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This statement rings true because it is the wordsmith'd version of exactly what the department head probably said when he first heard, which probably went somet
by AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
This statement rings true because it is the wordsmith'd version of exactly what the department head probably said when he first heard, which probably went something like "what the f*k did you do, who the f*k thought this was a good idea, and who the f*k told you you could do this?"
- DannyBee 6y agoYeah, i thought the same thing. This is basically someone yelling in an office put through a diplomacy filter, which is what you would expect happened.
- mike_d 6y agoI'm pretty sure the biggest program at UMN is Social Sciences. Conducting research experiments on unwitting subjects (the kernel maintainers) is a huge ethics violation. I can only imagine the other department heads screaming at the head of the, relatively speaking, small CS department.
- mumblemumble 6y agoWhen I was in grad school for a branch of social sciences, we had a whole class on how to conduct research experiments on unwitting subjects. It's something that social scientists do all the time. (Tangentially, it's something that computer people do even more often, and probably with fewer ethics controls. A/B testing, for one prominent example.) But it's typically only allowed when it's clear that the risk of harm to the participants is pretty much negligible. Which is clearly not the case here. As others have said, it's probably the case that the reason this got past the IRB is not because the research was clandestine, but because the team lied about how it might affect people. And probably also, I'm guessing, the IRB had their guard down because they weren't expecting that particular department to be conducting social science field experiments.