Scientific history is filled with awful experiments involving human subjects, and ones with terrible and long-reaching impacts: consider the effect of the Tuske

Scientific history is filled with awful experiments involving human subjects, and ones with terrible and long-reaching impacts: consider the effect of the Tuskegee experiments on Black reticence in taking the covid vaccine. Not to mention what the Nazis did. In response to this bleak history, in the mid-1960s, scientific organizations and universities began requiring Internal Review Boards (or IRBs) which would independently review proposed experiments and block them if they failed to meet ethical standards. The bar is very high, and with good reason: you're experimenting on humans. One of the foremost requirements is the notion of informed consent: you can't experiment on people who don't know or understand, or who didn't give you permission. This experiment very clearly involved human subjects and very clearly violated informed consent. If the student involved did not realize this, certainly his advisor did or he'd have to be considered incompetent. And if the experiment was indeed placed before the IRB and was given an exemption, as was implied, then Princeton's IRB made a glaring and incredible error. Had this student simply sent out a questionnaire from his Princeton email address, rather than conduct an experiment, he might have reasonably obtained IRB exemption or permission. But as I understand it, he (1) hid behind aliases so they did not know they were being experimented on, and (2) threatened legal deadlines in responding to his questions. There is no way this was ethical by IRB standards. One thing that really bothers me is that people are attacking the blogger for using the word "consent", suggesting it's hyperbole in the sense of date rape or whatnot. This is terrible: "consent" is the standard and correct term used in human subjects research, and is a factual description of exactly what occurred.