> The next time people ask "why so much paperwork, why so many regulations, why is it so complicated": this is why. Yes, as the saying goes, regulations and sa

> The next time people ask "why so much paperwork, why so many regulations, why is it so complicated": this is why. Yes, as the saying goes, regulations and safety rules are often written in blood. But that doesn't mean that all regulations are automatically good and proportionate. For example, many institutional review boards would have zero problem with researchers deliberately submitting security holes to the Linux kernel. Sure, you're experimenting on kernel maintainers without their consent, and sure, you might make hundreds of millions of people vulnerable. But it's not technically "human research", so the IRB may sign off. https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-linux-foundations-demands-to-the-university-of-minnesota-for-its-bad-linux-patches/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-linux-foundations-demands-... Meanwhile, if you're a psychiatrist working in a hospital, and if you want to (say) compare the results of your standard screening questionare against the results of your standard patient intake interview, you might think this is easy. Patients will usually do both anyways, so how hard can it be to design an ethical process to compare the two? Well, it's harder than you might expect: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/ I agree that we need to have rules and regulations about many things. But we should still discuss whether specific regulations accomplish the intended goal, and how big a cost those regulations impose on society. It is perfectly possible for a large organization to design a software development process that makes it impossible to ever ship software. And similar pathologies often appear in any large organization, public or private. Designing good policies is hard but worth it.