[xyzzyz]

Yes, it’s stupid. IRBs today are, on net, more of a detriment to science than a benefit. When they block a stupid voluntary questionnaire for being “unethical”, just imagine how much other useful science is not being done, because of concern lack of ethics of a similar grade.

[freemint]

IRBs look like a net detrement to most studies because they are a mechanism to prevent really bad/unethical experiments in the far tails of distribution.

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.

[darkerside]

Would be interesting to see their reject pile.

[freemint]

The mere presence of IRBs should discourage bad submissions however you are welcome to contact your local review board and ask for their juiciest rejects.

[myself248]

I would follow this tumblr.

[thrown_22]

IRBs are a net negative because really bad/unethical experiments are done with no oversight by private entities. Their only purpose is to keep ethicists employed.

[klodolph]

This has got to be one of the worst takes on IRBs I’ve ever heard.

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.

[thrown_22]

That's a very naive view of the expanding bureaucracy which must grow to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.

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.

[freemint]

The question is how do we get 5 year olds between planning an unethical experiment (consciously or not) and the means to such experiments financed with tax dollars?

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.

[klodolph]

> IRBs don't need to be ran by anyone more competent than a 5 year old to catch the cases you're talking about.

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.

[cycomanic]

Seriously if you think that IRBs are anywhere near the top 100 of things that are strangling academia I'd like your job. There are so many other issues that are so much more important that, let's fix those first.

[matheusmoreira]

> really bad/unethical experiments are done with no oversight by private entities

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.

[ttpphd]

I am grateful for the protection provided by IRBs and I understand exactly what kind of horrors they protect people from. They are an overwhelming positive force for good for science and society.

[moron4hire]

I was supposed to get an IRB review for a graphics experiment I did in undergrad where I showed people static, non-animated optical illusions on a computer screen and asked them some questions about whether or not it gave them the impression of hills. (This was, like, 20 years ago.)

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.

[tetrep]

There's similar issues with computer security and having projects reviewed before being shipped, with the classic story of people avoiding review because they didn't think they needed it at the start of their project (not that they're qualified to determine that) and by the time someone told them about it, it was "too late" and they'd miss important deadlines by going through the requisite review.

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.