7 ms·

Research without ethics is research without value. Unbelievable that this could have passed ethics review, so I'd bet it was never reviewed. Big black eye for

Research without ethics is research without value. Unbelievable that this could have passed ethics review, so I'd bet it was never reviewed. Big black eye for University of Minnesota. Imagine if you are another doctoral student is CS/EE and this tool has ruined your ability to participate in Linux.

gruez 6y ago
> Research without ethics is research without value. didn't we learn a lot from nazi/japanese experiments from ww2?
- gambiting 6y ago
  From my understanding - no, actually. We learnt a bit, on the very extreme scale of things, but most of the "experiments" were not conducted in any kind of way that would yield usable data.
  - db48x 6y ago
    Yes and no. It’s my understanding that the Germans pioneered the field of implanted medical prostheses (like titanium pins to stabilize broken bones). A lot of that research was done on prisoners, and they were even kind enough to extend the benefits of the medical treatments that they developed to prisoners of war (no sarcasm intended).
- bluGill 6y ago
  We did. Often we wish they could have got more decimal points in a measurement, or had known how to check for some factor. Despite all the gains and potential breakthroughs lost nobody is willing to repeat them or anything like them. I know just enough medically people given 2 weeks to live who were still around 10 years latter that I can't think of any situation where I'd make an exception. Though what a lot is is also open to question. Much of what we learned isn't that useful to real world problems. However some has been important.
  - NationalPark 6y ago
    It doesn't really sound like that's the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation#Aftermath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation#Aft... are there more impactful benefits that aren't listed on the wikipedia page? It sounds like the main research contribution is philosophical discussions over whether or not it would be okay to use the data if someone had a good reason for it.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Hypothermia is the only one I'm aware of. There is some useful data there that has helped treatment.
- impalallama 6y ago
  By in large no. The Nazi experiments were based on faulty race science and were indistinguishable from brutal torture and what remains is either useless or impossible to reproduce for ethical reasons.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  Experiments producing lots of data doesn't necessarily mean they were useful. If the experiment was run improperly the data is untrustworthy, and if the experiment was designed to achieve things that aren't useful they may not have controlled for the right variables. And ultimately, we know what their priorities were and what kind of worldview they were operating under, so the odds are bad that any given experiment they ran would have been rigorous enough to produce results that could be reproduced in other studies and applied elsewhere. I'm not personally aware of any major breakthroughs that would have been impossible without the "aid" of eugenicist war criminals, though it's possible there's some major example I'm missing. We certainly did bring over lots of German scientists to work on nukes and rockets, so your question is not entirely off-base - but I suspect almost everyone involved in those choices would argue that rocketry research isn't unethical.
- xjlin0 6y ago
  Learn how to torture? Maybe. Learn real knowledge? No. Most of those info are not just sick but also impractical. The goal of military is to protect or conquer. The goal of science is to find the truth, and the goal of the engineering is to offer solutions. Any of the true leaders in either fields knows there're more efficient means/systems to get those goals, even in ww2 era.
b0rsuk 6y ago
Life support machinery was developed with methods like cutting dog heads, plugging them in and see how long it shows signs of life.
- dvhh 6y ago
  If only we could have taught dogs to review kernel patch, ... we would probably be all out of work
dgritsko 6y ago
I'm a total neophyte when it comes to the Linux kernel development process, but couldn't they just, y'know, use a Gmail address or something? Couldn't the original researchers have done the same?
- room500 6y ago
  Yes, they could. This is actually addressed in the original email thread: > But they can't then use that type of "hiding" to get away with claiming it was done for a University research project as that's even more unethical than what they are doing now.
  - mort96 6y ago
    I was also thinking that commits from e-mails ending in ".edu" are probably more likely to be assumed to be good-faith; they are from real students/professors/researchers at real universities using their real identities. There's probably going to be way more scrutiny on a commits from some random gmail address.
    - bombcar 6y ago
      Exactly - the kernel maintainers already "prejudge" submissions and part of that judgement is evaluating the "story" behind why a submission is forthcoming. A submission from Linus, ok, he's employed to work on the kernel, but even that would be suspect if it's an area he never touches or appears to be going around the established maintainer. And one of the most reasonable "stories" behind a patch is "I'm working at a university and found a bug", probably right behind "I'm working at a company and we found a bug". Banning U of M won't solve everything, but it is dropping a source of known bad patches.
dmoy 6y ago
Some CS labs at UMN take ethics very seriously. Their UXR lab for example. Other CS labs at UMN, well... apparently not so much.
threatofrain 6y ago
Individuals should still be able to contribute, just not under the name University of Minnesota.
spikels 6y ago
Ethics are highly subjective on the margins. In this case they completely missed this issue. However the opposite is more often the case. A good example is challenge testing Covid vaccines. This was widely deemed to be unethical despite large numbers of volunteers. Perhaps a million lives could have been saved if we had vaccines a few months sooner. Research without ethics (as currently practiced) can have value.
- angry_octet 6y ago
  I can't agree that widespread challenge testing would have been ethical. It's a larger topic than HN can accommodate, but some factors I consider important: (1) NPIs are effective at reducing transmission, (2) the consequences of an outcome with side effects could include global and long-lived anti-vax sentiment -- COVID19 is unlikely to be our last pandemic. Issue (2) arose with the EU response to rare AZ/J+J side effects, where I believe the EU is more deserving of criticism. They will undoubtedly cause more deaths in their own populations and throughout the world than would occur from clotting complications, but no one will hold them to account. But they weighed their equities as more important than global benefit.
  - c1ccccc1 6y ago
    To save some folks an acronym lookup: NPI stands for Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention, and refers to things like wearing a mask, washing hands, physical isolation, etc.
  - spikels 6y ago
    As you agree challenge testing is unethical and it clearly would have had value (saving lots of lives) are you conceding that unethical research can have value?
    - angry_octet 6y ago
      The opposite -- I believe that the EU authorities acted unethically in covering their own asses, and this devalues their past & future statements. Russia and China effectively approved vaccines with only phase II trial data. China didn't even have active cases (officially) and they vaccinated tens of millions of people with it, their own, Africans and Brazilians etc. Imagine if there had been side effects, it could have been a global disaster. (Recall the contaminated Cutter polio vax that had live polio in it. Or the SV40 problems. The UQ COVID candidate caused false positives for HIV. Various SARS-Cov1 vaccines caused bad/lethal side effects, see e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00462-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00462-y ) Being both too hasty (China) and too blame-averse (EU) seem to be ethical failings.

