It's worse than that. The problem is that being truly rational is hard, unpleasant work that few people want to do.
If you read an article that makes your political opponents look bad, you can't just feel smugly superior, you have to take into account that you are predisposed to believe convenient sounding things, so you have to put extra effort into checking the truth of that claim.
If you follow the evidence instead of tribal consensus, you will probably end up with some beliefs that your friends and relatives wont like, etc.
> This is often seen in the form of very smart people also believing conspiracy theories or throwing their hands up around other massive issues. As an example, the "Rationalist crowd" has de-emphasized work on climate change mitigation in favor of more abstract work on AI safety.
To be clear, the argument (in rationalist circles) is not that climate change is no big deal, it's that there's already a ton of people worrying about it, so it is better to allocate some extra resources to underfunded problems.
I think it depends on how you frame it. If the Linux Foundation thinks this kind of research would generate useful information for the kernel project, then the developers' time wouldn't be wasted, just used in a different, yet productive, way.
I concede that this is not an easy question, because the developers may have different opinions about the usefulness of this exercise, but at the end of the day, maintainers can run their projects how they see fit.
> You do not experiment on people without their consent. This is in fact the very FIRST point of the Nuremberg code:
> 1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
The Nuremberg code is explicitly about medical research, so it doesn't apply here.
More generally, I think that the magnitude of the intervention is also relevant, and that an absolutist demand for informed consent in all - including the most trivial - cases is quite silly.
Now, in this specific case I would agree that wasting people's time is an intervention that's big enough to warrant some scrutiny, but the black-and-white way of some people to phrase this really irks me.
PS: I think people in these kinds of debate tend to talk past one another, so let me try to illustrate where I'm coming from with an experiment I came across recently:
To study how the amount of tips waiters get changes in various circumstances, some psychologists conducted an experiment where the waiter would randomly either give the guests some chocolate with the bill, or not (control condition)[0]
This is, of course, perfectly innocuous, but an absolutist claim about research ethics ("You do not experiment on people without their consent.") would make research like this impossible without any benefit.
I don't want to defend what these researchers did, but to equate infecting people with syphilis to wasting a bit of someones time is disingenuous. Informed consent is important, but only if the magnitude of the intervention is big enough to warrant reasonable concerns.
>to wasting a bit of someones time is disingenuous
This introduced security vulnerabilities to stable branches of the project, the impact of which could have severely affected Linux, its contributors, and its users (such as those who trust their PII data to be managed by Linux servers).
The potential blast radius for their behavior being poorly tracked and not reverted is millions if not billions of devices and people. What if a researcher didn't revert one of these commits before it reached a stable branch and then a release was built? Linux users were lucky enough that Greg was able to revert the changes AFTER they reached stable trees.
There was a clear need of informed consent of *at least* leadership of the project, and to say otherwise is very much in defense of or downplaying the recklessness of their behavior.
I acknowledged that lives are not at play, but that doesn't mean that the only consequence or concern here was wasting the maintainers time, especially when they sought an IRB exemption for "non-human research" when most scientists would consider this very human research.
This wouldn't really be representative. If people know they are being tested, they will be much more careful and cautious than when they are doing "business as usual".
This is a minor nitpick, but I think claiming that anarcho-primitivism is less fringe than it seems because the youtube channel "Primitive Technology" is popular is seriously reaching.
