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Comment by krisoft | Hacker News Reader

I read this and think how my friends had to spend about a month of their life getting ethical approval before they could strap an external, no-invasive continous blood pressure sensor on 5 healthy volunteers for about 10 minute each. It’s about as dangerous as letting a consenting adult wear a wristwatch while sitting in a chair. But since it was a “medical experiment” they had to get ethical approval from the uni which took a long time and was a very burocratic process.

And all because in the past bozos like these experimenters did crazy things like this and the system over corrected in the hopes of stopping extreme things like this.

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The thing is, maybe the system didn't over-react. There are still bozos out there, unfortunately. But better to pay the cost in commitees than in blood.

We pay for those committees in blood too, of people who could've been saved by new treatments or devices, but died while the R&D was bogged down in all those bureaucratic rituals.

Since either way, we pay in blood, the question is really about finding the right balance.

True. When is the time to remove from checklists, and when is the time to add to them. If the feedback-loop isn't properly closed, you get imbalance.

Thing is removing checklists very rarely happens. Almost nobody votes "Yes, let's have a bunch of deaths in the name of (potential) progress". But on the other hand the great majority enthusiastically supports adding more rules and regulations to "save lives".

The system is unbalanced by default.

Sadly, heaps of paperwork with checklists does relatively little to protect safety in the end. Everyone just spends a lot of time filling out paperwork to justify whatever thing they want to do. At least when it comes to corporations and regulator oversight, the companies ultimately will continue to do whatever harm they were doing they just have to dedicate a large fraction of their resources to creating loads of paperwork that proves how compliant they are.

Actually corporations are naturally balanced by the free market: the competition and their customers (whose needs they must serve in order to even exist) keep them very well in check.

Regulations pretend to "improve" this but inevitably skew the balance to the side of safety, leading to ossification, stagnation, loss of competition and lack of innovation.

It's not just about preventing the bozos. It's also indirectly about making the general public trust that researchers aren't (still) acting like bozos. (Unfortunately, in this era trust in institutions is so wrecked that it might not matter.)

Yeah and now the current bozos own private islands with no jurisdiction so they fly people there to do the experiments.

Presumably their ethical approvement was about considerably more than just potential physical danger of putting on the device for 10 minutes?

Of course ethics does need to make sure that the testing isn't going to harm the participants directly, which is nice and simple in your example, but it also needs to make sure that any measurements will be stored (and anonymised) in ways that conform to your friend's country's healthcare data laws. It needs to make sure there are adequate data protection plans. It needs to ask questions like have they considered ways in which they might accidentally create a device with racial bias (the way pulse oximetres are often worse at reading the blood oxygen level of people with dark skin as they were made by and tested on the fingers of white people). Etc.

Surely we can agree that researchers should be required to obtain informed consent from test subjects before dusting them with known radioactive toxins?

Yes.

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