Comment by AlotOfReading
1 day ago
1) How did they hit stable then? [0]
2) Yes, emails absolutely need IRB sign-off too. If you email a bunch of people asking for their health info or doing a survey, the IRB would smack you for unapproved human research without consent. Consent was obviously not given here.
[0] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/CADVatmNgU7t-Co84tSS6VW=3N...
1) They did not hit stable. GKH is referring, in this email, to a legitimate attempt to contribute from a student at UMN. Whether or not this student was part of the hypocrite commits study, I don't know. But it's not a hypocrite commit, just a normal buggy commit. You can tell, because it's from a umn.edu email address, which they did not use for hypocrite commits.
2) I don't actually care about the internal policies of UMN's IRB. Whether or not the study's approval was proper and whether they would get into trouble with their boss is not my problem. The point is that what they did is obviously not immoral or unethical.
The point of an IRB is to act as an outside reviewer of _ethics_. IRBs aren't some checklist thing admin put in to protect the University's reputation, they exist as a direct reaction to huge amounts of unethical human experimentation occurring last century.