Hallå Kitteh
> Then after World War II, everybody met up and decided to only do ethical human experiments from then on. And the most important part of being ethical was to have all experiments monitored by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) made of important people who could check whether experiments were ethical or not. I dutifully parroted all this back on the post-test (“Blindly trusting authority to make our ethical decisions for us is the best way to separate ourselves from the Nazis!”) and received my Study Investigator Certification.

> I sometimes worry that people misunderstand the case against bureaucracy. People imagine it’s Big Business complaining about the regulations preventing them from steamrolling over everyone else. That hasn’t been my experience. Big Business – heck, Big Anything – loves bureaucracy. They can hire a team of clerks and secretaries and middle managers to fill out all the necessary forms, and the rest of the company can be on their merry way. It’s everyone else who suffers. The amateurs, the entrepreneurs, the hobbyists, the people doing something as a labor of love. Wal-Mart is going to keep selling groceries no matter how much paperwork and inspections it takes; the poor immigrant family with the backyard vegetable garden might not.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/

@strypey will probably find this article interesting.
Aug 30, 2017 at 9:39pmWeb
Show threadNobody [LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1)]Aug 30, 2017
@clacke I agree with the statement about big business being okay with bureaucracy. LOOACs (large, out-of-area corporations) generally thrive when regulators are multiplied because they have the staff and resources to comply if they desire to do so. It is SLOBs (small, locally-owned businesses) that suffer most because they often lack staff and resources necessary to comply.
Show threadNobody [LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1)]Aug 30, 2017
A business-focused person like @bthall should probably be familiar with terms like #LOOACs and #SLOBs, even though neither term seems to be as used as they once were. (And there are other acronyms / initialisms that can be used to provide similarly descriptive naming.)
Show threadBrandon HallAug 31, 2017
@lnxw48a1 Thanks for bringing me in the loop about this discussion! This was a big topic of discussion in the philosophy class that I took about business ethics. Large business interests sometimes conduct public policy campaigns that would supposedly remove gov meddling in biz (a desired thing among freemarketeers), when in fact the policy does little more than reduce the burden upon only the large business interests, leaving issues for little guys.
Show threadNobody [LinuxWalt (@lnxw48a1)]Aug 30, 2017
@clacke I'm only halfway through it and I'm laughing like a maniac. Maybe because I work in an exceedingly bureaucratic environment, so even though I don't deal with mental health research, many of the IRB's objections are close enough to be familiar.