B) The involvement of a human being as a judge to interpret the facts and applicable rules
When you look at it from that angle, it's obvious why organizations like META just do the research, imho.
I was once trying to figure out taxes owed on some RSUs granted in California that vested in North Carolina (and some other edge case that I can’t remember). Hoh boy. What a rabbit hole. I didn’t think the CPA that I hired to do my taxes handled it correctly, so I started digging into the tax laws and regulations. Couldn’t find anything that covered my specific case. So I started digging into court cases involving disputes over RSU taxes owed in North Carolina and found conflicting outcomes.
I brought what I had found back to the CPA who basically said something along the lines of: there is no absolute “rule” for what to do in this case like you’re looking for. We make a good faith effort to mirror what was done in similar prior situations, write a number down, and then forget about it unless you hear from the IRS.
Did not make me feel very confident about the legal system.
This tends to be something people encounter a lot around tax, complex business structures, and various international dealings where you’re more likely to end up in an edge case that hasn’t been well explored.
Civil law systems (which are used in the non-English-speaking parts of Europe for example) don't have this property. In such systems, court precedents don't really exist, so if something isn't clearly defined by law, and there's no extremely ubiquitous legal interpretation that everybody seems to follow, you don't know whether it's legal or not.
For example, the Polish tax authority lets you ask for a tax interpretation for cases that aren't legally obvious, something that I believe the US would have handled via the court precedent system. It's not unusual for two people in identical situations to receive opposite rulings, and Those rulings are not binding on the authority that issued them.
In other words, you don't know how to handle your tax situation, you ask your tax authority, they tell you "hey, we're the tax authority, we're telling you to do x", you do x, they audit you, they say "this isn't clearly defined in law, we now believe you should have done y instead, here's your orange jumpsuit."
And eventual orange jumpsuit would be decided by the court, not tax authority.
If you're a software engineer and you're knee-deep in analyzing court cases to find out how to file some tax correctly, you're definitely overthinking it. The CPA was exactly correct.
(Hint* You can't)
> In the legal world, however, this assumption does not hold. This is because unlike the laws of nature, political laws are not consistent. The law human beings create to regulate their conduct is made up of incompatible, contradictory rules and principles; and, as anyone who has studied a little logic can demonstrate, any conclusion can be validly derived from a set of contradictory premises. This means that a logically sound argument can be found for any legal conclusion.
The Myth of the Rule of Law:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I-JhqpU3_0r_HL06hP-5DABhEtG...
I have also been thinking about how basing morality on following laws is a bad idea. You should not be afraid of breaking laws or rules if they are stupid. All of modern workers rights, women's rights, etc are based on brave people of the past that were not afraid of breaking stupid laws of their time, why should today be any different.
Yes that is 2 different countries. But it is similar. States have their own laws.
You can't expect the law across 3 jurisdictions to work out every permutation and legislate for it. There are 52 (I guess more... lots of territories) * 51 permutations of moves so 2652 moves that are possible.
In addition you are talking RSUs and not some vanilla thing like claiming an expense.
> So what happens in practice is politicians write a vague law. Bureaucrats turn that law into very detailed (but often still vague) specific rules. Those rules might or might not be “legal”, but nobody want to risk fighting them in court. If the regulations are particularly ridiculous or likely to be overturned if challenged, prosecutors may quietly stop bringing cases. But the regulations still sit there on the books. And people still usually pay attention to them, because why risk it?
What I thought was missing was an acknowledgement of the circumstances that would cause a _prosecutor_ or _other litigant_ to decide to _bring an action to court._
Prosecutors are political, have limited resources, and are ultimately more or less accountable to electoral forces. Their prerogative is (almost) never going after every single person who does an action that is technically illegal. Factors like harm, the reputation of one's actions in their community, and their alignment with the political establishment are going to be considerations.
As written, I could see the article maybe deterring a particularly rules-abiding individual from running a potato-eating weight loss experiment with their roommates. I've seen friends and relatives get all wound up worrying about whether something is technically illegal in some marginal way.
Understanding the human factors in the pipeline between a potentially unlawful action and a consequence for it is really important. All the institutions that get anything done are keenly aware of them.
I don't think it's fair to call that a deficiency, though; both the letter of the law and the practical applications are complex and interesting topics in their own right(s?), and either could fill a lengthy article as we see here. Both are welcome! One doesn't preclude the other. I would be interested in reading an article covering what you describe too.