gruez 6y ago

> Research without ethics is research without value. didn't we learn a lot from nazi/japanese experiments from ww2?

gambiting 6y ago
From my understanding - no, actually. We learnt a bit, on the very extreme scale of things, but most of the "experiments" were not conducted in any kind of way that would yield usable data.
- db48x 6y ago
  Yes and no. It’s my understanding that the Germans pioneered the field of implanted medical prostheses (like titanium pins to stabilize broken bones). A lot of that research was done on prisoners, and they were even kind enough to extend the benefits of the medical treatments that they developed to prisoners of war (no sarcasm intended).
bluGill 6y ago
We did. Often we wish they could have got more decimal points in a measurement, or had known how to check for some factor. Despite all the gains and potential breakthroughs lost nobody is willing to repeat them or anything like them. I know just enough medically people given 2 weeks to live who were still around 10 years latter that I can't think of any situation where I'd make an exception. Though what a lot is is also open to question. Much of what we learned isn't that useful to real world problems. However some has been important.
- NationalPark 6y ago
  It doesn't really sound like that's the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation#Aftermath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation#Aft... are there more impactful benefits that aren't listed on the wikipedia page? It sounds like the main research contribution is philosophical discussions over whether or not it would be okay to use the data if someone had a good reason for it.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Hypothermia is the only one I'm aware of. There is some useful data there that has helped treatment.
impalallama 6y ago
By in large no. The Nazi experiments were based on faulty race science and were indistinguishable from brutal torture and what remains is either useless or impossible to reproduce for ethical reasons.
kevingadd 6y ago
Experiments producing lots of data doesn't necessarily mean they were useful. If the experiment was run improperly the data is untrustworthy, and if the experiment was designed to achieve things that aren't useful they may not have controlled for the right variables. And ultimately, we know what their priorities were and what kind of worldview they were operating under, so the odds are bad that any given experiment they ran would have been rigorous enough to produce results that could be reproduced in other studies and applied elsewhere. I'm not personally aware of any major breakthroughs that would have been impossible without the "aid" of eugenicist war criminals, though it's possible there's some major example I'm missing. We certainly did bring over lots of German scientists to work on nukes and rockets, so your question is not entirely off-base - but I suspect almost everyone involved in those choices would argue that rocketry research isn't unethical.
xjlin0 6y ago
Learn how to torture? Maybe. Learn real knowledge? No. Most of those info are not just sick but also impractical. The goal of military is to protect or conquer. The goal of science is to find the truth, and the goal of the engineering is to offer solutions. Any of the true leaders in either fields knows there're more efficient means/systems to get those goals, even in ww2 era.

