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Comment by dragonwriter

4 years ago

> Yes, the review process does involve humans

It doesn’t just “involve humans” it is first and foremost the behavior of specific humans.

> but the humans (reviewers) are not the research subject.

The study is exactly studying their behavior in a particular context. They are absolutely the subjects.

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dragonwriter

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temp8964  4 years ago

Not sure why you are so obsessed with this. Yes this process does involve humans, but the process has aspects can be examined as independent of humans.

This study does not care about the reviewers, it cares about the process. For example, you can certainly improve the process without replacing any reviewers. It is just blatantly false to claim the process is all about humans.

Another example, the review process can even be totally conducted by AIs. See? The process is not all about humans, or human behavior.

To make this even more understandable, considering the process of building a LEGO, you need human to build a LEGO, but you can examine the process of building the LEGO without examine the humans who build the LEGO.

  • protomyth  4 years ago

    This study does not care about the reviewers, it cares about the process. For example, you can certainly improve the process without replacing any reviewers. It is just blatantly false to claim the process is all about humans.

    This was all about the reaction of humans. They sent in text with a deceptive description and tried to get a positive answer even though the text was not wholly what was described. It was a psych study in an uncontrolled environment with people who did not know they were participating in a study.

    How they thought this was acceptable with their own institutions Participant's Bill of Rights https://research.umn.edu/units/hrpp/research-participants/pa... is a true mystery.

    • temp8964  4 years ago

      No. This is not all about the reaction of humans. This is not a psych study. I have explained this clearly in previous comments. If you believe the process of doing something is all about humans, I have nothing to add.

      5 replies →

  • fishycrackers  4 years ago

    People are obsessed because you're trying to excuse the researchers behavior as ethical.

    "Process" in this case is just another word for people because ultimately, the process being evaluated here is the human interaction with the malicious code being submitted.

    Put another way, let's just take out the human reviewer, pretend the maintainers didn't exist. Does the patch get reviewed? No. Does the patch get merged into a stable branch? No. Does the patch get evaluated at all? No. The whole research paper breaks down and becomes worthless if you remove the human factor. The human reviewer is _necessary_ for this research, so this research should be deemed as having human participants.