Separate rant: I live on the west coast and am annoyed when I vote because of the number of ballot measures. None of them are sufficiently detailed and fall victim to vague language that's open to interpretation. I'd rather "hire" law makers to do the hard work of details law creation.
But they have been sued, sometimes for extraordinary amounts, as have their employers, corporate sponsors, etc. And they have lost funding for their research and the trust of everyone above (and of future IRBs). These are powerful disincentives.
Explosives are regulated by the ATF, but can also fall under regulations of the DOT and the EPA. And if your doing any pulse power z pinch or electronic detanator experiment or research, then that's also regulated.
Keep in mind this also has state regulations and ordinance to worry about and its almost like they are trying to get you to accidentally make some mistake that can technically be a felony. And they can visit and do inspections during your hours of operations.
Potato cannons, model rockets, and innovation and experiments in your backyard seem to be impossible these days.
Do I think safety is important, sure, but I'd argue that the paperwork of regulation has stifled the common man who want to follow the laws.
Also see: export control and gpu's
I’d argue that it’s not the regulations themselves, but people who want to avoid liability, whether ethical or social. (The existence of institutional review is a good argument against, say, a fiscal hawk looking at a state university’s research output to identify the existence of fraud or abuse.)
As a random citizen, you'd perhaps get away with an online self-service form, as a small company or startup you might need a form and an interview, but the entire "talk to 4 different agencies at different levels of abstraction" seems like a waste of time for everyone when it can be done in one go (provided the thing you wanted to do is common enough that it doesn't require some extreme documentation and safeguards etc).
If 100000 people were to want to try out a potato canon, it should be sufficient to do something at a local level where you select "I wanna play with a potato canon for a bit" in some drop-down, and it might ask you if you intend to shoot at people or not, and if you have enough room to experiment with this without hurting anyone (including yourself). If yes, problem solved, no need to fill out a form, if unsure or no, fill out a form since you probably are doing something novel, or something you might not want to do. If this then means some other agency at some other level needs to get notified, sure, automate that, who cares. If it turns out you filled out your form and specified radio active potatoes, perhaps one of those other agencies might want to have a chat first to see if everything is okay.
But the default of "talk to an arbitrary number of agencies in every case" is not great.
2. "Human research" means any medical experiments, research, or scientific or psychological investigation, which utilizes human subjects and which involves physical or psychological intervention by the researcher upon the body of the subject and which is not required for the purposes of obtaining information for the diagnosis, prevention, or treatment of disease or the assessment of medical condition for the direct benefit of the subject. Human research shall not, however, be construed to mean the conduct of biological studies exclusively utilizing tissue or fluids after their removal or withdrawal from a human subject in the course of standard medical practice, or to include epidemiological investigations.
They also didn't care about the part where he falsified his results or lied to his sponsors about how he was spending their money.
https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2014/06/29/how-an-irb-cou...
reminded - The EcoHealth Alliance application successfully granted by NIH for those Wuhan coronavirus gain-of-function experiments did have the "Human Subjects Included" and "IRB" checkboxes checked :)
It's been pretty universal in my experience that people will use the power given to them to push their agenda, which is generally only somewhat aligned with the nameplate mission.
E.g. a vegan or vegetarian on an ERB has an obvious, if soft, conflict of interests that will come out in how they treat requests involving animals, or whose results might lead to future testing on animals.
(and most IRB squabbles that involve non-invasion/low risk research never really get as bad as that, at least in my experience, knock on wood)
See Scott Alexander's works on IRB review.
Links:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/31/highlights-from-the-co...
Doesn't that describe all safety and security measures? Airport security wastes millions of hours in order to prevent a few possible problems.
> ethical lapses
That's quite a euphemism for death and bodily injury. I'm sure you wouldn't mind it yourself.
There is plenty of evidence of what happens without IRBs - just look what happened before IRBs.
And yes, airport security is also a colossal waste
What's interesting is how agencies push the limits on what they can do. All agencies do this to one extent or another. And they obviously won't tell you if they're doing that to you or not.
Granted authority and actual authority are different. It's worth remembering that when dealing with any bureaucracy.
You should read the actual regulations as well, but that's work so lots of people don't do it.
Here's an example of why you should read the regulations. Technically, supplements can't make structure/function claims. However, you can submit your structure/function claim to the FDA. Once you do that you can make that particular structure/function claim on your labels. Since the FDA has no process in place to actually review those claims your structure/function claim is suddenly valid.
It's amusing.
We were checking which candy was most popular from a giant bowl, and went classroom to classroom just asking a randomly selected student to pick a piece of candy.
