One of his most famous, beloved, and shared posts: the harrowing-yet-hilarious multi-year saga of trying to do a trivial study (does a bipolar screening test work on inpatients?) and being crushed by IRB/bureaucratic hell — the don't-be-a-Nazi training, the 22-page 'short' application, the absurd consent-form fights (name-of-study breaking blinding, mandatory risk paragraphs, pen-vs-pencil), the encryption-key-stored-next-to-the-cipher, the newbie-training treadmill, the protected-health-information catch-22 (needing consent to see a diagnosis he wrote himself), the audit (27 infractions — including that the corner-office lady enforcing the training hadn't taken it), and finally surrender. Then the serious payoff: IRB overreach kills research (Schneider's The Censor's Hand; Pinker/Nisbett), and the KEY insight — bureaucracy doesn't hurt Big Business (they hire clerks), it kills the amateurs/entrepreneurs/citizen-scientists (Wal-Mart vs the backyard garden; Pfizer-Merck-Novartis vs the random psychiatrist), skewing science toward big institutional actors precisely when we need dissenting voices/citizen-science most (the replication crisis; Gelman/Lakens).

Quality 84 · Excellent. Strong-classic: a canonical, beloved, hugely-shared post pairing a masterful comedic narrative with a genuinely important, oft-cited argument (bureaucracy favors big institutional actors, not the little guy; IRB overreach stifles research) — scored ON MERIT alongside Age-of-Em/Hungry-Brain (84). 84.

Claude’s paradigm shift 60 · Notable shift. The bureaucracy-favors-big-actors + IRB-overreach argument was sharp and influential; installed a durable framing. B60.

Real-world impact 3 · Moderate. A hugely-shared, influential post that shaped rationalist/adjacent views on IRBs/bureaucracy and fed the IRB-reform conversation; top-of-band discourse reach. RWI3.

Humor 2/5 · Man of One Study. A serious anti-bureaucracy essay with a SUSTAINED, defining, Scott-authored comedic narrative (the 'Like an idiot' refrain, the 'You know who else...' Nazi running gag, the pen/pencil obsession, the corner-office-lady punchline) that IS a defining feature you'd mention — the serious-piece-notable-humor=2 category (cf. Chronicles/Age-of-Em). 2.

My IRB Nightmare