Using weasel words doesn’t make your claim any more correct.

It's not "weasel words" -- there's a difference between an "experiment where city government changes traffic light patterns" and "experiment as in Institutional Review Board", and I suggest relaxing in general.

No, there’s not. Any of the examples I gave could be conducted by university researchers subject to the IRB, or by corporate/government researchers not subject to an IRB and informed consent requirements. When I worked in my university’s statistical consulting center in graduate school I could have consulted on the same experiment either subject to IRB or not depending on who the client was.

Thank you for the shift in tone: I'm honestly unsure what you mean, steelmanning: you worked as a consultant at a university and not all work you did involving experiments was for IRB experiments --- I guess what I'd say is, the fact you're able to make that distinction does seem to confirm my initial observation that the grandparent of my original post in this thread was drawing on IRB-style experiments to condemn excesses of colloquial-style experiments in tech.

No, there is no distinction between “IRB-style experiments” and “colloquial-style experiments.” Exactly the same experiment could be subject to IRB or not depending on who was running it. The distinction you’re trying to make does not exist.

> there is no distinction between “IRB-style experiments” and “colloquial-style experiments

Then why does the IRB exist? :) How were you able to draw a distinction between your consulting assignments? QED

I didn’t. I drew a distinction between experiments subject to IRB and experiments not subject to IRB, not as a function of the type of experiment, but as a function of other factors—namely who is doing the experiment. I thought this was pretty clear:

> When I worked in my university’s statistical consulting center in graduate school I could have consulted on the same experiment either subject to IRB or not depending on who the client was.

(emphasis added). Somehow you misread it.

Yeah Im sorry, I definitely don't understand the significance of the client stuff. And it's on me.

I did have a similar job for 2 years (statistics assistant farmed out to help out on different grants as needed), but clearly not long enough.

I'm a bit flummoxed, though. I had the very distinct impression an IRB imposes certain requirements.

I shouldn't even call it an impression, you're aware of it too.

Like, an experiment under the IRB has certain tasks others don't.

I don't understand what I'm missing or what's missing in our communication here.

I almost called up an old prof to ask but any question I could think of, I sound high ("does an IRB supervised experiment have different requirements from, say, a city changing traffic light timings on a street?")

Are you just trying to say in theory an IRB could always impose no requirements other than talking to the IRB, and the IRB considered human subjects and say "go ahead, ethical"?

Note that's still a distinction. FWIW that doesn't happen in tech, no IRB, no reviews of experiments. Infamously this caused some issues at Facebook