Comment by smsm42
4 years ago
I think this may be unintended. It is very hard to formulate a message that essentially says both "we recognize your time is valuable" and "we know we waste your time, but we decided it's not very important" at the same time, without it sounding sarcastic on some level. Inherent contradiction of the message would get through, regardless of the wording chosen.
“We determined after careful evaluation of the potential outcomes that the time wasted by kernel maintainers was, in total, sufficiently low that no significant impact would occur over a multi-day time scale.”
If I can come up with the scientific paper gibberish for that in real-time, and I don’t even write science papers, then these people who understand how to navigate an ethical review board process surely know how to massage an unpleasant truth into dry and dusty wording.
I think that they just screwed up and missed the word “precious” in editing, and thus got caught being dismissive and snide towards their experiment’s participants. Without that word, it’s a plausible enough paragraph. With it, it’s no longer plausibly innocent.
The quote is translated to English as "your puny concerns is nothing compared to our Science", so it only covers one of the two bases. To cover both, they had to include some explicit verbiage recognizing the value of time being wasted, and they went a little overboard with "precious", making it sound fake - as it actually was.