That would be fine to not care as much and this human experimentation would likely pass the bar for being ethical. The point is that it’s a line in the sand to not cross ever.
It’s like mandating code review. You don’t let the programmer who made the code decide it doesn’t need code review this one time, and you don’t let researchers decide they can experiment on unconsenting humans this one time.
That's a fair point. I may not fully understand who he experimented on, but it seems like the target of experimentation for the professor here was the reviewers and the journals, but he didn't experiment on people to write the paper, just that submitting the paper was the experiment. I feel that is maybe one layer removed from sending bad commits to real people then publishing the results, but I guess after thinking it all out they are close enough to pass a smell test and be critiqued along side each other! Thanks for your example.
It’s like mandating code review. You don’t let the programmer who made the code decide it doesn’t need code review this one time, and you don’t let researchers decide they can experiment on unconsenting humans this one time.