We got 100% on the report, which included "We didn't inform the participants of and potential harm from participating in the study. We're heartless bastards, oh well."
Then I went to college and helped in quite a few study designs with a Professor who had worked with over 30 IRB's across his career. Ours was by far the most strict. We were primarily doing software usability studies, and every single question we would ask a participant needed to be verbatim. Your data anonymization, destruction, and analysis plans had to be fully defined, including storing the participant name to UID key separately from the data.
Deviation or asking follow-up questions based on a prior response was either not allowed or a whole additional huge layer of SCRUTINY (I'm not sure). I'm genuinely curious how any sort of therapy focused study could have occurred with that IRB.
He did extra work, but it was effectively practice.
I was funded through a DARPA grant. It was definitely not a training exercise.
Because we're about to see how all the structures that were put in place to enforce those ethics react to being told they must instead do keyword searches for forbidden phrases set by fiat.
If you're the kind of administrator who does boring work of making sure all professors in your biomedical campus submitted IRB paperwork, are you also going to be the person who makes sure their papers don't contain the word "Woman" or "Historically"?
In contrast, a shockingly large amount of content is extremely lazy, gut-feeling reaction. Avoiding the work and disappointment of finding out that your hot take is wrong.
"We" decided that Tuskegee was bad enough that it should be stopped before harm is done, and that there is no appropriate or sufficient "punish[ment] in retrospect" for the fallout.
The government makes you get a license to drive at all, then "drive a Pinto" versus "drive a Trabant" are similar enough that they don't require more info. They require you to get different licensure to drive a bigger truck where you could potentially cause more harm, or to drive an airplane. In this analogy the IRB is the DMV/FAA/whatever, and you're asking for permission to drive a tank, a motorized unicycle, a helicopter, an 18-wheeler or a stealth fighter. You don't get a Science License rubber stamp because that's like getting a Vehicle License - the variation in "Vehicle" is big enough that each type needs review.
There are escape hatches, too: I doubt many rural Alaskan pilots worry (or need to worry) about these things.
(I guess the point of analogies like these are to force us to sweat the details and examples.)
A driver's license is more like a medical license than IRB approval.
If your point is that we could replace IRBs with some sort of a researcher license, that you need to obtain before being able to do studies that today require IRB approval, then I support it, because while not ideal, it improves over the status quo.
The thing is, although you and the linked article seem to be associating IRB approval just with human studies, these days you need it for mouse studies.
[1] example: https://animalcare.umich.edu/institutional-animal-care-use-c...
For the scale and impact of non-IRB human psychology research, that one has to be at the very top.
Note that “this person is a psychologist and is employed by Meta working on user research” is not evidence that supports the statement you made.
IRBs are only REALLY required when you are intervening in patient care or pose some theoretical risk to a human.
Some institutions still want you to submit approval for institutional data, but as a non-lawyer it seems that's much more of a CYA policy.
In practice, sure, but that's not what the spaghetti of rules that one is compelled by law to follow state. This disconnect is the whole point of the article.
The point I'm trying to make is that the blog is so narrowly defined that it doesn't match the reality of clinical research.
Yes it does, but typically the IRB will waive consent and waive notification for those sorts of studies if the images can be de-identified. There's also HIPAA involved which may or may not require establishing a BAA depending on what's being done if the images can't be de-identified. This is particularly an issue with brain MRI because it is usually trivial to generate an image that can be compared to full-face photographs (i.e. can be compared to drivers license/passport type photos to reestablish identify).
And longer term you're not getting anything even in the door at the FDA without an IRB and you're not selling anything without FDA approval.
Also please note that MRI is a Class II regulated device that deposits energy in subjects/patients so it doesn't qualify for a lot of the exemptions (early last year the FDA granted IRBs the ability to do things like wave full written consent for minimal risk research for FDA-regulated research).
I admit it sounds pedantic, but I'm not discussing IRB *exemptions* that are sometimes required by an institution nor am I discussing BAAs. I was specifically talking about the specific IRB applications (which I've submitted and signed before) that the blog author was talking about. Yes, HIPAA and other state and local regulations also govern what you can and cannot do with the data, but that's not what I argued.
Sorta off topic but the FDA doesn't care so much about SAR unless you're directly programming the MR machine's pulse sequence. If you're just doing quantification of some brain structure for monitoring a biomarker, they're primarily concerned if your product 1) matches an existing prerequisite and 2) functionality that your product achieves performance that you say it does. That is why the marketing around most of the early DL / AI based radiology startups were focused on language for "study prioritization" rather than more specific claims.