b0rsuk 6y ago

Life support machinery was developed with methods like cutting dog heads, plugging them in and see how long it shows signs of life.

dvhh 6y ago
If only we could have taught dogs to review kernel patch, ... we would probably be all out of work

dgritsko 6y ago

I'm a total neophyte when it comes to the Linux kernel development process, but couldn't they just, y'know, use a Gmail address or something? Couldn't the original researchers have done the same?

room500 6y ago
Yes, they could. This is actually addressed in the original email thread: > But they can't then use that type of "hiding" to get away with claiming it was done for a University research project as that's even more unethical than what they are doing now.
- mort96 6y ago
  I was also thinking that commits from e-mails ending in ".edu" are probably more likely to be assumed to be good-faith; they are from real students/professors/researchers at real universities using their real identities. There's probably going to be way more scrutiny on a commits from some random gmail address.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    Exactly - the kernel maintainers already "prejudge" submissions and part of that judgement is evaluating the "story" behind why a submission is forthcoming. A submission from Linus, ok, he's employed to work on the kernel, but even that would be suspect if it's an area he never touches or appears to be going around the established maintainer. And one of the most reasonable "stories" behind a patch is "I'm working at a university and found a bug", probably right behind "I'm working at a company and we found a bug". Banning U of M won't solve everything, but it is dropping a source of known bad patches.

dmoy 6y ago

Some CS labs at UMN take ethics very seriously. Their UXR lab for example. Other CS labs at UMN, well... apparently not so much.

threatofrain 6y ago

Individuals should still be able to contribute, just not under the name University of Minnesota.

spikels 6y ago

Ethics are highly subjective on the margins. In this case they completely missed this issue. However the opposite is more often the case. A good example is challenge testing Covid vaccines. This was widely deemed to be unethical despite large numbers of volunteers. Perhaps a million lives could have been saved if we had vaccines a few months sooner. Research without ethics (as currently practiced) can have value.

angry_octet 6y ago
I can't agree that widespread challenge testing would have been ethical. It's a larger topic than HN can accommodate, but some factors I consider important: (1) NPIs are effective at reducing transmission, (2) the consequences of an outcome with side effects could include global and long-lived anti-vax sentiment -- COVID19 is unlikely to be our last pandemic. Issue (2) arose with the EU response to rare AZ/J+J side effects, where I believe the EU is more deserving of criticism. They will undoubtedly cause more deaths in their own populations and throughout the world than would occur from clotting complications, but no one will hold them to account. But they weighed their equities as more important than global benefit.
- c1ccccc1 6y ago
  To save some folks an acronym lookup: NPI stands for Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention, and refers to things like wearing a mask, washing hands, physical isolation, etc.
- spikels 6y ago
  As you agree challenge testing is unethical and it clearly would have had value (saving lots of lives) are you conceding that unethical research can have value?
  - angry_octet 6y ago
    The opposite -- I believe that the EU authorities acted unethically in covering their own asses, and this devalues their past & future statements. Russia and China effectively approved vaccines with only phase II trial data. China didn't even have active cases (officially) and they vaccinated tens of millions of people with it, their own, Africans and Brazilians etc. Imagine if there had been side effects, it could have been a global disaster. (Recall the contaminated Cutter polio vax that had live polio in it. Or the SV40 problems. The UQ COVID candidate caused false positives for HIV. Various SARS-Cov1 vaccines caused bad/lethal side effects, see e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00462-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-020-00462-y ) Being both too hasty (China) and too blame-averse (EU) seem to be ethical failings.