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Peter Gerdes's avatar

IRBs are fundamentally broken and need to be eliminated.

Lots of aspects of medical ethics make normal people squirm -- even triage makes us feel uncomfortable -- but we also don't like letting people come to harm because of our unjustified discomfort. IRBs let us avoid that uncomfortable guilt by excusing our inaction -- it's what the authority said was morally necessary.

But don't we need them to prevent research misconduct and horrible things like the Tuskegee study? NO because there was never any reason to think IRBs would guard against that shit. The worst abuses didn't happen in the dark, they happened because the same class of people who would have been on an IRB didn't see a problem with it. In 50 years we'll be looking back at all the suffering we allowed to continue as a result of IRBs with the same moral horror.

Sure, it's important to have more than 1 person look at a study. Have an *informal* group of profs/docs or employees in other departments do that kind of thing but there is no reason to think the IRB process is more morally sound.

The best case scenario is the incentivizes for IRBs are either to minimize risk of lawsuit (the for-profit ones) or risk of bad PR (for hospitals and universities). The worse case is their incentives are to provide cover for powerful people at those institutions to avoid pressure to face uncomfortable choices. So why would you think they are a superior way to vet human studies?

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Michael Magoon's avatar

Interesting article.

I know this comment is a little off-topic, but Randomized Controlled Trials can and should be expanded way beyond the medical drugs field. RCTs can make an even bigger difference in social welfare programs, education, and law enforcement.

I believe that we should radically ramp up the use of RCTs, so we can identify programs that actually work instead of spending trillions of dollars per year only to find out later that the programs either do not work or do not do so in a cost-effective manner.

I go into more detail here:

https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-case-for-randomized-trials-in

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