Comment by ret2plt

> You do not experiment on people without their consent. This is in fact the very FIRST point of the Nuremberg code:

> 1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

The Nuremberg code is explicitly about medical research, so it doesn't apply here. More generally, I think that the magnitude of the intervention is also relevant, and that an absolutist demand for informed consent in all - including the most trivial - cases is quite silly.

Now, in this specific case I would agree that wasting people's time is an intervention that's big enough to warrant some scrutiny, but the black-and-white way of some people to phrase this really irks me.

PS: I think people in these kinds of debate tend to talk past one another, so let me try to illustrate where I'm coming from with an experiment I came across recently:

To study how the amount of tips waiters get changes in various circumstances, some psychologists conducted an experiment where the waiter would randomly either give the guests some chocolate with the bill, or not (control condition)[0] This is, of course, perfectly innocuous, but an absolutist claim about research ethics ("You do not experiment on people without their consent.") would make research like this impossible without any benefit.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1559-1816...