FDA and human subject protections come from different laws with different legislative authority. The regulations are not the same except to the extent that the agencies themselves work to harmonize things. If you are doing anything covered by FDA you must follow FDA's regulations in addition to any other applicable human subjects research regulations. And because MRI scanners are Class II regulated devices it means that people are being scanned with a doctor's permission, an IRB's permission or the FDA's direct permission.
FDA "doesn't care" about SAR to the extent that they have published guidance that if you operate an approved MRI scanner within normal operating mode (which are settings defined by IEC that do not necessitate medical supervision), then the FDA will not automatically consider use of the scanner itself to elevate a study's risk (in the way that using something like a CT scanner with ionizing radiation would). Risk determination goes beyond whether or not the MRI itself is a risk though. For example a research study that diverts patients to MRI in a way that delays care in an emergent situation (say testing experimental sequences for stroke detection) is unlikely to overall qualify as minimal risk even if the scanner operates in normal mode because of other non-MRI risks associated with the study procedures.
Retrospective use of de-identified or anonymized medical records that already exist are of course a different thing because the risks to the patient are primarily privacy risks.
And you are correct the actual FDA labels of all the AI crap that's coming out are jokes compared to what a lot of sales bullshitters promise. But you better believe all the data submitted to the FDA by the MRI manufacturers support their accelerated acquisitions that use deep learning recons follow FDA's clinical trials regulations.
That said, there's plenty of buying and selling of radiological images for industry development on the second hand market. Now where the line of "research" vs. "industrial" work is, well that's something I would leave to legal council. But as you said any sort of "altering" of clinical outcomes is a clear IRB is required zone like DL based recon.
Theoretical risk is a very broad category. IRB approval is required to download de-identified human genome sequences, in part because the genome sequence can be used to identify the individual. Drawing blood from an individual, or using blood that has been drawn for other purposes, requires IRB approval. And IRB approval is required for many sociology studies (or surveys), in part because publishing an individuals answers to a survey might put the subject at risk.
So the "theoretical risk" threshold can be very low. It's theoretical after all, so the harm need only be imaginable.
As other commenters mention, the “theoretical risk to a human” encompasses nearly all research. For what I do, any imaging studies that aren’t de-identified pose a theoretical risk to patient privacy. If you try to de-identify images, you learn that this is nearly impossible. Sure, you can try your best to scrub DICOM headers, but these headers are mis-used by vendors, so identifying information can appear almost anywhere. You could delete the headers entirely, but then you lose a lot of metadata that you may need to properly display the images. Further, people contend that you can identify individual peoples’ faces if you 3D-reconstruct CT/MR images, so then you have to expend resources to delete faces from all head/neck/brain imaging. Confirming that this was done properly requires manual review and limits the size of your dataset.
Edit: I think the disagreements here are partly due to institutional differences in IRB requirements and partly due to conflating “IRB exemptions” with the idea of not having to interact with the IRB at all. You always have to interact with the IRB—even just to obtain an exemption. While obtaining IRB approval is a cumbersome process, obtaining IRB exemption is only slightly less cumbersome. I’m sure this varies across institutions, but I’ve been at three different large urban academic centers, and obtaining exemptions has been a multi-month process at all three.
Even with all this professional double-checking, a non-trivial amount of fraud and data manipulation takes place as academics rush to climb the bureaucratic ladder or get large corporations to buy their government-subsidized startups, often making it difficult even for experts in the field to determine what's reliable and what isn't.
my limited experience with them was to do with governing access to repositories of personal health information and really, just bet that unethical research that abuses powers is going to happen, and that research product gets fed back to policymakers to increase the unaccountable powers of policymakers. any public benefit is for show.
(Reposts aren't considered dupes unless the previous submission got significant attention within the last year or so - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
(It's on my list to implement karma sharing so in the future, several submitters can share in the 'win' when a story makes the frontpage)
But at the same time American corporations will gleefully A/B test to determine the most clicked ads, the most profitable search result ordering, and the algorithmic feed parameters that maximise time spent scrolling - all with nary a thought about any ethics whatsoever.
> Federal funds administered by a Federal department or agency may not be expended for research involving human subjects unless the requirements of this policy have been satisfied.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/subtitle-A/subchapter-...
