One of the things I have against academics is that they are supposed to be smart. They are smart. Yet get enough of them together and you get this – from Robin Hanson. Words fail me.
Once upon a time some researchers gave people diseases without their consent or knowledge. Other researchers let volunteers think that they were torturing folks. This so horrified many that they created a system of regulation where any academic “experiments” must have prior approval by an Institutional Review Board (IRB). And that system has expanded to the point of requiring prior approval for any interaction between researchers and non-researchers intended to be the basis of an academic publication.
That is, researchers seeking publication can’t talk to people (e.g., survey), or buy or sell something with them, or even pay them to do trivial tasks like correcting spelling mistakes, without first writing out a detailed plan months in advance and getting that approved by a committee of other academics.
One common rule is “informed consent” – people must be informed in great detail of the consequences of their interacting with the researchers – they must be told much more than ordinary people must tell when they deal with each other. A second common rule is that people must benefit in some other way than money – they must gain some sort of intellectual insight or learning. A third common rule is that no record can be kept of people’s identity unless a really strong reason is offered to the contrary.
IRBs seem a good example of concern signaling leading to over-reaction and over-regulation. It might make sense to have extra regulations on certain kinds of interactions, such as giving people diseases on purpose or having them torture others. But it makes little sense to have extra regulation on researchers just because they are researchers. That mainly gets in the way of innovation, of which we already have too little.
Notice that researchers continue to be allowed to publish their results, and give lectures and media interviews, without such prior approval. Yet couldn’t ordinary people be harmed by reading articles that induce them to have unethical or unpleasant beliefs? Of course they could – it is only an accident of history that regulation does not also require prior ethical review of publications.
I learned today that you are not allowed to handle food – even at your school fete – without a certificate of food handling. My daughter told me – and has the requisite certificate. The certificate costs about $85 to get and takes about three hours. It could be an OK rule I guess – justified by cost/benefit analysis. But (assuming this is state regulation rather than school regulation) I’d like to see the analysis – and I must confess to being irritated by it. Back in the day . . . we managed without such certificates.
And it’s hard to believe you couldn’t do it a lot more simply with a course on the net for next to nothing.
I’ve just finished a bit of a barnstorm tour of New Zealand giving two presentations with a similar title to that above and a talk on Govt 2.0 which funded the visit. I must say I’ve loved it. Having checked out Auckland and Wellington for the first time in forty years, I can report that they are lovely cities beginning life, as all Australia’s glorious capital cities did, as British provincial cities. The French are generally lionised for the beauty of Paris, and it’s got to be admitted it’s got a lot over London, but did anyone plan more glorious modern cities than the British and did anyone get a better deal than us antipodeans. I’d love to know who.