Comment by ufmace

This reminds me of a few passages in the SSC post on IRBs[0].

Main point is that IRBs were created in response to some highly unethical and harmful "studies" being carried out by institutions thought of as top-tier. Now they are considered to be a mandatory part of carrying out ethical research. But if you think about it, isn't outsourcing all sense of ethics to an organization external to the actual researchers kind of the opposite of what we want to do?

All institutions tend to be corruptible. Many tend to respond to their actual incentives rather than high-minded statements about what they're supposed to be about. Seems to me that promoting the attitude of "well an IRB approved it, so it must be all right, let's go!" is the exact opposite of what we really want.

All things considered, it's probably better to have something there than nothing. But you still have to be responsible for your own decisions. I bamboozled our lazy IRB into approving our study, so I'm not responsible for it being obviously a bad idea, just isn't good enough.

If you think about it, it's actually kind of meta to the code review process they were "studying". Just like IRBs, Code review is good, but no code review process will ever be good enough to stop every malicious actor every time. It will always be necessary to track the reputation of contributors and be able to mass-revert contributions from contributors later determined to be actively malicious.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/