I can't stand this precious style of writing. I wish it were less ubiquitous. I think what upsets me about it is that it's disingenuous. When it registers as "cute and charming", it flies over the reader's head and doesn't encourage them to evaluate for themselves whether something like an IRB (or whatever) should exist. If it comes across as disingenuous---or if the reader doesn't feel like the "very mean very bad people" are "very mean" or "very bad"---then the reader is put in the position of feeling like they're going to rain on someone's parade if they disagree. Basically, it's a rhetorical tactic used to forestall argument or discussion about something the writer finds distasteful. I find myself unwilling to read an article if it opens this way because I don't feel comfortable trusting anything the writer says since they've already opened their piece with a piece of rhetoric which is essentially dishonest.
They don't actually think anyone who suggests IRB approval is very mean and very bad, that line really isn't the thesis statement. If you read a bit further I think you'd be less annoyed by it.
In this case, it functions as a hook; it's there to give you a slight chuckle before diving into a long and relatively dry informative article. It's some clear sarcasm makes you evaluate the supposed assertion made - that people who push for IRB evaluations are meanie-heads - and challenges any preconceived notions you might have of it being a simple "this is good" or "this is bad" thing either way because of course it's not that simple. This invites the question to the reader: if it's not as simple as that, then how is it actually?
Of course, if the tone doesn't land and you read it as a factual statement - and, importantly, it's so distasteful that you immediately bail and don't read the rest of the article to see what it's actually about, and just assume it's a petulant tirade against IRBs - none of that works. If you're at all interested, I would recommend reading some Adam Mastroianni / Experimental History posts, as it has a very similar feel but plays to the strengths of the tone a bit better (IMO). This one [0] actually touches on the use of humor in scientific papers, and I think makes a pretty good case for why clinical language isn't necessarily a good thing.
[0] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
With everything Trump is doing to destroy the rule of law, and all the potential for technology to help us simplify it, I can only hope that when Trump burns it all down, the people who rebuild will be wise enough to do better.
The default state without rule of law is rule of the strongest. The law is like pillars that support a tunnel. Once these are weakened, the tunnel goes crashing down, and it has to be dug again.
The society backslides to authoritarianism. And the price for digging a new tunnel is often a lot of blood.
People need to accept that what Trump is doing is only possible because of what his predecessors put down as law. That means democratic presidents too.
I didn't see Trump's detractors call all of this out when the winds were blowing their way. So no, I have no faith that rebuilding it from the ground up would make it one iota better. Not without deep societal changes.
That's you and I.
EDIT: <sigh/> The second sentence of the article is -
> Like, let’s eat potatoes and see if we lose weight.
- which, in the minds of 95% of likely jury members, is not "medical research". Nor, at small scale, of plausible interest to the gov't.
If the US Gov't is looking for excuses to crush me, or I've got enough money to be worth a lawsuit, then nothing resembling medical research is needed for them to go ahead with those. Doubtless, I evilly conspired to not pay $0.06 of Use Tax in 2003. And some poor innocent was traumatized for life by my cat looking at them cross-eyed, in a photo I put on the web.
And, notice my phrasing - "of no actual interest to the gov't". Not "IAAL, and you're 100.00% okay to run with this".
I had a stressful event and had a psychogenic fever and lost 15 pounds in two weeks and kept it off for more than six months. There is some research on this [1] [2] in particularly that author wrote a case study about a Japanese girl who was bullied at school who developed a stress fever.
Given there is an obesity crisis and everything this might be an effective diet plan, but to do it, you have to induce severe stress. A protocol might be "get 30 people to show up for a weekend encounter group, pick out the 1 person who seems the most susceptible, have the other 29 bully that person." Cal Lightman might get away with something like that in Lie to Me but no way you can get away with that in real life.
Don't try crashing a plane for Youtube though, that went down badly with the FAA.
Eventually he got in a car crash and got in a lot of trouble.
You could find yourself standing in front of a courtroom if something goes wrong, or God Forbid, if someone dies, trying to convince a judge and jury with nothing but, "I didn't need government permission".
That's not a good place to be.
Does emacs improve your typing speed? STOP! That's human experimentation!! That's the point of the article. Why would you worry someone is doing to die testing their typing speed, or filling out an online survey?
You've probably conducts numerous Experimental Human Trials over your lifetime - anyone who is even slightly curious and empirical has!
No.
Because you don’t have to. This seems like a glib answer, but I assure you that, as a university employee in a research unit, I have both tested my typing speed and filled out an online survey. Whataboutism doesn’t help the conversation here become more informed.