What I want to know is whether the researchers had ever privately asked anyone in the chain of the kernel whether they would be willing to participate as a filt

What I want to know is whether the researchers had ever privately asked anyone in the chain of the kernel whether they would be willing to participate as a filter. Bad example for obvious reasons, but if Linus was given the usernames that would be submitting bad patches and forewarning of which ones were valid and which ones weren't, it could have been done such that the experiment was valid and the commits were not included in the final tree. I think it is a rather mild restriction to the experiment that a single person must be able to find an excuse to recuse themselves - as simple as "I don't have time to look at this, can someone else" would have worked.