Hacker News Reader

Comment by 21 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, submitting a paper to an editor/reviewer is considered human research thus ethical board approval is required:

> McLellan asked Boghossian to reveal any evidence that he had received approval from the university’s institutional review board for research involving both human and animal behavior.

> The review board also determined that the hoax project met the definition for human-subjects research because it involved interacting with journal editors and reviewers. Any research involving human subjects (even duped journal editors, apparently) needs IRB approval first, according to university policy.

So from now on, writing a CS paper on a new sorting algorithm will require ethical board approval.

View on HN

If I write a paper on a fake sorting algorithm and submit it to a real journal to see if it gets approved, it's not really a stretch to call that human subjects research.

But if you call it "bogosort" and make the algorithm blatantly terrible, then any journal that takes it seriously is showing its lack of expertise.

Maybe it could work by sorting things based on political ideology and strength of coalition support plus willingness to shout down the opposition.

I'm sure you can imagine how that applies to a list of integers. They probably sort themselves into intersectional groups recursively. So the algorithm starts off and the first pass sorts loosely into odd vs even. Then a next pass sorts the partitions further into positive and negative. Then the next pass sorts by prime factorization and so on until they are maximally sorted by all the ways in which they can be grouped intersectionally.

Of course the result of the sorting is useless, but that's the moral of the story.

Quick, write it up and get it published!

Certainly! You may note the absence of "and these journals are very high quality and acted perfectly" in my post.

True, true. I guess the real question is where we draw the line between "science", "research" and "poking a bear with a stick." :)

Right, it's tricky, and- although I do think there's a legitimate ethics argument from principle, it does look like this particular case is only being taken (somewhat) seriously because of other reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com